Doom creator and FPS pioneer John Romero is PC gaming royalty. His career in the videogame industry is incredibly storied, too, with dizzying highs and some hellish lows. For the first time, though, Romero is telling his own entire story in his new autobiography, Doom Guy, from his early childhood learning to code, through to the exciting new FPS he’s working on in 2023.
PC Gamer: Is it fair to say that a fear of being left behind was a key motivator for you when learning to code as a child?
John Romero: Yeah. The feeling that I was behind the curve, was when I really recognized early on that I loved making games, and I really loved programming. Because game development in the early ’80s was so solitary, and it was something that… I didn’t know anyone else that did it. There were so few people doing it back then.
So I just looked up to those programming heroes of mine, and just tried to create animations and techniques that would be quality enough, and then, really, it comes down to design. You know, coming up with a design that people would really like, or that I would really like, mostly.
PCG: Recalling making games in the 1980s, you say that, “Finding another game programmer at the time was like a needle in a haystack.” That’s obviously a culture that is hugely different from today. Can you expand on that?
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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