John Romero

After Alfonso and Ginny married, they headed in a 1948 Chrysler with three hundred dollars to Colorado, hoping their interracial relationship would thrive in more tolerant surroundings.

Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is an American director, designer, programmer and developer in the video game industry.

Romero was born on October 28, 1967, six weeks premature, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

He has said that he has Mexican, Yaqui, and Cherokee grandparents.

His mother, Ginny, met Alfonso Antonio Romero when they were teenagers in Tucson, Arizona.

Alfonso, a first-generation Mexican American, was a maintenance man at an air force base, spending his days fixing air conditioners and heating systems.

Among Romero's early influences, the arcade game Space Invaders (1978), with its "shoot the alien" gameplay, introduced him to video games.

Namco's maze chase arcade game Pac-Man (1980) had the biggest influence on his career, as it was the first game that got him "thinking about game design."

John Romero started programming games on an Apple II he got in 1980.

His first developed game was a Crazy Climber clone, but it was not published.

Nasir Gebelli (Sirius Software, Squaresoft) was his favorite programmer and a major inspiration, with his fast 3D programming work for Apple II games, such as the shooters Horizon V (1981) and Zenith (1982), influencing his later work at id Software.

Other influences include programmer Bill Budge, Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario games, and the fighting games Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting and Virtua Fighter.

Jumpster was created in 1983 and published in 1987, making Jumpster his earliest created, then published, game.

His first published game, Scout Search, appeared in the June 1984 issue of inCider magazine, a popular Apple II magazine during the 1980s.

Romero's first company, Capitol Ideas Software, was listed as the developer for at least 12 of his earliest published games.

Romero captured the December cover of the Apple II magazine Nibble for three years in a row starting in 1987.

He entered a programming contest in A+ magazine during its first year of publishing with his game Cavern Crusader.

The first game Romero created that was eventually published was Jumpster in UpTime.

Romero's first industry job was at Origin Systems in 1987 after programming games for eight years.

He worked on the Apple II to Commodore 64 port of 2400 A.D., which was eventually scrapped due to slow sales of the Apple II version.

Romero then moved onto Space Rogue, a game by Paul Neurath.

During this time, Romero was asked if he would be interested in joining Paul's soon-to-start company Blue Sky Productions, eventually renamed Looking Glass Technologies.

Instead, Romero left Origin Systems to co-found a game company named Inside Out Software, where he ported Might & Magic II from the Apple II to the Commodore 64.

He had almost finished the Commodore 64 to Apple II port of Tower Toppler, but Epyx unexpectedly cancelled all its ports industrywide due to their tremendous investment in the first round of games for the upcoming Atari Lynx.

During this short time, Romero did the artwork for the Apple IIGS version of Dark Castle, a port from the Macintosh.

During this time, John and his friend Lane Roathe co-founded a company named Ideas from the Deep and wrote versions of a game called Zappa Roidz for the Apple II, PC and Apple IIGS.

Their last collaboration was an Apple II disk operating system (InfoDOS) for Infocom's games Zork Zero, Arthur, Shogun and Journey.

Romero moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, in March 1989 and joined Softdisk as a programmer in its Special Projects division.

After several months of helping the PC monthly disk magazine Big Blue Disk, he officially moved into the department until he started a PC games division in July 1990 named Gamer's Edge (originally titled PCRcade).

Romero hired John D. Carmack into the department from his freelancing in Kansas City, moved Adrian Carmack (no relation) into the division from Softdisk's art department, and persuaded Tom Hall to come in at night and help with game design.

He is a co-founder of id Software and designed their early games, including Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993), Doom II (1994), Hexen (1995) and Quake (1996).

His designs and development tools, along with programming techniques developed by id Software's lead programmer, John Carmack, popularized the first-person shooter (FPS) genre.

Romero is also credited with coining the multiplayer term "deathmatch".

Following disputes with Carmack, Romero was fired from id in 1996.

He co-founded a new studio, Ion Storm, and directed the FPS Daikatana (2000), which was a critical and commercial failure.

Romero departed Ion Storm in 2001.

In July 2001, Romero and another former id employee, Tom Hall, founded Monkeystone Games to develop games for mobile devices.

In 2003, Romero joined Midway Games as the project lead on Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows (2005), and left shortly before its release.

He founded another company, Gazillion Entertainment, in 2005.

In 2016, Romero and another former id employee, Adrian Carmack, announced a new FPS, Blackroom, but it was canceled after it failed to gain funding.