While he became infamous later for Daikatana, a hugely ambitious and hyped up project that ended up failing massively upon release, John Romero is best known as the genius who, working with John Carmack at id Software, created some of the most pioneering games of the industry. Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake were all among his creations.

Now, with DOOM 25 years old, Romero seems to be celebrating the original game with something new. You may remember that he was teasing an announcement recently—that announcement has led up to SIGIL, a free “megawad” mod for the original DOOM, containing nine single player and nine deathmatch levels. You do need to own a registered copy of the original game to be able to run this, but that shouldn’t be too difficult, given how freely DOOM has been distributed in the years following its release (legally, I mean).

SIGIL will release in February, and, as stated above, will be absolutely free. However, Limited Run Games will also launch a physical copy of the game, with music by metal guitarist Buckethead. So if you like having physical copies of your games, that’s something you will want to keep an eye out for.

In the early 1990s, four young men came together to create id Software, and a series of games that ended up redefining the industry and changing the world- Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake were among some of the genre defining titles that these men released.

The four men soon split ways, and their subsequent individual pursuits never quite hit the greatness of those early efforts. And yet, now, two of those four men – John Romero, the man famous for developing the infamous Daikatana (with which he struck out once the game released after a protracted development cycle and turned out to be horrid), and Adrian Carmack – are reuniting to deliver a new FPS.

That FPS is BLACKROOM, “a visceral, action-packed FPS set in a holographic simulation gone rogue.” It is currently on Kickstarter with a goal of $700,000- of which almost $24,000 have already been collected in the few hours since the Kickstarter went up. You can check the trailer for this game for yourself below. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage and information on the title.

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.

Valve, along with Bethesda Softworks, introduced a new initiative for paid mods on Steam with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim being one of the first supported games. The decision caused much backlash, leading to Valve removing the option but some people – like John Romero, who is a former id Software co-founder and co-creator of Quake and Doom – believes modders should profit from their hard work.

Speaking to Games Industry International, Romero said, “I’ve always believed that mod makers should be able to make money from their creations. In 1995, while we were making Quake, we had the idea to start a company called id Net. This company would be the portal that players would connect to and play other mod maker’s creations. It was to be a curated site, levels and mods chosen by us at id, and if we put your content on our network we would pay you an amount equal to the traffic that your content drove to the site.”

The effort didn’t quite pan out due to the team focusing on development of Quake but Romero feels that modders should be “rewarded for their hard work.”

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments below.

Industry legend John Romero, who was one of the founding members of id Software and helped create the revolutionary FPS Doom, recently spoke about shooters still having tons of potential in terms of ideas. Speaking to EDGE, Romero spoke about how Call of Duty isn’t doing enough to evolve.

“Call of Duty is enough of a deathmatch game to keep people coming back to it year after year, but the design isn’t breaking people’s brains.

“It’s expected, in the same way Madden is. You see it, you know what it is, and you know the next iteration is going to be like the previous one but in a different location, maybe a different time period. It’ll have guns and a lot of the same features.”

It’s funny because Sledgehammer Games’ Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has received strong initial praise for its exo-suits, customization and loot system. Do you agree with Romero? Let us know in the comments.

It may have been a while since Doom designer John Romero made a decent game but his announcement of a new FPS is still significant. Of course, given all the first person shooters that release each year, hasn’t the genre been played out by now? There’s also the belief that Romero has already done enough shooters. What else is left?

Plenty, according to the man himself in conversation with Develop. “There are unbelievable amounts of new stuff to do in that genre. The idea of a shooter is running around with weapons, in first-person, blowing things away. But what are you really doing? What is the world like? Who are you, and what do you care about? What are you doing in the world that’s different?

He took World of Warcraft as example, and talked about what the result would be if shooter elements were added. “You have a giant world full of quests, and tons of people with PvP already in the game. If World of Warcraft was a shooter, that would be brand new – nobody would have seen something that big and that cool.”

A better example of such a game model would probably be Team Fortress 2. “Perhaps villages would become like TF2 levels, where you would try to score as much as you could before deciding to move on. Or that area would have specific goals, like taking out five snipers and two demo guys to retrieve some key items. Perhaps once you’ve exhausted that village, you could go to another one down the road. And maybe the planet’s full of them – nobody’s played a game like that.”

Romero also wants to see developers try something new in the genre. “Shooters have so many places to go, but people just copy the same thing over and over because they’re afraid to try something new. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”

Hopefully this won’t be the second time Romero has talked about trying something new and falling well short of expectations. Stay tuned for more details.

Whatever you may think about John Romero, there’s no denying the man’s a legend. Having helped found id Software and created some of the most famous franchises in gaming – namely Doom and Wolfenstein – Romero has his fair share of opinions on the current state of the industry. And right now, he believes PCs are beating out consoles thanks to free to play gaming.

Speaking to Games Industry International, Romero stated that, “With PC you have free-to-play and Steam games for five bucks. The PC is decimating console, just through price. Free-to-play has killed a hundred AAA studios. It’s a different form of monetization than Doom or Wolfenstein or Quake where that’s free-to-play [as shareware]. Your entire first episode was free – give us no money, play the whole thing. If you like it and want to play more, then you finally pay us.

“To me that felt like the ultimate fair [model]. I’m not nickel-and-diming you. I didn’t cripple the game in any design way. That was a really fair way to market a game. When we put these games out on shareware, that changed the whole industry. Before shareware there were no CD-ROMs, there were no demos at all. If you wanted to buy Ultima, Secret of Monkey Island, any of those games, you had to look really hard at that box and decide to spend 50 bucks to get it.”

Romero also believes that the ever-evolving nature of the PC platform offers an advantage over consoles like the Xbox One and PS4. “The problem with console is that it takes a long time for a full cycle. With PCs, it’s a continually evolving platform, and one that supports backward compatibility, and you can use a controller if you want; if I want to play a game that’s [made] in DOS from the ’80s I can, it’s not a problem. You can’t do that on a console. Consoles aren’t good at playing everything. With PCs if you want a faster system you can just plug in some new video cards, put faster memory in it, and you’ll always have the best machine that blows away PS4 or Xbox One.”

Thoughts? Let us know below.

“You know, if you’re really cool to update the graphics, and the sound, and the user interface, and controls, and everything. I mean, I’d love to see that happen”

In the same interview he stated that he was close to signing a deal with EA for a Command & Conquer RPG after setting his own independent game development studio. Of course, John Romero played a huge part in stopping that, when he offered Spector a job at Ion Storm.

As they say, the rest is history and the world is all the better for it.

Source: DSO Gaming