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

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

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

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

But I remembered Romero’s near-perfect memory and thought about that. In reporting my own books on the making of the Xbox and Xbox