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John Romero gifts 'Doom' 18 new levels for its 25th birthday
Ready to feel ancient? The original Doom is 25 years old -- and co-creator John Romero wants to make sure you know it. He's preparing an add-on for the 1993 game, Sigil, that serves as a "spiritual successor" to the classic shooter's fourth episode ("Thy Flesh Consumed") with nine single-player story levels as well as nine multiplayer deathmatch levels. The expansion will be free if you're just looking for some nostalgia-fueled demon slaying, but you can also spend a lot of money on it if you're determined to flaunt your fandom.
The creators of 'Doom' and 'Quake' reveal a new sci-fi shooter
John Romero and Adrian Carmack helped found id Software in 1991, and by 1993 the studio had changed the video game world forever. That's when id released Doom, a genre-defining first-person shooter, and it was followed by Quake, another classic FPS, in 1996. Today, Romero and Carmack are back with Blackroom, a new FPS set in a future where lifelike holographic reality is the norm, but it's being overrun with sinister visions. The game stars Dr. Santiago Sonora, an engineer at the massive holographic company, Hoxar, as he investigates irregularities in the Blackroom military training system.
The first 'Doom' gets a new map from co-creator John Romero
John Romero is virtually synonymous with Doom as one of its key developers, but he never made a map for it after 1995. Quake, and eventually his other studios, took over after that. However, he's finally coming home to roost: Romero has released an add-on map for the original Doom, "Tech Gone Bad," that reimagines the Phobos Anomaly at the end of Episode 1. That's bound to whet your appetite if you're a veteran gamer. He's not only intimately familiar with Doom, he's approaching it with 21 years of additional experience under his belt -- as early reactions attest, this is probably much better than the homebrew maps that you saw two decades ago.
'Doom' designer John Romero tells you about the game while playing it
Most Blu-rays and DVDs these days come with filmmaker commentary tracks, but it isn't too often you get to hear a game developer give play-by-play while running through something they created. That's the thrust behind the latest episodes of Double Fine Productions' "Devs Play" YouTube series, spotted by Polygon. Here we have one of Doom's co-creators John Romero playing a handful of maps from the legendary first-person shooter that runs on basically any platform. He breaks down everything from the work that went into differentiating it from id's other FPS Wolfenstein 3D, how the team used texture irregularities to denote secret rooms and even how he's watched speed runs that not even he can replicate. Oh, and he designed the first level last, incorporating everything he'd learned throughout the other missions to make the initial one the most interesting.
Romero: GameCock is dumb, GameCock: No U R!, Us: Whose bitch are we?
As the adage instructs, we are usually inclined to save drama for our mamas. But sometimes it's just too much fun to pass it up. Such is the case with a vitriolic exchange between marvelously coiffed game dev John Romero and GameCock CEO Mike Wilson. Let's get straight to the aforementioned drama, shall we?So, Romero was blogging, and he was all like "Once again, just like with Godgames, Wilson is taking all the credit away from the indie devs and pasting his asinine logo everywhere" and Mike Wilson was totally like "I will also not allow you to rewrite the history of it all, more to your liking and to my public detriment, and I will in no way take the rap for what you did (or didn't do)with your dream company."And we were all like "Have either of you guys made any games since the Clinton administration?"Though we're trying to seem cynically aloof and above all the squabbles, we do have to give the 2008 Burn of the Year award to Mike Wilson for "Your unparalleled work ethic and strong character has (just in the time I've known you) left only a bloody trail of ex-wives, fatherless kids, and ill advised breast implants strewn across this fair nation." Wow. Romero may have taken the first swing but Wilson responded with the Enola Gay. Metaphorically speaking, John Romero has just been shoved into a wood chipper.
Daikatana to bless GameTap on September 6th
Long before the shame of Red Steel and well beyond the absurdity of Advent Rising, there existed only Daikatana. A game so dreadfully awful that the mere mention of it can be considered the setup and the punchline. Should you not be fortunate enough (yes, fortunate) to have experienced this godless monster of taint, GameTap will be offering it up to subscribers come September 6th.We knew their deal with Eidos was too good to be true and we can only imagine the stipulations of having franchises like Tomb Raider, Hitman and Thief on the GameTap service. A contract -- weaved with the legendary locks of John Romero's lost mane and signed in blood harvested from the liver of a newborn child -- one that demanded Daikatana live once more.In the name of Superfly Johnson, amen.[Thanks, Johnny Bloom!]
Romero unearths unreleased Doom music
So you think you know everything about Doom, huh? You've beaten all the games on Nightmare without cheats? Played every fan-made WAD you could get your hands on? You're listening to a megamix of Doom MIDIs right now, aren't you? Well we've got some tunes here that we can guarantee aren't on your playlist.Doom co-creator John Romero has posted these unreleased tracks on his blog with the warning that, much like deleted scenes on DVDs, "there's a reason these weren't released - they're not very good." And he's right -- with a few exceptions, the tracks are overly repetitive and a bit wonky. Still, if you worship anything and everything Doom-related, then, uh, I guess you should start worshiping ... because these are definitely Doom-related. Yeah!
John Romero: PC is about to make console its bitch
With the disfigured ghost of an anti-climactic game and the remnants of a self-destructive marketing campaign chasing him for the rest of his life, it's only fair that John Romero occasionally gets to look forward and into the future. In an interview with Adrenaline Vault, the Quake designer predicts that "cheap" multi-core processors will eventually steal hardcore gamers away from the "next-gen" consoles and bring them to the PC (or something "PC-like"), while the Wii's simplicity will earn it a casual gamer audience. "Next-gen console is big but its future isn't too bright with the emergence of cheap PC multi-core processors and the big change the PC industry will go through during the next 5 years to accommodate the new multi-core-centric hardware designs," says Romero. "My prediction is that the game console in the vein of the PS3 and XBOX 360 is going to either undergo a massive rethink or go away altogether." While the next five years may indeed bring enough cheap multi-core processors to blot out the sun, we submit that the PS3 and Xbox 360's intended audiences will happily play in the shade. By the time those PC parts are even considered to be cheap (try buying just a comparable multi-core chipset and a Direct X 10 graphics card for under $400 today), these consoles will likely be home to several franchises that hardcore gamers will be taxed to resist -- and the next wave of consoles won't be far off either.Romero goes on to say that "The Wii has the perfect design for a console that doesn't pretend to be a PC and is geared more toward casual gamers than hardcore gamers. The hardcore gamers are going to either be playing on their PCs or a new PC-like platform that sits in the living room but still serves the whole house over wifi, even the video signal." A PC-like platform sitting in the living room? Now that sounds a little more likely -- in fact, hasn't this convergence already begun?
NeXT crucial to PC game history
John Romero, pausing from his CPL project, recently updated his weblog, reminiscing about the tenth anniversary of Apple buying NeXT; id used NeXT machines to develop some of its most iconic games. Doom, Doom II, and Quake were created on NeXT boxes, and Romero also says Raven Software developed Heretic and Hexen on the same platform. Romero's post delivers lots more geek love, with more specific notes about the development process; we almost forgot that developers have platform allegiances even if their products are made for other operating systems.[Via TUAW]
A decade of NeXT and Apple
In the summer of 1989, I had a really, really tough assignment: I had to evaluate the NeXT Cube for a publishing company. What a hardship to have that black box on my desk, along with that 400-dpi laser printer! I don't know how I ever managed.It's hard to believe that it was ten years ago, on 12/20/1996, that we welcomed Steve Jobs and NeXT Computers back into the Apple family. Legendary game developer John Romero remembers, and he's got a fascinating post up about the role of NeXT in bringing his babies to market.According to Romero, the original development environment for both Doom and Quake was NeXTSTEP; in fact, the first four years of id Software's efforts were on NeXT. He fondly remembers the days of simultaneously building for three different architectures, and side-by-side map editing across the LAN with cofounder John Carmack.Romero ends his post by noting that he spent the 15 years prior to 1996 working on computers built by Steve Jobs, and that "maybe someday I'll get one of those kickass iMacs." Cue the salivary glands of Mac gamers everywhere...[via IMG]
