For 36 years, John Romero has been one of the video game industry’s most accomplished developers. Credited on more than 100 titles, Romero has built nine studios, such as Id Software, where with John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall, he pioneered the first-person shooter across Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Heretic, Hexen, and Quake.

By 1996, Romero had left Id Software to start Ion Storm with Hall, as well as Todd Porter and Jerry O’Flaherty. Although the Dallas office was best known for the bold advertising of Daikatana and the critically acclaimed Anachronox, the Austin branch fared better under Warren Spector with Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Seeing the future of mobile games in 2001, Romero and Hall cofounded Monkeystone Games, producing 15 titles in four years across various mobile platforms. While closing up shop in 2005, the duo worked at Midway Games on Area 51, where Romero stayed on until production wrapped on Gauntlet. In 2005, he cofounded Gazillion Entertainment with Robert Hutter.

In 2009, Gazillion landed a ten-year deal with Marvel Comics, out of which came Marvel Heroes. For a time in 2010, Romero was also lead game designer at LOLapps, where he shipped Ravenwood Fair, which he calls “one of my most successful games ever.” That year, he left Gazillion and cofounded Loot Drop with his future wife and veteran game designer, Brenda Brathwaite.

When this interview was conducted in 2013, John and Brenda Romero had become directors of the Master’s Program in Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz. Months later, Brenda was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to advance video games in Ireland, and John had continued his work at Loot Drop, in addition to joining Brainquake as chief game designer.

Ramsay: Everyone who follows games knows your name and has probably played every game you’ve released, but you had a career before Id Software. What were you doing back then?

Romero: I had been programming Apple II games for ten years, and then, in 1981, I started my very first game company: Capitol Ideas Software. I was getting a lot of games published in magazines. Remember Nibble Magazine and InCider Magazine? People would type their game listings into the computer. I sold several games there, and I even got the covers three Decembers in a row. I published 15 games through my first company.

I got my first real job in the industry at Origin Systems in 1987. I was porting 2400 A.D. from the Apple II to the Commodore 64. I also worked on Space Rogue with Paul Neurath at Origin. I then left to start my second game company with my manager: Inside-Out Software. I did the conversion of Might & Magic II from the Apple II to the Commodore 64, as well as the conversion of Tower Toppler from the Commodore 64 to the Apple II at Inside Out.

I left that company because the market dropped out on 8-bit games. We were directly tied to Epyx. They were developing the first set of games for the Atari Lynx. When that happened, I said, “I’ve got to get off the Apple and onto the PC.” After leaving that company, I started my third company with my friend Lane Roathe: Ideas from the Deep. We made three or four games and published them before going to Softdisk. I stayed with Softdisk for about a year and a half.

After Softdisk, I started my fourth game company, Id Software, in 1990. Well, officially, we started on February 1, 1991, but we laid the groundwork in 1990 with the Commander Keen series and other games we were making.

Ramsay: How old were you when you started programming?

Romero: I was 11 when I started learning how to code, but I didn’t actually come up with the name of that company, Capitol Ideas Software, until I was 13. I finally got the Apple II at home, and that’s when I really took off. I could spend every second that I wasn’t in school on the computer.

And I really played so many of the games I was trying to emulate—you know these games were on the shelf and that meant to me they were successful. They’re being sold, right? I wanted to emulate that success and because they were made by companies, I thought I should make a company. The games were all in these Ziploc bags with cardboard folders, so I started making those, too, and started making advertisements. I did a whole lot of drawing and writing and stuff for marketing for my early games, for my first company.

Ramsay:  What started you on this path?

Romero: I was playing arcade games. That was back when arcades rose up in the late 70s and the early 80s. Games had turned from pinball parlors into electromechanical arcade games like Dune Buggy. I was really, really excited, and I started spending as much time as I possibly could in the arcades. I started learning how to code in 1979. Learning how to program was just unbelievable. I had never experienced anything like that before.

Ramsay: How did arcade games get you interested in programming?

Romero: The problem is with being a kid and having arcades all over the place is that it costs money, and if you don’t have a job that’s generating money, you can’t play in the arcades. At that time, I actually had a job delivering newspapers in the morning, so I’d have to wake up at 3:00 in the morning, deliver papers, and then get ready for school. I made probably 250 bucks a month that I would then spend completely on arcade games.

I was so crazy about arcade games that, when I ran out of money and couldn’t really play anymore, I’d go and just watch. One day, my friend rode quickly to my house and said, “Oh my god, they have games up at the college and they don’t cost any money.” And I’m like, “Oh my god, no money; I’ve got to do this.” And so we rode back up to the college—Sierra College in Rocklin, California—and we went up there, got in the computer lab, and the computer lab was basically a bunch of HP terminals connected to an HP 9000 mainframe in another room, so it filled the whole room.

The games there were nothing like the arcade games; they were more thoughtful. They were Hunt the Wumpus, Poison Cookie, Colossal Cave Adventure, and primitive stuff like that. That experience expanded my brain as far as game design goes, and those terminals had keyboards, so I thought, “These were probably made on this machine here. I wonder if I can do that.”

In that computer lab, students were programming, so obviously, I knew it could be done. I started asking the students there, “I’m 11. How do you make that come up on the screen?” And they would tell me, “Print.” They would use the word “print” and put quotes around whatever you want, but you’ve got to put a line number before it because it was HP Basic.

I slowly learned how to program just by asking questions. I didn’t have a book. And the only way I could save programs was by putting them on paper tape, or making punch cards. I did that until I lost all of my cards in a puddle one time. I was like, “Okay, I want something that’s not going to be destroyed in a second.” I waited for discs to appear before I actually went to save programs again.

Ramsay:  When did you get your own computer?

Romero: 1982. That was when I got the Apple II+ with 48K memory. I was really lucky to get that computer. The keyboard was really nice.

Ramsay:  Who bought that for you?

Romero: My parents. In 1981, the college opened up a whole room, filled it with Apple IIs, and I was like, “I only care about the Apple II now. I don’t care about these ancient HP machines.” I cared about the thing that has sound, graphics, and color.” I started spending all of my time in that room. For two years, I was always going up to the college, coming back, and telling them all of the things I was learning. And he my stepdad started thinking, “Wow, he’s really learning a lot of stuff. I have no idea what it is and I’m an electrical engineer. Maybe he’s got something going with this computer thing. Let’s get a computer for him.” And I think my parents spent $6,000 on getting a computer.

Ramsay:  Wow, computers were expensive then.

Romero: Yeah, they were, but he didn’t just buy the computer. He bought a printer, a color monitor, a Microsoft SoftCard that had CP/M, in case I needed to use the computer like I did up at the college. You know, it’s funny, because back then, Microsoft was making Apple II peripherals and software before they started making their own stuff.

Ramsay:   What were your parents’ backgrounds?

Romero: My stepdad was an electronics engineer, mostly in recordable media. He was working for the military. Specifically, he was working with the Air Force spy program on reconnaissance cameras for TR-1s and U-2s. He had a top secret clearance. He never talked to us about anything, so I didn’t really know what he was up to for a long time. My mom is basically a homemaker.

On January 1, 1983, we moved to England. I got to take a BASIC programming course on the Apple II there. On the very first day, I showed the teacher a bunch of the games I had written and that I was learning assembly language. She was super blown away, so the next day, she had the class work on a project while she took me in her car across the base to the 527th Aggressor Squadron to meet with the captain there.

Eventually, I got a job programming for the military in a bank vault. They locked it, and you had to say code words to get it unlocked from the inside. I was converting a program from an older system over to a computer system using HP BASIC, and they were doing work with Russian flight paths for dogfighting, like analyzing them. This was the height of the Cold War.

Ramsay:  When did you get your first industry job?

Romero: It was awesome. In 1987, at the very beginning of the year, I had a girlfriend, and I was working at Burger King. By May, she was pregnant, and she had just graduated high school. I had been out of high school for two years. So, I was like, “Wow, I have to get a real job. I cannot screw around.” I left Burger King, and I started working for Manpower, which was a temp agency.

At Burger King, I was making $3.50 an hour, but through Manpower, I immediately started making $9.00 an hour because I have total computer skills and that was much better. It wasn’t my dream job, obviously, and because we were going to have a kid, I decided I had to get serious.

I went to Applefest in 1987, and I brought a box of my disks. I went there to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and I went in the door and went to UpTime. UpTime was a disk monthly. It was like a magazine on a disk. Jay Wilbur was the editor-in-chief of the Apple II disk. I had already been talking to Jay for a year or more at that time. When I went up to the booth, everybody was playing my game. It was the latest one I had sold to them, and they’re showing it off in the booth, so I was like, “Okay, these are some good prospects. I’ve got one of my games being played at Applefest. This is great!”

The owner of UpTime came over and talked to me. He was wondering if I’d be interested in joining the company as programmer. I was like, “Wow, okay, one job offer down. I didn’t even have to try. This is great.” So, I walked over to Softdisk, their competitor, and I told them, “I’ve been submitting to UpTime. They’ve been publishing my stuff every month for a while now.” In fact, they had been publishing my stuff pretty frequently, so Softdisk was like, “Well, why don’t you come work for us?” Job offer number two!

And then I’m thinking about what I really want to do. I want to work at Sirius Software, I want to work at Sierra, I want to work at a real game company like Origin that I really respect. I went over to the Origin Systems area. They had a huge corner, and big posters on the wall for Ultima 5:   Warriors of Destiny, coming October 31. I was all excited; I love Ultima and Origin.

They had a computer there where they were showing off the re-writes in assembly language of Ultima 1 on an Apple II. I thought, “They probably don’t care so much about this Apple demo as much as they do the Ultima 5 display, so I’ll just pop one of my disks in here and show them my stuff.” I popped Ultima 1 out of their demo machine, I stuck my disk in there, and I booted it. The marketing lady ran over really quickly, and she was like, “That’s our display. You know we’re showing our games here. What are you doing?”

I said, “Well, just check this out.” I showed her one of my games, which was written in double res, and back then, that was really difficult to do. There were very few double resolution games, so she was like, “Wow, did you write that?”

“Yep, and I’m looking for a job working at Origin.” And so she goes, “Okay, I need your information.” I gave her my number, name, address, and all that stuff. She said, “We’ll be in contact.” I was like, “Well, can I have your card?” She gave me her card, and I’m thinking, “Awesome. Maybe I have a job there.”

But when I got back, I had to call and pester her until she connected me to someone who was a project manager. They said that in a month there’s going to be a position opening up for a Commodore 64 programmer in New Hampshire. I went, “I will take anything. I’m really interested. I really, really want to go.” I just called every day—just pestered the hell out of them—to get this job.

Finally, they said, “Okay, the job is now open. We can now start the interview process for this job.” I asked, “What do I have to do?” He said, “We’re going to call you. There will be three programmers on the line, and we’re going to ask you questions. We’re going to be doing this with all the candidates, and then one of you we’ll fly to New Hampshire for the big interview.”

I said, “All right. Do it. Ask me anything.” I had known this call would be taking place in a few days, so I bought the book, Mapping the Commodore 64 by Sheldon Leemon. I knew everything about the computer. I read the whole thing, and I had it with me, ready to look up anything. When the programmers called, I easily answered all of the questions, no problem. A couple of weeks later, I’m the one they chose to fly to New Hampshire for the big interview. They had called four other programmers across the US; they were all Commodore programmers. I was the only Apple programmer.

When I had the final interview, there were nine programmers there: Steve Meuse, Paul Neurath, Stuart Marks, Herman Miller, and just several other programmers at Origin. It was very easy. At that time, I knew everything that there was to know about the computer; there was nothing that they could ask me that I didn’t know. I knew every byte in the machine. That’s what happened. I did the interview, blazed right through, and they hired me.

Ramsay: But you had never programmed games for the Commodore 64?

Romero: Yeah, I hadn’t actually programmed the Commodore 64 until I went to Origin. I just had a really good idea about how to code it. But when I started working on the port, I immediately ran into a wall. I said, “I need to move this code over to the Commodore. Where’s the cable, guys?” They went, “What? There’s no cable. We don’t port stuff here; you’re the first guy to port stuff.”

I went to RadioShack and I got a telephone cable, which has four lines in it, and I got a 16-pin chip, like a little integrated circuit chip that you would plug into a motherboard. I soldered the wires from one end to the 16-pin chip, and then I soldered the other end of the four wires to a joystick plug, like the kind that plugged into the Commodore. I made a cable, and programmed it on both sides to transfer data one way from the Apple to the Commodore. The computer only took in data from a joystick; it never pushed data out to a joystick. They do now because of force feedback and all that stuff, but back then, joysticks only output data; they didn’t ever get data from a computer.

When I started at Origin in 1987, my salary was $22,000 a year. Back then, programmers topped out at $30,000. But after I had built a transfer cable and programmed a system on both computers to transfer data between an Apple and the Commodore, they immediately bumped me up to $26,000.

Ramsay: You didn’t have any trouble learning how to program for the C64?

Romero: No, in fact, the next job I did on the Commodore was porting Might & Magic 2 over. That’s where I had to get really technical. I had to set up vertical blank interrupts and control the screen—which meant switching the screen mode so the screen is in mixed mode, but a certain line on the screen switches into high-res mode, and then it switches back at the top of the screen back into mixed mode. I could have two graphics modes on the screen at the same time: one for displaying super crisp, high-res fonts, and then the top being the most colorful resolution to make the graphics look as good as possible.

Ramsay: How long were you at Origin?

Romero: I was there for eight months. Origin was my dream company and I loved it; it was the best thing ever. But the guy who hired me at Origin said, “You’re the best 6502 programmer I’ve ever met. Let’s start a company together. I need to get out of here. We could make bigger money.” And I thought, “Okay, I could start a company.” It was a huge decision, and it was crazy, but as long as he could ensure that I’d make the same amount of money, then that sounded pretty amazing.

Isn’t that nuts? I got that job at Origin in October 1987, but I didn’t start there officially until November. In October, I got married, I got my first real job, I moved across the country to New Hampshire from California, and then we had a baby in February. So, from October to February, I went through the four biggest life-changing things that people go through other than buying a house or death, and I did that when I was 19. A few months later, I started a company.

Ramsay: Every entrepreneur I’ve talked to has said that starting a company takes a toll. Was that the case with Inside-Out Software??

Romero: My former boss and I were partners at Inside-Out Software, and that didn’t take a toll on me because he was the one who wanted to handle the business stuff. He had to worry about the contracts, if we were going to have enough money, if we could hire people, and all that. I didn’t care back then about what was in those contracts. I just signed them and got money.

My job was to focus on just making games, just porting stuff all day long as fast as possible. I didn’t have any stress because I love programming. But I learned the value of networking and business relationships. He was older than I was, and I saw him stress over things, dealing with everything.

Ramsay: Did you invest anything in this company?

Romero: The only money we needed was to get the loan for the computer, and he used his contract with New World Computing to get that loan. I used my partner’s Apple II GS computer until we bought some new ones. I used his to start and went to his apartment coding on that while he was next to me coding on the Compaq PC. As we got bigger, we added more projects, and more money came in; we never had to actually put in our own money.

Ramsay: You were bootstrapping from the beginning?

Romero: Yeah, almost all of my companies have been bootstrapped. The best part is you own the whole deal. If you bootstrap, you own it all, and you don’t have to give it away for money or an interest. It’s just the beginning that’s the hard part. If you have great ideas, you’ve just got to sweat it out.

Ramsay:  Who did you work with on Ideas from the Deep?

Romero: Lane Roathe was the guy I started that company with. He had a company called Blue Mountain Micro, but he didn’t do games; he basically did disk utilities. He was really great at disk access and disk operating systems.

I met Lane at Applefest in 1987. Lane worked for Jay Wilbur at UpTime. He was his programmer, and Lane was an expert badass programmer in assembly language. Not only was Lane great on the Apple II, but he was great on the Apple II GS and the Macintosh.

When I met Lane, we hit it off, and from then on, we were friends. I actually hired Lane at Inside-Out from UpTime, so he came to New Hampshire from Rhode Island, and worked at my company. But the problem in the 1980s was the Apple vs. IBM culture. You were either on Apple’s side, or you were on IBM’s side. It wasn’t even Microsoft; it was IBM.

I was an Apple guy, and Lane was a 100% Apple guy. He hated PCs, and my cofounder was an Apple guy, but he really believed in the PC, like as the future. He and Lane didn’t get along ever at all, so Lane did not last long. He just quit because he had enough pestering from the cofounder. Lane left, super disgruntled, so he stole a contract away. It was totally legitimate because we didn’t have an Apple II GS programmer. What Lane was working on at Inside-Out was an Apple II GS port of Dark Castle; it was a classic.

So, he called 360 Pacific and said, “Tom [Frisina], I was the guy working on the port; they don’t have anyone to do the port. You can just assign the contract to me.” And they said, “Hell, yeah, let’s do that.” My cofounder got even more pissed off.

When the game I was working on disappeared because Epyx cancelled everything industry wide, I decided to leave the company, too. I moved in with Lane, and I did the graphics for the Apple II GS version of Dark Castle while he did the programming. We started our little company, Ideas from the Deep, and we made some games. Then, I got both of us jobs at Softdisk, and we moved from New Hampshire down to Shreveport, Louisiana, together.

Ramsay:  Why did Epyx cancel everything industry wide?

Romero: So, Epyx canceled all ports because they needed to conserve cash to dump into their first-party development of Atari Lynx games. My port was canceled for a game called Tower Toppler.

Following the Epyx cancelation, Inside-Out was having money trouble, so I left and moved in with Lane. Meanwhile, my wife was in California with her parents having our second kid; I was in the middle of a job change. We started writing some code, making games, while we were porting Dark Castle.

I had to get a job, so I asked Lane what Jay Wilbur was doing. He said, “I think he’s interviewing at a company down in Louisiana called Softdisk.” I said, “Why don’t we just go work down there with him?” Lane’s like, “Okay, that sounds cool.” I got the number for Softdisk, called them up, and I said, “Can I speak to the president?” His name was Al Vekovius. I said, “My name is John Romero and I’m interested in working there.” Al said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of you.” I said, “Wow, really? You’ve heard of me? That’s cool.” He goes, “Yeah, Jay Wilbur’s down here and Michael Amarello.” Mike had been an editor-in-chief at UpTime.

I said, “Well, I’m interested in coming down for an interview.” He replied, “I’ll send a plane ticket immediately.” Then, I said, “Oh, there’s another really awesome programmer. His name’s Lane. He worked at UpTime, too.” And Al said, “I’ll send two tickets.”

So, we fly down and meet Al. He drove us around Shreveport, and we got this awful tour of downtown. There were prostitutes walking all over the place and stuff. But then he took us to this cool building, and I thought: “Holy crap, this is amazing!” It was filled with developers and programmers. They’re just our kind of people, so we were excited to meet everyone. Later that night, we went to Al’s house and had a big dinner. We came down in late February of 1989 from New Hampshire, where it was freezing, and we fly down to Shreveport, where it was warm with green grass. We were thinking, “We’re coming here!”

Ramsay: Money had been an issue for you. What were you offered?

Romero: Al offered us jobs for a $1,000 more per year than what we were making, which was $27,000 total. We signed up and moved down. He was trying to get us to make some commercial products. He wanted to do what Origin did in forming a group called the Special Projects Division.

During the first month I started programming on the PC, I made a game called Magic Boxes that was a port of an Apple II game over to the PC in text mode. I wrote it in Pascal even. I ported the games I had made on the Apple II to the PC, some of them mixed Pascal and assembly language, and then full-on assembly. I was pumping out so much stuff that the PC department was falling behind, so they decided they needed me on PC and scrapped the Special Projects Division.

After a year working in that department, I really wasn’t doing what I wanted to do, which was make big games. I went and had lunch with the president, and I said, “I need to make games, so I’m planning on putting my resume in at LucasArts.” And he was like, “No, no, no. We need to keep you here. Okay, what can we do?” I said again, “Well, I want to make games.”

He was like, “How about you make games on a new disk that’s just games?” And I said, “Well, that would probably be cool, but I don’t want to do it in one month.” And he said, “Two months. How about two months?” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, two months is a lot better than one month. How about a team: an artist and another programmer?” He said, “Okay,” and I told him, “Now that’s cool. We can do way cooler stuff than what I was doing before.”

It took months to get it together, and I needed somebody to be the other coder. I knew of a game called Tennis by John Carmack. I’d run that game and I saw how smoothly it operated. I could tell that was quality programming on the Apple II. And so I told the Apple II department, “Hey, I’m setting up this game division, and I want to talk to the guy who programmed that. That’s some really good programming.” They said, “Yeah, he’s not going to come down here; we’ve already tried to hire him two times and he keeps on telling us, ’Forget it.’” And I said, “Let me talk to him. You guys are trying to hire him for non-game programming, but he will come here to code games.”

And so we set up a meeting. They called him and he came down to interview with Lane, Jay, and Al, and we had a great meeting. He was excited; he felt that he had finally met two programmers who he could learn from, and so John said, “Yes, I want to work here.” He drove his little MG all the way from Kansas City to Shreveport, and moved into an apartment complex.

I got the room we would move into, start coding, and make our games. It was a big deal to start this game division, so I got pretty much everything I wanted. I wanted three 386/33s with 4 megs of RAM, and they were like, “Okay, you got it.” I said I needed an NES with Zelda, Super Mario 3, and Life Force, too. The place was turning into an arcade, and we kept the lights off, so it was a cool cave. We got secondary monitors for debugging using Turbo Debugger, and we got this giant refrigerator. We were playing heavy metal all day long, and we left the door open, otherwise it would get too hot in there. And I was looking for an artist, so I went next door to an office full of artists. Al told me I could pick any artist I wanted, so I picked an intern: Adrian Carmack.

The rest of the company thought we were spoiled brats. Al tried to calm them down by saying, “They’re going to save the company. This is a big deal.”

Ramsay:  What was your first game?

Romero: So, we got started in August 1990. John was doing his game, and I was doing mine. In one month, we got both of those games done. I had ported a game from 1988 that I had made for UpTime called Dangerous Dave.

Little did I know that this game would live on for decades. Tons of people have since played Dangerous Dave all over the world, and one of the reasons for the game living so long is that, in parts of the world where computers are not as nice as they are here, this game is one of the few that runs at a crazy fast speed on old computers. The graphics routines were all written in assembly, and the game is only a 73 KB compressed executable.

But our first game together was Slordax, which was a clone of Xevious. When John, Adrian, and I started working together in September, we had never worked with another person to make one game. We had ten years of experience, but not in a team. And that team worked out extremely well. Oh my god, that was the best thing in the world.

On September 18, there was a lot of coding going on. Tom Hall was there late at night. Super Mario 3 was running on a Nintendo in there, and John had just got horizontal scrolling in. Tom saw it and he was like, “Oh, that’s cool. What if we replicate the first level of Super Mario 3?”

And John was like, “Yeah, that would be awesome.” And they said, “Yeah, we could surprise Romero with it.” So, they stayed up until 5:00 AM in the morning. Tom was replicating, pixel by pixel, the blocks you see in the first level and using my level editor to put the world together. John was taking the graphics out of Dangerous Dave because it has animation cycles for a character jumping and everything, and put them in this little demo. And so, because they were using Dangerous Dave inside of Mario, Tom made a little title screen that said: “Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement.” They put this little executable and everything on a disk, and stuck it on my keyboard when they were finished. I came in the next day, and I saw the disk on my keyboard and it said “run me.”

I stuck the disk in the drive, and I ran it—and I see, holy crap, there’s Mario—it’s a level of Mario right there on the screen. And the character jumps up and it’s a demo that’s playing. And so as soon as the character runs across the screen and it smoothly pans, I was totally destroyed. It was the entire Mario game on a PC, right there, actually happening, and no one on a PC had ever seen that happen because no one had mastered the panning registers.

It was mind-blowing that you could make Mario for real on a PC. It was really huge because it meant so much for PC games. Until that point, PC games had a lot of static screens, and a lot of experiments in ways of making action happen, but at a really slow frame rate. This was the real thing.

So, John and Tom came into the office at 1:00 PM, and they go, “So, what’d you think?” And I went, “Absolutely unbelievable. We need to quit.” Their reaction was, “What?” And I said, “This company can’t do anything with this game. They can’t actually market it; it will go into a black hole if they have this game. It will disappear. This needs to get out, we need to make something that gets out there with this technology. This is unbelievable; this is company-starting shit.” And Jay Wilbur was there when I was saying this stuff, and I said to him, “I’m serious.” So, Jay closed the door and I outlined the beginning of Id Software, how we’re going to get out of here, and what we’re going to do.

Ramsay:  What was the plan?

Romero: The first plan was we were going to try to make a really good Mario demo with Mario, the turtles, and everything from the beginning of Super Mario 3. We got it together, and sent it to Nintendo. We heard that our demo went to NOA, and then to Nintendo Japan.

Hiroshi Yamauchi decided then that Nintendo games will be on only Nintendo consoles, not on the PC, which is great. That’s the Apple strategy, right? “This is our stuff. This is our hardware. This is what our stuff goes on.” And so they said no, and wrote a letter back that said, “Thank you very much. You’ve done a really great job, but we plan to stay on only our own consoles.”

So, we thought, “Okay, well, we’ll just make another game that’s not with Mario in it.” And the funny thing is that, at this exact same time, Scott Miller was trying to get in touch with me. He had published a bunch of stuff with Softdisk, and he saw my games coming out. Scott had a shareware software company, Apogee Software, and wanted me to make another version of my game.

He called me and said he wants to see my Pyramids of Egypt game. He wants that game, but with different levels to publish with his company, Apogee. This was just a few days before this Mario demo happened. I said, “Oh, you should see the stuff we’re doing right now; it’s way better than that thing that you’re talking about.” That was Slordax.

I sent him a disk with Slordax that’s in the middle of progress. And he gets it and says, “Oh my god, we need you to make a game for us.” Then, I said, “Speaking of the Mario demo, you won’t believe this, but we blow away that thing I just sent you with this new tech.” He asked me to send that, too. He got it, and he was like, “Oh god, please. Seriously, right now, let’s do a deal.”

I said, “Okay, we’ll make a game for you,” and he’s like, “No, no, you need to make three games. This works only if you do three games; we’ll give one away and sell two.” I said, “Okay, well, we’ll just use the same engine and put different data on it for the other episodes, so we’ll do the three episodes for you. But you need to send us $2,000 upfront for us to start.”

And Scott’s like, “No problem. Done. What’s the address?” Holy crap! Back then, $2,000 was a lot of cash. His last question was: “what is the game you are going to make?” I told him we would talk about it and get back to him.

So, I gathered Tom and John with me, told them the story, and asked what they thought we should make. John Carmack said, “I don’t know. What about a game about a genius kid who saves the universe?” And we’re like, “That sounds great,” and Tom’s like, “I love it. I’m going to write it up right now.” Tom ran into the Apple II room and wrote it up on the Apple II in AppleWorks, printed it out, came back in, and he goes, “Okay, here it is.” Tom read it in a radio announcer voice: “Commander Keen, defender of the galaxy…” We were laughing and clapping, so I go, “That’s amazing. We’re going to go run with that.”

We printed it up on paper for Scott. We all signed it, and we sent it to him. I still have a scan of that paper we sent. Scott said, “That’s it. We’re in business. Let’s go.” So, we got started.

We would work all day, and when 6:00 PM rolled around, we changed directories in DOS to the Commander Keen directory. We’d work on Commander Keen until 2:00 AM in the morning, and we’d do that every day. On Friday nights, we’d take the computers out of there, put them in our cars, and take them out to the lake house where we would work on weekends. We’d work all weekend long nonstop, and we’d do that for three months. We made three games, and that was the first Commander Keen trilogy.

Ramsay: How was that first trilogy distributed through Apogee?

Romero: I mastered all the disks after a whole bunch of compression fun, and sent it to Scott. He uploaded it on December 14, 1990, to the Software Creations BBS for the PC back then. It had tons of games on it. We had a really great advertisement. As soon as you logged into the BBS, it would scroll Commander Keen. The guy who ran the BBS was mind-blown by how great the game was, so people downloaded the game like crazy. We just waited for our royalty check, which Scott said would be sent to us on January 15.

And we got a check on January 15 for $10,500. We were excited! We had, I think, a 45% deal with Apogee, so we got 45% and they got 55%. Combined, we were making not quite $100,000, so we thought, “Okay, we can live on this. Now, we need to quit, and tell Al what’s going down.”

Ramsay: Oh, you hadn’t left yet?

Romero: Yeah, so when I told Al, he was so upset! He had set up this whole division for us. I explained our opportunity. After some time, he told me, “We need to figure out how you’re going to leave. You can’t just leave me high and dry here with subscribers expecting games and nobody here to make them.”

I made a proposal I thought would be good for him and us. We hammered out an agreement where Id Software would make a whole year’s worth of games for Softdisk. Every two months, there’d be a game, and we’d get $5,000 for each game. That’s it. Meanwhile, Softdisk would have a whole year to get up to speed while they brought a team together to build games using our technology. They also agreed to not sue us; they obviously had an IP case because we coded all of Commander Keen on their machines. So, that was our agreement.

Ramsay:  When did Id Software actually get started?

Romero:  We incorporated Id Software on February 1, 1991. We counted on Commander Keen’s income staying the same or getting better. It was a huge risk for all of us to leave, based on one check, especially at Christmas. But back then we just took risks all the time without thinking.

After our year of making games for Softdisk, we had $30,000 and we had made Hovertank 3D, one of the first 3D first-person shooters. We had also started prototyping our next Commander Keen series, but this time, we planned to take six months instead of three. We had a more complex engine, more art, and at the time, we were still make games for Softdisk by day. In 1991, we made 11 games in total. We were just cranking out these games, and then by 1992, we moved down to Dallas where Apogee was located.

Ramsay:  Was that when Mark Rein became involved?

Romero: So, one day, we got a letter from a guy, in which he says, “Game’s amazing. I’m blown away. These are the best games on the PC, but I found some bugs in all three of the games.” He tells us where the bugs are, and I thought, “This guy is super sharp. Somehow he found bugs we haven’t even found.”

And so I contacted him and asked if he’d like to become a beta tester. He said, “Yeah, I’d love to be a beta tester, but do you have a biz guy in the company?” And I’m like, “Nope, we need a biz guy; we don’t have one right now.” He’s like, “I’m a biz guy. I make $100,000 a year doing business. I live in Toronto.”

And I’m like, “We’re really small. There are only four of us, and adding one more person is a really big deal, especially if they’re not making a game. You’re going to have to sell yourself.” So, he said, “This is what I’ll do. I’ll fly down, and I will present myself as your business development guy and tell you some of my ideas—and you guys decide whether you like me or not.”

So, Mark Rein came down, we talked, and we decided that we needed to be careful. We didn’t want to be giving away stock in the company or hiring people until we knew they could do something for us. We told him, “You can be the probationary president and present yourself as president to do deals. Can you do deals for Commander Keen? What kind of deals can you get us?”

Mark went out and found a company called FormGen in Toronto. He signed us up for a two-game deal: one to be released at Christmas, and the next to come out after that at no specific time.

Ramsay:  What happened with the second Commander Keen trilogy?

Romero:  We got Commander Keen 4 done in three months, Commander Keen 6 in two months, and Commander Keen 5 in one month. Commander Keen 6 had to be done before 5 because it had to go to retail; they had to get it out to stores quick. Commander Keen 4 and 5 would just be uploaded to the BBS. So, the games went out, and people loved Commander Keen, so it did okay. But it was nothing like the first one; it was broken into two pieces instead of three, and people didn’t feel like they were getting their money’s worth.

Ramsay: How did Wolfenstein 3D get going?

Romero: I could see that the 3D thing was going to be cool. And, one day in 1990, I’m talking with Paul Neurath, and he says, “We’re working on this really neat technique called texture mapping, where you take a picture and you project it onto a surface that is displayed in 3D.” I figured he was doing this with Ultima, since he couldn’t tell me for confidentiality reasons. I thought, “Wow, that’s awesome.” I got off the phone and told John, “Hey, there’s a thing called texture mapping,” and he looks up in the air for a second, and he goes, “Yeah, I could do that.”

The funny thing was that Origin worked on Ultima Underworld for two years, and we worked on Catacomb 3D for two months. Both 3D games ended up using the mapping technique. We released Catacomb 3D around Christmas and went on vacation. Well, John stayed home because he heard about a great new computer he was so excited about: the NeXT. It’s $11,000; he had to have it.

When we came back, he had the NeXT computer all set up, and he was doing tests with vector quantization: taking 256-color VGA graphics, breaking down the RGB values, converting them to another color space, and figuring out if he could compress it better. And we’re just like, “Okay, time for another game.” This was January 1992. I said, “We need to redo Castle Wolfenstein in 3D.”

I decided to send a copy of Commander Keen 4 through 6 to Roberta Williams at Sierra. In January, she had written back that she loved Commander Keen, that it was super exciting, and we should come out and talk to them.

We flew out there with Mark, our probationary president. We got the whole tour; we got to see Warren Schwader, who was an Apple II programmer from 1981, and Ken Williams, who had two Software Publishers Association (SPA) awards in his office. Ken brought up the idea of buying Id Software for $2.5 million. We talked further the next day and told them we were seriously thinking about it, that we’ll make our decision when we get back.

We went back home, we talked about it, and said, “Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s have them sign a letter of intent and pay us $100,000 to keep us bound, and then go through the acquisition contract and get bought for $2.5 million.” We called Ken and told him, but he’s no longer interested.

So, we thought, “Well, we’re still making Wolfenstein, and we’re going to put it out. Too bad that deal didn’t work out.” We didn’t sell Id Software to Sierra for $2.5 million because Ken didn’t want to pay $100,000 for a letter of intent.

We continued developing Wolfenstein. At the very beginning, we were doing the game in 16-color EGA, and Scott Miller said, “You know what, ditch EGA. VGA is where this game’s going to look really great. And more people have VGA now than they did when Keen was out, so just throw away EGA, forget it, and don’t even support it.” We were like, “Hell, yeah, that makes it way easier.” EGA was a hard mode to program, especially with texture mapping.

Ramsay:  Where was Mark during this time?

Romero:  While we were looking for apartments in Dallas, I had a conversation with Scott. He asked, “You guys have Mark doing all the biz stuff? He told me I’m not supposed to talk to you about business.”

And I said, “What? No. You can talk to us. We just don’t want you talking to us all the time about biz stuff because we wanted to see how well he would do with it. It’s a distraction when we’re trying to code, design, and everything.”

So, when I got back to the hotel, I called John Carmack and Adrian Carmack, told them the situation, and John fired him. Mark then went straight over to Epic Games. That was the beginning of 1992, and that was fine because we were hiring Jay. It’s funny. Now, Jay and Mark work in the same office at Epic, but Jay did stay as our CEO at Id Software for years.

Ramsay:  When did you finish Wolfenstein 3D?

Romero:  We finished Wolfenstein in Dallas, and uploaded the game to the Software Creations BBS around 4:00 AM in the morning on May 5, 1992. It was really just the shareware version, and we didn’t have any other episodes. The reason why we uploaded the shareware version was because Scott said, “Let’s get this out fast; let’s upload the first episode. You guys finish the other two episodes, and then we’ll have all three ready to go.”

We agreed. We thought we could get the other two episodes done pretty quickly, and that’s what happened. We finished it out well; it wasn’t like it was just blasted out. The engine was working really well, so the first episode came together great, and the second and third were just bam, bam, we’re done.

And when we got done with the three episodes, Scott said, “Hey, so here’s a crazy idea. You guys make another three episodes as an expansion pack. When the shareware goes out, the other two episodes will be $35. The expansion—which will give you double the levels—will be an additional $15. On top of that, how about you guys make a hint guide for all six episodes, and we’ll sell that for $10? Everything together would be $60. What do you think about this?” So, in the summer, we finished the pamphlets for advertisements, we did the hint book, and we finished all those episodes.

Ramsay:  What happened when Wolfenstein 3D was released?

Romero:  When Wolfenstein came out, there was just a massive amount of downloads. Just huge. We found out that the first episode sold 4,000 copies, which was a lot back then. Nowadays, it’s a joke, but back then, that was a ton of copies. That was a quarter million dollars in one month, which we had never seen before. For us, a quarter million bucks was like five months of income, and it was just, bam, instant. It was pretty amazing to see that in one month.

And then we got a call from a company in Japan that wanted us to port Wolfenstein to the Super Nintendo; they would give us a $100,000 down payment. We were like, “Let’s all give ourselves raises.” Everyone had been paid the same amount then. There was no difference in payment, no matter what our jobs were; we all had crazy amounts of experience. We were paying ourselves $27,000 a year. When Wolfenstein came out, we raised ourselves to $45,000 a year. After a few more months of Wolfenstein just really rocketing and going crazy, we raised our salaries to $60,000 a year.

Ramsay: Today, after major releases, game developers often take time off, when they aren’t laid off, of course. Did you guys take a break?

Romero: Yeah, after Wolfenstein, we all decided to go to Disney World as a group vacation. We stayed in Disney World for a week. And while we were there, people were like, “Holy crap, you guys made Wolfenstein?” The word was out, which never happened with Commander Keen, so it was pretty cool to finally see some people recognizing a game that we made.

Ramsay: After you left Softdisk, you were working out of an apartment. It’s strange to think that Wolfenstein 3D was made there. How long before you decided that you needed a real office?

Romero: Once we had real money, we had started looking around for real office space in October. By November 1, 1992, we had moved all of our stuff out of the apartment complex into the black building in Mesquite, Texas.

In the black building, we had only one quarter of the floor, and there was a dentist and a lawyer next to us on one side. Eventually, we took the whole floor, except for the dentist because we liked him, and changed our suite number to 666. But that took a couple of years.

We all got NeXTSTEP machines. We were thinking we could develop our next game on this rich platform, probably easier. DOS was super primitive. And we all got on the Internet, we all got email, and all that stuff at the end of the year.

Ramsay: How did Doom come together?

Romero: Before Doom, each of our games had been the brainchild of one person, often Tom, and we would build out that vision. This time was different. This was the first game where we decided to collaborate on the idea.

We thought about Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. There was so much happening in those campaigns that any one adventure would be epic. We thought, at the very end, that demons could overrun the whole place, and I asked, “What if you were fighting demons? What kind of weapons would you need?” We had been doing World War II, which was kind of limiting, so I was like, “What if we did space weapons and space marines? And what if the space marines were fighting demons? How about that?” Tom came up with the fiction, and we all agreed that would be really cool. What would the engine do though? We came up with a laundry list of what we wanted to accomplish, and then we realized that the game would take longer than Wolfenstein. We ­realized that this would be the biggest game we had ever made.

One idea that John had for Doom was portals that would allow the player to look into other areas, other maps maybe; the player would look in the doorway or something, and it would actually be a view into another section of the map or another map entirely. He started thinking about how his data structures would handle this, and then decided, “Okay, it’s not the time right now, but I can see being able to do that later when there’s more memory.”

In January, we wrote up a press release to announce our plans. That was the first time we told the world what our next game would be. We put the press release out, and we hired Shawn Green, who worked at Apogee, to be tech support for the game. He would know the game while it was being developed, and when it came out, he would know everything about it and be able to answer tech support questions.

Ramsay:  What were the rest of you doing?

Romero: At the very beginning, Tom Hall was in charge of making the levels, I was busy making the map editor, and John was writing the engine. For a couple of months, Tom was thrashing around; he couldn’t get really inspired about what kind of levels he could make. And after two months, the engine was there to make stuff work. So, we spent another two months trying to figure out how we could come up with a really interesting level design.

One day, I just said, “Okay, I’m going to do it today. I’m going to solve this level problem.” And that day, I came up with the abstract level design style, and I showed it to everybody. I’m like, “Here’s some round stuff, and here it opens up into a huge room with really high walls, cool areas on top that are brightly lit, the room’s kind of dim and dark, and it’s got two paths out of it.”

And the design looked way, way more interesting. The textures were cool and everybody liked it. “That’s the direction that we need to go. It can’t be realistic; it needs to be abstract. It needs to be fun, look cool, have a great design for puzzle solving, and have a great general flow for combat.” Tom started working with that and we continued making the game.

We just kept on making progress, getting monsters in, and scanning stuff with a video camera. We added a Lazy Susan that had eight slots. You could rotate it, and it would stop at each slot; we had someone build that for us. Adrian was building models out of clay, so he built the main Doom marine and the Baron of Hell. He made only two of those guys. Clay turned out to be the worst thing because when you wanted to animate the characters, the clay would tear.

Ramsay:  What did you use for the other characters?

Romero: After making a couple of those guys, we hired somebody, Greg Punchatz, to make actual latex models that fully articulate and are colored correctly instead of just clay color. We had a video camera hooked up to a NeXTSTEP that could take a video image. We’d aim that right at the Lazy Susan and whatever monster was on top, scan a frame, and save. We’d scan all eight frames for one type of animation, animate it, and do another set of eight frames. It was kind of tedious, but we got them all scanned in.

We had to clean up the images. There were extra dots all around each image that had nothing to do with the image. And we ran the images through something called “The Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop.” We created a palette for Doom, a 256-color VGA palette, and we applied that palette to those images, so that each image would conform to the Doom palette. An artist could then go through them, clean up the images, and color them correctly.

Ramsay:  What about the weapons?

Romero:  All the weapons we got were from Toys ’R’ Us. There was a shotgun, a pistol, and some other kind of space weapon. We took the space weapon and we used it in multiple ways to get the BFG and the plasma gun. We had a toy gatling gun as well. And, suddenly, Tom just wasn’t into it.

Tom really didn’t like blood and violence and gore, and that’s what the games were turning into, starting with Wolfenstein. Doom was even worse. And so Tom just wasn’t very happy. In August, he took off and went to Apogee—and then we hired Sandy Peterson to take over as the full-time game designer. We also hired Dave Taylor to help with stuff like the menu system, the intermissions screens, the auto-map, and those things. He integrated the sound engine we had licensed, too. He came on for the last five months

Eventually, we started working on deathmatch, probably around September. Getting that in there just changed everything; it became the coolest game ever. But by the time we got to the end, when we were going to upload the game finally, we were like, “We don’t even want to see this game again.” We had been living with this game, playing it over and over a million times. That’s the only way to make good games—play your game tons of times.

Ramsay: Doom was released on December 10, 1993. What was that day like?

Romero: That last day was 30 hours long! We stayed up getting DOOM tested and ready to upload, and then we uploaded the game to the Software Creations BBS and the University of Wisconsin’s FTP site, and we went to sleep. We didn’t want to see the game again, but we were going to.

Everybody knew Doom was coming out. In fact, some people got Dave Taylor’s phone number at Id somehow, and they were calling up, asking when the game’s coming out. In the University’s FTP directory, people were creating bogus files with file names that were sentences like “when.will.it.come.out” and “oh.my.god.i.cant.wait.” And when we tried to upload, we couldn’t because we couldn’t log in; the site was packed. We had to have the admin dump everybody so we could try and log in while everyone else was automatically logging back in. We finally uploaded the game, and then people slammed the site, crashing the servers two times in a row. It was pandemonium.

Doom did really well. The game went out like a rocket; everybody loved it. We fixed some problems. We also added support for a version or two for three monitors, where you’d have a middle main monitor and two side monitors that would show your view wrapped around. That was pretty neat. And we just kept responding to everybody going nuts over the game. At the same time, we started Doom II, which would be the retail version; Doom was shareware.

I started working with all kinds of people on the hint books, hint guides—you know, do this and do that. I even started up Heretic in January 1994. We took about eight months to get Doom II done and launched that on October 10.

Ramsay: I recall that you had a launch party, right?

Romero: Yeah, we had a launch event for Doom II in New York City at a club called The Limelight; the club was all gothy. We had a 15-person deathmatch station set up in back for the journalists, and we held the press event on a stage where we would all just sit on the sides and answer questions.

At that launch event, a couple of people came over, gave me a disk, and said, “Just run the thing on the disk. We’re super excited about our thing; you can play Doom at any time, night or day, through this.” That was very exciting, because the Internet was then in its early, clunky stages. Jay and I flew back home, installed it, ran it, and came in the next day and we were like, “Wow, did you run that thing last night? That thing is awesome.” That was DWANGO.

And I told Jay, “I’m going to work with those guys. I’m going to get that thing done.” It was extremely crude. So, I got in touch with the company owner and said, “I’ve got to work with your server guy. I’m going to do the client. He’s going to do the server, and we’re going to get this thing rewritten. It’s going to be nice and professional, so I can put it on my master disks when I do a new version of Doom II, or when this new game Heretic comes out.”

We raced to get it done. People could run “DWANGO.exe” and connect to a server. When you connect with DWANGO, you’re inside of a lobby and you can see all the other people in there. You can connect together with other people, chat, and then you can start deathmatching. And this was at any time of the day, so there was no calling up your friend on a modem; it’s like they were sitting there, waiting for you. To me, this was going to be the best thing ever, especially when you could play over the Internet anywhere.

So, anyway, that was pretty cool, and we wrapped and launched Heretic at around 11:30 PM on December 23, 1994. “DWANGO.exe” was on the disk.

Ramsay: Since you wanted to get Doom into retail stores, did you find a publisher for Doom II?

Romero: A company called GT Interactive approached us and asked if they could be the publisher for Doom II. We said, “Well, we don’t even know who you are; you’re brand new. You’ve got to prove you can actually move games.” And so we said, “How about this? We’ll give you Commander Keen 4 and 5, and if you can sell 30,000 copies, you’ll get Doom II.”

And so they did that. They sold 30,000 copies pretty quickly, came back, and said, “Boom, there it is. All right, let’s sign you guys up.” We signed up with GT Interactive and preorders went crazy after they announced they were the publisher. They were doing marketing, and the preorders were just insane—just tons of preorders. And when the game came out in the stores on October 10, Doom II was selling so fast that they didn’t even put the game on the shelves. Stores would bring in a huge pallet of Doom II boxes and just drop the pallet right inside the doorway of CompUSA, for instance. People just went in, picked up a box, and went to the register—that’s why they were coming in.

Ramsay: Although Doom was originally shareware for DOS, the game spread quickly to other platforms, including the Super Nintendo. How did that happen?

Romero: One day, we got a package in the mail from Sculptured Software. We opened it up and there was a Super Nintendo cartridge with “Doom” written on it. I thought, “I know Sculptured; they’re one of the best SNES developers around.” We put the cartridge in our SNES and it was Doom!

We didn’t ask anybody to do that; they were just so crazy about the game that they decided to make it. I think they were thinking, “Okay, so we’re the best Super Nintendo developers around, and if Id gives Doom to anybody else, we’re not going to get it, so we need to just do it.” So, that’s what they did. They made Doom without our knowledge, and then sent it to us to see if we wanted to publish it. We were like, “Um, yes. Great.” That’s what happened with that.

Also, in 1994, there was a Cybermania award show in Hollywood that Robert Stack was MC’ing. We went to that show and we didn’t get an award. It was ridiculous. Doom didn’t get an award. And I remember when Doom came out, in Computer Gaming World; Doom was just in the back with a bunch of newly released software like it’s no big deal. It was hilarious. This was before they were writing articles all over the planet in every magazine about Doom. I remember Matt Firme wrote in PC Gamer about how Doom had taken control of his life. It was everywhere then, but when it first came out, nothing.

Ramsay:  When did Quake get going?

Romero: In December 1994, we were thinking about the next game: Quake. At the beginning of 1995, we started actually coding. John was spending time on architecture, and he was trying to get Michael Abrash to come join Id.

Because Doom II was now in stores, and Doom I had been out for a year as shareware, we decided to put the full registered version of Doom together with Doom II as a package, and add another episode to give it more value. And so we were working on that and Quake. I was building the level editor for Quake, and I was also working on Ultimate Doom, which is what we called the package.

I was also kicking off the Hexen game; Heretic had just launched and I really liked it. I wanted to do something new, so I got Raven, the company I worked with on Heretic, to sign up for another game. We took over pretty much the rest of the building, except for the dentist we liked, and built out new offices.

Finally, by the end of 1995, the engine was in a state that we could make Quake run at a rendering speed and frame rate that would help us deliver a great game. And we then knew how many polys we could have in a scene, so we could make our levels look really cool and not feel too slow.

So, we were at a time when we could really build an innovative game design, but the problem was that everybody was burned out from a year of nonstop work. We had a company meeting to decide what to do. Almost everyone said they were burned out, and they didn’t want to even think about trying to innovate game design. Even Carmack was on the fence.

Some people were on my side to move forward and innovate game design. But most of the people had not been through a full hardcore dev cycle—they were kind of broken and just wanted to get the game over with. I was advocating, “No, we need to move forward with great game design and make cool new stuff that people haven’t seen before. This technology is already something no one’s seen; let’s make a great game design.”

But the consensus was “let’s just slap Doom weapons in this stupid game and get it done, get it over with.” I said, “Okay, I’ll redesign it, and we’ll just slap Doom weapons in and finish this game. Right then, I was done with the company. I thought, “I’m finishing this game and I’m leaving.” In January, I contacted Tom Hall and said, “When I’m done with Quake, let’s start another company.” And he’s like, “Sounds great to me.” He was working on Prey.

For the next seven months, we were in just a crazy crunch mode on Quake to make the levels, all the models, all the weapons, tie them all together, make them work, test it, ship it, and we’re done. Around February 22, we put out Qtest, which was our technology test with three levels and people got to check it out. We had seven people in the Doom community come to our offices to test the game, so we could watch them and get feedback immediately. We made some changes, finished it up, and shipped.

In March, we actually got an offer from GT Interactive to buy the company for $100 million and we decided to turn it down. We were just not in the state of mind that we could even make a decision about it. We were all mentally done with thinking about anything else but getting this damn game done. We could not make good decisions about anything, so we just told them to forget it.

We got the game together and I launched it by myself because the company was just destroyed. The game was finished, everyone was done, and so I came in on a Saturday to get the game packaged for online distribution. I was there for awhile, figuring out all the compression stuff and everything. It was the first Id game that had a subdirectory in it, so it was a little more complex. I called one of the Qtest guys over and said, “Hey, do you want to be here when I upload Quake?” And he’s like, “Holy shit!” And I just spent hours trying to get this thing perfect; mastering something really takes a long time.

I uploaded Quake probably around 5:30 PM and then I was done. I was in the office by myself, but everyone was just done. It was the last game we were going to make together. In August, I finished mastering the retail disc version of Quake, and I was helping with the design of Quake II. One day, I decided to call GT Interactive. Talking with the president, I said, “I’m going to be leaving Id to start my own company. I was wondering if you guys wanted to talk about investing or publishing.” He was very excited about that.

Well, the next day when I got into work, the guys call me into a room and ask me to resign. Evidently, GT Interactive talked to Id about me leaving. But, anyway, I just signed the resignation thing because I was done.

Ramsay: This was the start of Ion Storm?

Romero: Yes, I spent the rest of 1996 putting together the people in Ion Storm. Tom left Apogee, so he could work on planning with me for the last half of 1996. We were meeting with a lot of publishers, and finally, we whittled it down to Eidos Interactive as the company that would be around with a good amount of money. Eidos was doing well and they were kicking butt, so I chose those guys and we got funded in January 1997.

I started to design Daikatana, and Tom Hall was there and he was starting to design Anachronox. We licensed the Quake engine, and we hired a bunch of people for the team. By the middle of the year, we had probably 40 people.

In September 1997, I brought in Warren Spector to Ion Storm. I heard he was released from working with Looking Glass and he was making Thief: The Dark Project, and the second I heard that, I e-mailed him and said, “Dude, you’ve got to join Ion Storm. Let me come down and convince you.” And I did. I convinced him to join, and he was really happy with how things turned out.

Anyway, I thought we’d be able to get the game done in a year. We already had finished technology, we had a lot of people, and we were off and running in January, but a lot of the people I hired were inexperienced. I gave a lot of modders their first job at Ion Storm, and they didn’t have professional experience or a work ethic. Some had never had a job before. And so with all of that inexperience, it took much longer.

Ramsay:  Why didn’t you hire experienced professionals?

Romero: I thought they made cool stuff at home and they would continue to do really cool stuff, so I figured, well, they’re doing what they love, why wouldn’t they do a good job here? But there’s a lot more to working than just that.

Ramsay: They had to do a lot of learning on the job?

Romero: Yeah. They had to learn how to go to work and be on time, how to work with other people on a team, and how their work fits within a game that’s in development versus a game that’s already made. And they had to learn how to work with programmers because, if they’re level designers, they’ve never even known a programmer. There were a million things I didn’t even think about. They had to learn everything; it was like a school.

Ramsay:  What were you doing?

Romero: I was making my game constantly, and so was Tom Hall, and so was Warren Spector. We were working on our games 100%.

In May at E3, I saw Quake II and it looked unbelievable. The technology looked amazing with the colored lighting, and I realized there’s no way we could do that for Daikatana with the current engine. We could not be competitive with Quake II. In the contract, I could get any successive engine upgrades—Quake II was the upgraded version of the engine—but I had to wait for that before I could continue developing our game.

Waiting for Quake II took more time. It was 1998 before we could really get down to developing. We worked hard to make the game work with this new engine, and we thought we’d be able to ship by that Christmas. But Mike Wilson, who had been my CEO and who I had to fire, was planning to take my team out of Ion. He started a little company, got a development deal, and contacted people on my team.

In November, eight people left my team, and two others went to Id and 3D Realms. I lost ten people in one day. I had to try and staff up as soon as I could, so I could finish the game. When I got the new team in and new programmers, I hired people who had experience. And they found there was a lot of data that had to be remade; there were lots of issues with what had been created already. They decided, “We need to recreate a bunch of levels and art.” So, we had to work really hard to try and release the game sometime in 1999.

And during 1999, we had a nightmare situation with two cofounders, so we got rid of them, leaving just Tom Hall and me in charge.

Ramsay:  Was the loss of those ten people more of a blessing in disguise?

Romero: I don’t know if the game would have been better if they stayed on or not. I couldn’t say. They were kind of poisonous; they were not happy and they could have spread more poison throughout the company if they had stayed, so losing them could have been a blessing. But I have no idea what would have actually happened if they had stayed.

Ramsay: Losing them gave you an opportunity to bring in experienced professionals though.

Romero: Yeah, that kind of helped. It would have been much better if I had hired them in the beginning rather than halfway through the project at which point they’re going, “What in the hell is this? What happened here?” And it’s like, “What happened here was a bunch of modders tried to make a game, and now we have to fix it.”

Ramsay:  What was the nightmare situation with the two other cofounders?

Romero: Just a crazy number of issues, and ridiculous things like, “Hey, let’s start a comic book division and hire a bunch of comic book artists.” Like, what does that have to do with the games we’re making? Nothing. You know, so they hire a bunch of people and that defocuses the other people working right next to them, who are like, “What? What are we doing? Why are we making comic books now?” And then Eidos finds out and they say, “What? You’re not doing that. Fire all of those people that just moved here.”

That’s what they did on top of buying a whole bunch of computers for those people that then went unused; they were completely specialized machines. They wouldn’t be useful development machines, so that money was just thrown into the trash. There were stupid things like that constantly.

While I was at a show or something, they took over the game, went to the dev team, and had them start changing all this stuff in my game. Just one thing after another. It was just a nightmare. It was super stupid. It would have been better if I’d just decided after that first team quit, “That’s it. I’m rebooting the whole game. Just everybody go. I’m going to rebuild this the right way.” But that would have probably sent Eidos into a panic and I didn’t want to do that.

Ramsay:  What was the process for removing cofounders?

Romero: The chairman of Eidos told them he didn’t invest money in this company because of them; he invested because of me, and he doesn’t care at all for them and they need to leave. They then negotiated how to get out.

Our next challenge was to help Tom’s team finish Anachronox, which took another year. It took him a little over four years to do Anachronox. His game got out during the summer of 2001 and it was a really great game. He did a really good job on it. But we left Ion Storm in July, and in August, we started our next company, Monkeystone Games.

Ramsay:  What did you want to do at Monkeystone Games?

Romero: I could see that the future of games was going to be handheld mobile phone games. It was pretty obvious. The Pocket PC was out, which was basically a proto-iPhone. I saw the crazy processing power, the graphics, the multitasking functionality, and I was like, “Oh, man, this is what everyone’s going to have in their hand. Let’s get into it quick, and start making mobile games.”

The first thing we did was make Hyperspace Delivery Boy! for the Pocket PC. We started on the game in August 2001 and we shipped on December 23, 2001. It was a pretty cool game, but it didn’t get any marketing, advertising, or anything like that. We worked on PC, Linux, and Mac versions, too.

After that, we made Congo Cube on BREW and J2ME, and we worked on Cartoon Network: Block Party for Majesco Entertainment for awhile. We got that thing done, and then worked on several other little things that never got out. We worked on Red Faction for the N-Gage. Nokia wanted that game done. So, we made that one and that was my last game at Monkeystone.

Ramsay: For the four years that Monkeystone was around, you released around 15 games. Sounds like a lot of games to make in that short period.

Romero:  We were cranking! We were working really hard. That was an amazing time. There were so many different platforms we put stuff out on.

Ramsay:  Without much in the way of marketing and advertising, was Monkeystone not in a position to make any real money on mobile games?

Romero: Yeah, we didn’t have any business people, so that was not helpful. We didn’t do all of the stuff we should have done.

Ramsay: You were a business person, weren’t you?

Romero: That wasn’t really my focus though. The focus for me when we were starting Monkeystone was coding 100% of the time. I don’t want to do business stuff. I just want to code. But it got to the point that it became clear we were going to have to do something. The company had not made really any money and we needed to pay back a huge loan.

I was working on Red Faction for the N-Gage, and probably five months after that, I decided I had enough of Texas. I just had been there for too long. I knew everybody. So, I finished Red Faction, and I told Tom I wanted to leave Texas and get back to California. I said, “I’m thinking about going over to Midway in San Diego because San Diego’s a really great town.” And Tom was like, “You aren’t leaving without me.” We left in October 2003.

We had one of our guys at Monkeystone, Lucas Davis, run the company while we went to California. We still had some projects they should work on. And, with Tom and me leaving, that freed us up to figure out how to make the money we needed to pay off our loan. And so we went to work at Midway.

Midway was working on Area 51 in Austin, and they needed to have their multiplayer deathmatch mode done. We said, “Hey, we have a whole team that can do multiplayer no problem, and they’ll just move down there to Austin.” And so Midway said, “Hell, yeah, let’s do that. Bring them down.” I had Monkeystone move down to Austin and start working at Midway Austin. We made lots of money and paid the loan off. The company then had no debt.

When we completed Area 51, we shut down Monkeystone. Tom went back to Austin to work at KingsIsle on an MMO. I left slightly later to Redwood City to found my MMO company. Each of us took half of Monkeystone with us, so everyone got jobs. It was a good closing down of the company.

Ramsay: I understand you needed to pay off your debts, but why go back to being a full-time employee of a company you didn’t control?

Romero: I really wanted a break from running companies. You know, the only other times in my whole life that I worked for someone else since I started making games was at Origin and Softdisk. I didn’t spend very many years at any of them. I was at Origin for nine months or something, Softdisk for two years, and Midway for about two years. That’s less than five years, probably.

Ramsay: Of the places you could’ve worked at, why Midway? Midway hadn’t reported profit since 1999, and every year, they’d readily admit in their annual report, “We may not become profitable again despite our efforts.”

Romero: I went there because they promised whatever it took to get 80% or higher review scores. I thought, “That’s great. They’re dedicated to quality. I’m interested.” When they saw that 80% cost too much money, they were like, “Okay, well, we’re done with that. We care about fiscal quarters and your game must come out in Q4. Whatever is in that box is going on the shelf.” It was all corporate politics coming from on high.

Ramsay:  What did the two of you manage to do at Midway?

Romero: Tom worked as a third-party creative director and I worked as the project lead on Gauntlet. I hired Josh Sawyer to be my lead game designer and he came up with a great idea for a game called Seven Sorrows. It was turning out to be a really cool game, but it was going into overtime. We knew it wasn’t going to ship for Christmas 2004, but we knew it could ship for Christmas 2005.

Around the middle of 2005, we knew Gauntlet was not going to make Christmas. Midway had planned for five games to release at Christmas, and four of them were delayed. Three were at studios they had acquired, but Gauntlet was made at their own studio, so they had direct control over the game. They decided the game was definitely going to come out no matter how bad it is. They would just hack it up, put it in a box, and sell it. They knew I wasn’t going to like being around for that, so they told me and the studio head, “Thanks very much. We have to do this hack job on your game. Thanks for everything.”

Ramsay: You mentioned you started an MMO company then?

Romero: I took about three months off and went to Redwood City to start an MMO company with Rob Hutter that we initially called Slipgate Ironworks. We later renamed that company Gazillion Entertainment.

Ramsay: Gazillion has a confusing history. I thought Slipgate was a separate company that was bought by Gazillion, and various sources indicate Rob Hutter as the sole founder. Is that not the case? Can you set the record straight?

Romero: Yeah, in November 2004, Rob filed papers to create a company called NR2B Research. He spent time at GDC and E3 in 2005, meeting people to find somebody who could deal with designing an idea he had for an educational MMO and running an MMO team. Around the middle of 2005, I saw on LinkedIn that he was looking for a lead game designer, so I contacted him. After we talked, Rob decided, “You need to be a cofounder of this company.”

“NR2B Research” was the name of the company before I got there, but we kept that name hidden. I told him, “It’s going to be really hard for me to hire any game talent into a company called NR2B Research. That’s not a game company name. I need to use something more exciting.” He filed a DBA, or Doing Business As statement, for NR2B Research. I suggested “Slipgate Ironworks.” We finally settled on the name “Gazillion Entertainment,” and officially changed the name in the corporate record. NR2B Research didn’t exist anymore.

Ramsay: By March 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that Marvel Comics had signed a ten-year deal with Gazillion. What games were you going to make?

Romero:  We actually started two Marvel games at once. One of them was a kid’s game called Super Hero Squad, and the other one was Marvel Universe, which got retitled to Marvel Heroes. We hired David Brevik to make that game.

Ramsay: Shortly after, you left Gazillion. The company had basically just started to get going. Why did you want to get out?

Romero:  Well, my game hit a critical tech issue and we couldn’t proceed, so we had to stop development in October 2009. The board wanted to lessen any kind of risk, and original IP is a risk versus existing IP that you can just license. I don’t really like to work on any licensed IP, so I was trying to get the company interested in Facebook games. The board decided we needed to focus on MMOs, but Facebook games were taking off. I was more excited about that.

My wife Brenda—we married on October 27, 2012—was the creative director over at a company called Lolapps in San Francisco. They had a game she took control of to get it to launch. She needed someone to fix it, so I came in as a consultant and worked for almost three months on the game design using the existing code base. I came up with a game called Ravenwood Fair, redid the graphics, and designed it. We had a team of about 12, including Brenda, on the game, and shipped on October 19, 2010. By the end of the first month after shipping, the game had four million players; it was doing really, really well.

Because Ravenwood Fair was doing so well, we decided to start a social games company. Brenda and I created a company called Loot Drop. The plan was for me to start talking to publishers while she continued working at Lolapps, and at some point, she would leave Lolapps and join Loot Drop full-time. That point was at the end of February 2011.

I got a deal with a company called RockYou and we started Loot Drop on January 11, 2011. We worked on a game called Cloudforest Expedition, a game I designed. We worked on that for about nine months until we handed the whole game over to RockYou to launch it, but they had an implosion and shut down all game-related publishing activities.

During that time, we started doing deals with EA, Ubisoft, and other companies. We got Loot Drop up to four games in development simultaneously. But at the end of January 2013, we decided to put Loot Drop into hibernation mode.

Ramsay:  Why?

Romero:  Well, one big reason was that we saw that all of the major players were losing interest in social. EA and Ubi were going, “Forget it. This market’s done. Zynga’s already jacked it up.” And so they started cancelling projects. They saw Zynga going down and decided the bubble’s gone. Instead of thinking of Facebook as a long-term viable game platform, they were just thinking about the bubble and the bubble was popping.

We decided, “Let’s not keep pursuing projects from these big publishers in this space. Let’s just wind it down.” We’d figure out what we were going to do with our last game that we had actually almost finished. But we just weren’t interested in continuing because the money wasn’t flowing.

We shut the company down at the end of January last year. Over the next several months, Brenda became the first game designer in residence at UC Santa Cruz in December 2012, and I started to lecture at UCSC in April 2013.

During the summer, I did a consulting gig. That turned into being president of the company. That led to starting a studio for that company out here in Santa Clara, right across the street from UCSC’s Extension building. Brenda became program director of the new master’s degree program in games and playable media, and I became the creative director of the program.

In the fall, a new company contacted us about doing a game for Facebook. They told us about the IP and we were very excited about it. We decided, “Well, why don’t we do it? Why not just do that game?”

We spun up Loot Drop again, hired some people, and we’re going to be back in full production in February 2014. We’ve finished that game we had on hold for a year, and we’re publishing that within weeks. So, hopefully, we’ll get something from the half million we invested in that game last year.

Ramsay: It was an actual hibernation then!

Romero: Yes, it was an actual hibernation. We have Greg Costikyan working as our lead game designer. We’re working here in the same building as the New York company. I have Loot Drop in the other half of the building, so both companies are in the same space right across the street from UCSC.

Ramsay: Sounds like you’re building your own incubator?

Romero: Yeah, we have a little trio of companies. I’ve got three jobs, but it’s working out really well, and we’ll be back in full production again.