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John Romero, the Man Behind the Hype
rockstarenvy writes "In a recent interview with the Escapist, Russ Pitts reveals a lot about who John Romero really is. As Romero puts it: 'After 10-plus years of reading about yourself, all the good and bad, it all just becomes irrelevant after awhile. I know what I'm capable of doing and the people I work with are united in our mission, and they treat me just like they treat each other. The whole fame thing doesn't come into play when we're in development, because we're all a team. I know some of my guys read a lot of forums and sometimes they'll see some remark that someone clueless made and show it to me, chuckling because they know the truth of who I am and how I work. The media personification of John Romero is not who John Romero is.'"
is John Romero. Was he in that movie with that other guy?
I made him my bitch back in '97!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
The media personification of John Romero is not who John Romero is.
:P
John Romero, like many washed-up has beens, likes to refer to John Romero in the third person.
Seriously, for a guy that's a laughingstock in the video game industry, he sure does still have an ego. Come on man, when are you making me your bitch?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
"I know some of my guys read a lot of forums and sometimes they'll see some remark that someone clueless made and show it to me"
I wonder if he made those guys his bitches.
From the who-really-gives-a-crap? department.
Besides Thresh owned him and took his car to boot, now lets move on to relevant games.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Some things never change.
My humor is probably your flamebait
It's hard to forgive someone after they post an ad declaring he "will make you his bitch" and then proceeding to turn out an overhyped, piece-o-crap game.
Thank god I didn't fall for it. However, I feel genuinely sorry for those that did.
"The media personification of John Romero is not who John Romero is."
John Romero is a guy who refers to John Romero in the third person.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
"I am the meek and humble non-wizard!"
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
"You!"
"Oh bugger. You've found out I really and no ordinay mortal, but a great and powerful wizard."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Doesn't he read Slashdot? I could swear that he's offered a comment or two. At least, assuming it's really him...
The media personification of John Romero is not who the real John Romero is. The real John Romero is a class A asshole. Just ask Killcreek and she'll give you the straight story. His days of being an asshole go beyond that point too. Ask his ex-wife. She'll set you straight too. And when you corroborate the info you'll realize they can't both be lying. So I wonder if Raluca is has figured it out yet?
I still remember when she got her new bewbs. Mmmmm Killcreek.
**She was Romero's girlfriend back in the day
This
...that you think John Romero isn't that much of a big deal, you'll still come here and post voluminous tomes about how worthless he is. I guess he really DID make you all his "bitches". Gimme some o that Killcreek lovin'... ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
of dealing with the fame that comes with a smash hit like Daikatana. He must need a taser gun to keep off the groupies....
I wonder if John's MMOG is the "Bizarro World" he describes:
Also, quite interesting to see that both John and Tom (Hall) are working on an MMOG. I'm more interested to see what Tom
s MMOG will be (/me hopes it's the Anachronox MMOG he always wanted to make).
So John Romero wants to make you his friend now?
HERE. Hmm, I wonder if someone will get the joke...
Circumcision is child abuse.
John Romero Presents: John Romero's John Romero (A John Romero Production)
That's all that really needs to be said. For further reference, look up the amount of talking, egotism, and otherwise useless rhetoric he's shat out over the past 10 years. All that plus one crappy game and the demise of an otherwise good gaming studio that resulted in the Romero fallout. I would say that Romero was all sizzle and no steak, but that implied that there was worthwhile sizzle to begin with. It's all pretty much flatuence at this point. Stop wasting people's time John. Get a real day job. You rode your useless reputation to the ground and that's where all us day working schmoes exist. We don't have a rediculously inflated reputation to ride from publisher to publisher asking for insane advances for absolutely no substance to speak of.
When I think of John Romero I think of the search for the Daikatana. Eventually we found the Daikatana but then we realized that we did not really want it in the first place.
90% of the comments are from geeks he's pissed off. That's talent. :D
" I know what I'm capable of doing and the people I work with are united in our mission, and they treat me just like they treat each other. The whole fame thing doesn't come into play when we're in development, because we're all a team."
I was thinking the exact same thing before I quit my old job. You know, a lot of people do tell lies and if often turns out that powerful people are getting bullshitted all the time. I thought my staff enjoyed what I was doing and I kept hearing good things about my efforts until it was settled at a party and a few people got too drunk.
I'm not saying your team is doing this on you, John. Maybe you're really a great guy. Truth is, I don't know you and I actually even enjoyed Daikatana more than most other people did. It's just that I don't buy it, because you can't trust anyone until you know what he's thinking - which you probably never will.
Full Tilt
Ok, the guy is more or less well known, for something he did 13 years ago, but does that really qualify as "fame"? All this talk about how his "fame" doesn't go to his head has a distinct "protesting too much" feel to it.
The media personification of John Romero is not who John Romero is.
Don't tell me, John Romero is a series of... of nevermind.
sic transit gloria mundi
for a factual interview it seems strange to leave out the fact that he has an "Add more frogs!" button on his desk.
Not just any frogs mind you, but happy, dapper and unique frogs! Fantabulous dancing frogs!
What can I say about John Romaro? He likes frogs. That's a good legacy to leave on this earth.
The media personification of John Romero is not who John Romero is.
No, the video games speak for themselves just fine thank you.
Wolfenwhat?
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
For the 10th anniversary of the release of Quake, there is a Quake-centric interview with Romero at the QExpo site.
For a person like myself who knows neither whom John Romero is nor whom Russ Pitts is, I suppose the slashdot editor and article submitter just assume that I'll feel compelled to read the article to figure it all out. I call poor editing; a good article summary should allow me to make an informed decision about whether to delve further, just from reading the article. Putting a blurb about who Romero is would make all the difference here, e.g. "... reveals a lot about who John Romero, the author of WhateverHeDid, is."
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Except for the dated graphics... the sidekicks that constantly pissed you off ( (essentially gung ho retards hell bent on suicide runs there for you to keep alive rather than the support structure of the lancemates of battletech), the impossible showdown with the uber-baddie... the shitty colors in the first level...
well it was a fun game.
How about just letting your work speak for itself John? I'm betting that if you had released a single good game in the last ten years, people might take you a bit more seriously. Hell, they might even forgiven you for all the self-aggrandizing you did during your Ion Storm days.
from the picture, it looks like John Romero is trying to be a bit like Derek Zoolander.
"As Romero puts it: 'After 10-plus years of reading about yourself, all the good and bad, it all just becomes irrelevant after awhile"
So, it was relevant at some point? Huh. I must have missed a memo.
I mean, I kinda hate to bust on the guy, but he's made a career out of being a celebrity...and now he's thinking celebrity is irrelevant, and that's some kind of revelation.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
This update to the Daikatana story 5 years later has some interesting facts. I didn't know the game let Ion storm break even on it - who bought 200,000 copies of the darn thing? Were the console ports of this game playable? But an MMOG...no. Mr. Romero needs to learn from his past mistakes, and realize that while he might have talent, he's never successfully led a project that big. He might have the ego for it...but an MMOG is the most technically difficult type of game there is.
Taking risks is part of business, and success in life, but you need to make an effort to minimize those risks. Mr. Romero should instead work under a better designer, focusing on art and gameplay design.
John Romero attempts to hype himself up with other legends such as Chuck Norris, but Chuck Norris he is not. Attempting to piggy back on the fame of other legends such as John Carmack, I still have yet to see one piece of software that has come from the brain genius of John Romero that has come close to anything ID has done since he's left. Boo you John Romero.. Boo you!!!
I'm loving this story, best comments on Slashdot in like, forever and a day.
I found the article very interesting. I didn't really read much of the lead-in to the story, but I read the actual interview. It was very interesting. Romero finally matured! Very cool. I would never count John Romero out. I think his major problem, is that he is an artist, not a business man. Politics and business concerns are not an artists natural habitat. I honesty believe, that if he works on games, and just works on games, while other people watch the books, and deal with politics, he could produce more great games.
He was tapping Stevie Case.
Come on people... Even if he has acted like an ass sometimes, this is still the guy who helped bring us great and unique games... He deserves a lot of credit for that!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Romero and American McGee driving around Dallas in Romero's yellow turbocharged ferrari testarossa.
At a stop light, Romero (long hair and all) turns to American and states, "not enough people are looking at us". Still looking, with the car at a full stop, JR revs the 600+ horsepower testarossa to redline.
Several times.
John looks around, looks back at American and states, "there, that's better."
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
In a recent forum post [http://www.rome.ro] John Romero revealed the premise of his 'top secret massive multiplayer online game' admist much heckling on the part of the forumers, many of whom bringing up dissatisfaction Daikantana with harsh invectives citing 'Masters of Doom'. In response, Romero 'angrily' composed a reply which revealed the overall direction of his massively multiplayer video game. However, quickly realizing his error his forum post was deleted approximately 10 minutes after it was posted.
In short, John Romero intends to build an educational Massive Multiplayer Environment. Taking the baton from the economic complexities of Eve Online and the creative emergences in Second Life, Romero boldly asserts that there lies a vast landscape untouched by the industry involving human to human adaptability in a loosely scripted goal oriented scheme. Romero continues and suggests that this adaptability has been either exploited, again citing recent self-replicatining scripts [second life] and Eve Online's Great Heist, both of which are perfectly legitmate under the games rules not as cheap exploits but as fundamental inevitabilities in a human to human environment. Romero also contends that certain companies have gone out their the way to stifle such occurances as to deter unfair gameplay. Romero further cites Blizzards Efforts to 'balance' World of Warcraft by further nerfing weaponry and attacks, that are testaments to human enginuity: 'Has Star Trek taught you guys anything?!".
Romero believes that the solution to the inevitablity of human innovation is to allow it to unravel itself onto the short comings [of math and science] in the American educational system. In oddly worded rant, Romero outlines the general storyline and the goals of the game:
1. The story takes place in a distant future where a human mothership carrying thousands has crash landed onto a desert planet [think Dune], The ship has broken into separate self-sustaining pieces, in these pieces reside a part of the AI [think Outpost/Alpha Centauri]
2. the inhabitants surrounding these ships ascribe to certain futuristic disciplines revolving around [Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Biology]
3. a fifth discipline (Computer Science) wanders between these settlements as neutrals with the goal of reuniting the AI
4. Separate AI's 'nurture' the individual player, awarding players with modules that can only be unlocked by answering questions regarding modern day sciences and mathematics.
Read this book: Masters of Doom.
One of the best tech industry books ever written (and if you've read some of the bad prose written on tech history out there, you know what I'm talking about).
I got it from the library, and read it in one weekend -- couldn't put it down.
...there are people who think this is news.
Regardless of the subject matter (not sure Romero is still relevant), this is a great magazine, and the closest thing I've seen to "game journalism". Truly good writing.
Is he still going to make people His Bitch?
John Romero's not John Romero!
John Romero feels insulted that you would confuse John Romero with John Romero.
John Romero is starting to realize how hard it is to have a secret identity that can conceal John Romero's Ego.
"Tom then left Midway to be Creative Director of two MMOGs at Kingsisle Entertainment in Austin, and I left to co-found my new game company in the Bay Area to do an innovative [MMOG] on the PC."
wrong. both did not leave. both were let go. one for not doing anything... the other for bringing girls in the studio and taking pictures of them naked.
PC Power Play (Aussie gaming mag) Issue #128 has an article about John Romero on pg 24. Basically it says that Romero is a washed-up has-been with an ego the size of an elephant. Pretty funny.
Apparently he's only a legend in his own and a few other sycophantic minds. A truly legendary game designer is someone like Steve Jackson. Compared to him, this Romero is a badly self-disfigured, desperate-for-attention Michael Jackson.
John Romero is an idiot savant who thinks he's more savant than idiot.
I wonder who would win, Chuck Norris, or JR...
John Romero: The Escapist Interview
by Russ Pitts
Romero.
Perhaps it's something about the name itself that brings to mind great things. Some combination of etymological triggers, perhaps; a heady mental mixture that's part romance, part Camaro - sex in a Z28.
The man himself evokes a similarly visceral response. Meeting him, speaking with him and tracking his movements across nearly three decades of life in the game game, one can hardly imagine John Romero as anything other than a smashing success. Which is why, perhaps, so many take such pleasure in pointing out his one great failure.
Romero has developed, or been involved in developing nearly 100 games, at least half a dozen of which have sold more than 100,000 copies. Having cut his teeth in the game industry coding games for the Apple II, Romero worked for Origin and Softdisk (founding a few of his own companies along the way) before co-founding id Software in 1991 with John Carmack, Adrian Carmack (no relation) and Tom Hall.
In the five years he worked with id Software, John Romero contributed heavily to developing a number of innovative PC games, including id's breakout hit Wolfenstein 3D and one of the most widely recognized and controversial games of all time, Doom; the game that has been accused of inspiring the Columbine High School shootings, made its designers multi-millionaires and ushered in the era of the "rockstar game developer." Yet inside the game industry, Romero is even better known for the one that got away.
In 1996, following a widely-publicized feud with John Carmack - centered around the belief among key id staffers that Romero talked too much to the press and worked too little on the games - Romero founded his own company, Ion Storm, with fellow designers Tom Hall and Todd Porter and artist Jerry O'Flaherty. The men leased the penthouse of a prestigious Dallas, Texas office building, deep in the heart of oil country, for the company's headquarters. A monument to excess, the Ion Storm offices featured a movie screening room (complete with leather furniture), arcade machines, a bank of computers devoted to Doom and Quake "deathmatches," 60-foot glass ceilings (which prompted the company's programmers to erect felt tents over their workspaces to reduce the glare of the daytime sun), oak furniture, steel cubicles, and a pool table. It was an office fit for the man who had once referred to himself as "God," and it would be within this 54th floor glass cage that John Romero's Icarian flight would come (at least temporarily) to an end.
Ion Storm, backed by publisher Eidos, planned initially to ship three games, each designed by one of the company's three co-founders. Romero's long-time friend (and Softdisk and id Software colleague), Tom Hall, planned to develop a science-fiction roleplaying game called Anachronox , which was eventually released in 2001 to poor reviews and lackluster sales. Todd Porter, former ministry student, exotic dancer and Origin employee, was to develop a game called Doppleganger, which was eventually cancelled. Romero's game was Daikatana . It was intended to be larger and grander in scale than any videogame ever made, and was heavily advertised as the game that would make you, the player, John Romero's "bitch."
That Daikatana eventually sold 200,000 copies - a smashing success by some standards - is irrelevant. Cost
According to one limited poll of 100 journalists and developers in 2001 it was. By no stretch of the imagination does it remain so. Even if you ignore the many more popular console games (Super Mario Bros for example still holds the official record as the best selling game of all time) Half-Life and its sequel are largely considered to have replaced Doom for the best PC game spot (and HL is the best-selling FPS) and The Sims remains the best-selling PC game overall.
a mes_that_have_been_considered_the_greatest_ever_ video_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_and_video_g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling
There is no doubt that it was the leader and trend-setter in its genre and a fantastic game to boot but I think a little perspective is in order.
And behold, a command prompt and he who sat upon it, his name was shutdown and -h 3:11 followed with him
For being the worst designed one I have seen this year.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Romero is a man who makes non-nintendo games. His games will be among those labeled as "old-skool" if that first-person-style bullshit doesn't stop soon. I blame him for the 3D-fps-ultra-omg-realizm boring games. Wake me up when he does the next tetris or something 2D that sells.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
John Romero: I'm very talented. My genius is misunderstood and under-appreciated. Every mistake I made in the past was somebody else's fault. Expect many more great things from me in the future.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
From rome.ro:
:)
As is customary, I'm wishing a happy birthday to Wolfenstein 3-D - he's 14 today!
I'm still waiting for an awesome source port that takes advantage of DirectX9...... any takers out there? If so, please add multiplayer.
DX9? What the fuck ever happened to GL? Hey Carmack, can you slap some sense into Romero? Make him your bitch if necessary..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
- a great programmer and level designer (http://www.idsoftware.com/);
- an average game designer (Daikatana); and
- a really bad manager (Ion Storm).
On top of that, he's apparently a real nice guy (according to most interviewers and gamers that ever contacted him) while still keeping the biggest ego in the world (Planet Romero).