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.'"

Comments

Re:Who the hell....

[Sv-Manowar]

Co-Founder of id Software and lead designer on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He left and then made Daikatana and didn't do that much until he joined Midway in 2003, left again in 2005 and is currently making his own MMOG. He's pretty legendary for having the domain name rome.ro along with having a Ferrari that you could tune via USB while driving.

Re:Who the hell....

[basscomm]

No, that wasn't him. You're thinking about Caesar Romero.

John Romero is a video game designer/producer/programmer who gained a degree of infamy by designing and producing Daikatana.

Re:Forget him... Killcreek

[DarkHelmet]

Only on slashdot would gawking at a woman's breasts be considered "informative".

Besides, it kind of takes away from her being a level designer, game designer, and overall nice person.

But since Slashdot revolves around Self Indulging (tm), I might as well Karma whore and get noticed:

http://steviekillcreekcase.tripod.com/

Look everybody! I can be "informative" too!

Re:A lot of bashing

[Jett]

If that is true it didn't happen until later. When I visited Ion Storm Romero introduced me to every single person who worked there, he knew each of them by name and knew exactly what they were working on. This was before the big remodel was done so they were still on the temp floor, perhaps things changed when they moved. I spent severl hours there hanging out with Romero and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy, not at all like the egomaniac he is portrayed as. What I saw of Daikatana looked badass, but remember this was before Quake2 was even out - they were still using the the 256 color palette Q1 was originally limited to, each section of the game had it's own palette (3 or 4 total). I don't remember who the programmer I met was but as I recall he had just hacked 16-bit color into the engine the day before I got there. The good old days! After Ion Storm I got the id tour courtesy of American McGee - I still have the q1 expansion pack he gave me from their goodie room, I wish I had the forsight to one of their classics and get them to all sign it :(

Re:His reputation precedes him.

[Paralizer]

In the book "Masters of Doom", it was said that Romero really did not want to do the ad. Mike Wilson created the ad told him it would go over well, but Romero was uneasy about printing it.

From the book (page 239)

Earlier in the year, on the suggestion of Mike Wilson, Romero had agreed to an ad that would emulate the cheeky bravado of deathmatch smack-talk -- the very language Romero had helped define. But when he saw the words in print, he felt a tinge of hesitation. "Are you sure about this?" he asked Mike.
"Yeah," Mike said, "don't be a pussy."
Romero agreed. The ad ran in all the major gaming publications in April with simply these words written in black against a red background: "John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch." Underneath was the tag line "Suck It Down!" -- a phrase Mike had recently trademarked.

Apparently this Mike fellow was a bit of a jerk, seems he even borrowed Ion company money to buy himself a BMW before getting himself fired. I say give Mike some of the blame for the ad.. sure it says Romero but Mike designed the thing.