They remember the game as some having great memories with their dad.” “I have often heard over the years about people who played with their parents, like their fathers, and their fathers have since passed away. But he also understands the emotional impact the game has had on generations of gamers. There was modding (the ability for players to make their own levels and content), multiplayer deathmatch, plus an engine with techniques that every game used for decades afterwards, like binary space partitioning (BSP).”īeing a programmer, John is proud of the game’s technological feats, and he highlights the sheer ‘speed’ of Doom as being a key selling point, because that speed of movement had never really been done before in first-person gaming.
“I think that multi-layered innovation was one of the reasons it was so huge. In Doom, we just did everything at once.” “It wasn’t incremental, like ‘We’ll add floor height and then we’ll do multiplayer in the next game’. “There were a lot of big breaks in Doom that made it so big,” says Romero. Why has Doom left such a lasting impact on the world of gaming? It is a free release that continues the story of the original Doom, following in the aftermath of that game’s conclusion.
Now Romero is returning to the original game for one last entry, called Sigil, which will be his first full episode in over two decades. “We even put a press release out in 1993 ahead of the launch, because we knew the tech was going to be beyond what anyone else was doing.” “We knew that it was going to be pretty big,” says Romero, chuckling at the memory. Doom not only birthed the modern online shooter genre, now popularised by Call of Duty and Destiny among others, but it also introduced technological and design innovations that can still be seen in gaming today.
John Romero is a legendary American developer and one of the co-creators of Doom, arguably the most influential game of the last 30 years.