Nepedia
Back to Discover
Fluent Reader
🎨

John Romero

arts Maturity 7-9 war conflict Next article →

This article covers sensitive topics: war_conflict. Parents can manage visibility in Parental Controls.

John Romero is a famous American and Irish video game developer.

BAFTA2011 GameDevs
BAFTA2011 GameDevs

He is best known for helping start a company called id Software. This company made many games that changed how people play. He worked on famous titles like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. He also helped design the game Quake. These games made the first-person shooter genre very popular. In these games, players see the world through a character's eyes.

Romero's work involved much more than just making art. He wrote many tools that helped his team build games. These tools included level editors like DoomEd and QuakeEd. He also created the program used to connect players to servers. One of his most famous contributions was a special name. He coined the term "deathmatch" for multiplayer games. This term describes when players compete against each other in a game.

His journey into games began with a single computer. Romero started programming on an Apple II in 1980. He was inspired by playing arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Pac-Man was very important to him. It was the first game that made him think about game design. He even wrote his first published game, Scout Search, for a magazine. He spent many years practicing before joining his first big industry job in 1987.

Romero's career has seen many different companies and projects. After id Software, he co-founded a studio called Ion Storm in Dallas, Texas. There, he directed a game called Daikatana, which came out in 2000. He later helped start Monkeystone Games to make games for mobile devices. In 2003, he joined Midway Games to lead a project called Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. He also founded a company called Gazillion Entertainment in 2005.

BAFTA2011 GameDevs
BAFTA2011 GameDevs

Even when things were difficult, Romero kept creating. He had disagreements with his teammate John Carmack at id Software. This led to Romero leaving the company in 1996. Later, his game Daikatana received many bad reviews from critics. Despite these hard times, he continued to work on new ideas. He even announced a new game called Blackroom in 2016. He remains a key figure in the history of video games.

360 words

Where will your curiosity go next?

Keep exploring at your chosen reading level.

🖼️ Images & Media (2)
File:Strong National Museum of Play (51363875005).png
Strong National Museum of Play (51363875005).png
File:BAFTA2011 GameDevs.jpg
BAFTA2011 GameDevs.jpg
More to explore

What is Nepedia?

A free, ad-free encyclopedia for children. Every article is written at five reading levels, so the same page works for a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old — use the level switcher above to see this one change. No account needed to read.