Making Doom and building the FPS industry at 100 miles per hour | John Romero interview

17.08.2023 - 18:51 / venturebeat.com / John Romero / John Carmack / Miles

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John Romero is perhaps the ideal person to record the early history of first-person shooters, the genre of hardcore gaming with tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year. Not only was he there at the beginning at id Software with games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, but he also has an interesting brain condition known as hyperthymesia. It’s what makes his autobiography, Doom Guy: Life in First Person, into one of the must-read books about gaming history.

Hyperthymesia means he doesn’t forget things, even events that happened in his childhood or during his young adult days decades ago. He can even recall dialogue of critical meetings, like when his small team of id owners — John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud — made big decisions like firing Romero back in 1996, the year that I started covering games on a daily basis. Those memories are burned into his mind, and he can recount them like it was yesterday, Romero told me in an in-depth interview.

My first thought on hearing that Romero was writing a book about the Doom days was that I had already read that. David Kushner wrote Masters of Doom in 2003, and there were many long articles about the rise and fall of Romero’s time at id Software and his subsequent big gaming start Ion Storm. I did a long interview with him at Doom’s 20th anniversary — and now it’s at its 30th anniversary.

But I remembered Romero’s near-perfect memory and thought about that. In reporting my own books on the making of the Xbox and Xbox 360, I recall how tough a time people had remembering particular meetings because there were so many of them. It is very rare for anyone to recount the dialogue in a meeting years afterward.

It doesn’t read like Romero had a lot of scores to settle. He notes how, despite having falling outs with people in the industry like Carmack and his former colleagues, that he doesn’t hold grudges so many years later. And he checked with them to see if his account of things was right. This means that Doom Guy contributes to the canon of lore around gaming’s early days.

It also turns out that Romero lived a harrowing life that was never included in previous tales. He survived a childhood that — while warm and loving much of the time — included traumatic events like the murders of two cousins, drug dealing by uncles and other members of his family, and a father and stepfather who were abusive in different ways.

His father once abandoned John and his brother Ralph in the Sonoran Desert, and yet Romero