Carmack squashes hopes of game dev reunion with John Romero anytime soon
Fans wondered if the Doom co-creators might get back together after a quote from Carmack appeared on the back of Romero's new book, Doom Guy: Life in First Person.
If you haven’t been following John Romero, he has a new book out. It’s Doom Guy: Life in First Person, an autobiography of Romero’s life and career in video games, and the explosive popularity of Doom. What’s more, his fellow Doom creator John Carmack has a quote on the back cover of the book. The collaboration got fans excited that Carmack could be doing things with Romero again. However, Carmack has put that rumor to rest. He recently claimed that he and Romero aren’t working on a new game at this time.
John Carmack squashed rumors of a new collaboration with John Romero from his personal Twitter account. In a post celebrating the launch of John Romero’s book, Carmack congratulated his id Software alumni and wished him well. At the same time, he bookended the conversation about new collaborations early.
“To preempt the inevitable question, no, we aren’t planning to make a new game together,” Carmack explained quite plainly.
Source: John Carmack
It might come as a disappointment to fans that would have liked to see two of the core minds behind the legacy of the Doom franchise work together on something new. Unfortunately, Carmack and Romero have gone very separate directions since the days of Doom. Carmack would eventually join Oculus before it was acquired by Meta and stuck with the VR department at the new company up until earlier this year. Currently, Carmack has kicked off a new tech startup the form of Keen Technologies, which works on Artificial General Intelligence. Meanwhile, Romero has stayed in games, but moved on from id Software to launch Romero Games. He and Brenda Romero launched Empire of Sin in 2020 and he is now working on a new first-person shooter to be revealed at a later date.
A new partnership or collaboration between Romero and Carmack seems to be wistful thinking at the moment, but with Romero still dipping his hands into the FPS genre, we still have something to look forward to from at least one of the masterminds of Doom. Stay tuned as we continue to follow this story for further updates.
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Carmack squashes hopes of game dev reunion with John Romero anytime soon
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Sandy could probably still contribute; he's still active in game design. I watch his horror videos sometimes:
https://www.youtube.com/@SandyofCthulhu -
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One of those is loathed by the others.
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100% even carmack threw his old protégé under the bus when romero made a mockery of his tall tale bullshit. Mcgee went as far as directly calling him a turd and petersen pretty much spelled out how much of a backstabbing asshat willits was.
Even craddock had some unkind words for willits relationship with the truth in his articles for the shack.
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Naaaaah… Carmack and Romero etc had so much to contribute back then, and their impact was amazing, but there has been nothing since, from any of them, that indicates they would be the right people to reimagine that legacy.
Just look at how great the new Doom games turned out, exactly because a different set of people were given a chance to take the reigns.
I can imagine a genuinely amazing reimagined Quake game for today, but I think Romero etc would have all the wrong take aways on a project like that.-
Romero understands gamedesign and shooters. Petersen does as well but more importantly is probably the guy for worldbuilding for lovecraftian stuff. Carmack was pretty much irrelevant the moment they got the cryengine lead. By the time he made his exit nobody was sad he was gone as mentioned directly to me by a former idsoftware employee.
Nudoom was neat, it took from the old game and fighting games, made it console friendly etc but if I wanted a real quake successor would very much like romero/petersen to have at least some input/consulting role.
All that said I would rather romero and co make a somewhat niche, pc centric fps on a medium sized budget that doesn’t need to cater to the large audience idsoftware has to tailor their games around.
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