John Romero and John Carmack took the gaming world by storm, when their id Software continued to churn out one ground breaking and genre defining FPS after another- together, they gave us Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake, and forever changed the landscape of PC gaming.
The story of what happened next is almost as legendary as the games the two managed to create together- Romero left id Software to start his own independent game, the massively hyped and perennially delayed Daikatana, which managed to release after a lot of setbacks, and was such a terrible game that it became a joke- basically, it was Duke Nukem Forever long before Duke Nukem Forever was a thing.
However, Romero is now back and working on a new game- and true to style, he’s being flamboyant with how he hypes it. Speaking to Develop at Zurich’s Ludicious games festival, Romero said of his new game,
“I don’t want to talk about it because it’s a really cool idea, it’s a unique idea,” he said. “I’ve never seen a game like it.
“I’m really excited to start making it because it’s just a great idea. Instead of just pumping out game after game after game, it’s like waiting to come up with something that’s really unique, that no-one’s seen before, and enables you to make something that you hope will be really amazing. So, we’ll see. It’s got a pretty cool fiction around it. It’s got an interesting story.”
John was, of course, asked if this was the game that had been gestating in his imagination for the nearly two decades that he took off from designing video games- and it turns out, surprisingly enough, that it was not. That was an entirely different title, that he still hopes will see the light of the day some day.
“I actually had an idea for a shooter before this one, and it’s still a really great idea, and it might be something that I do after this one,” he said.
“This is a totally different idea to the previous one, and a lot of it has to do with the way that I wanted to design a new shooter. I’m not going to talk about the previous one either, because I want to do that one.”
John Romero was always an incredible game designer- not as good at the tech stuff (that was always Carmack’s forte), but incredible at designing games. One bad showing with Daikatana does not change that. Let us hope whatever his new game is, it’s as ground breaking as the original Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake games were in their time.