John Romero Interview
The second part of Computer & Video Games' John Romero interview is now available. This time questions are about ION Storm and its games, Monkeystone Games, leaving Midway, and his current job.
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Rich McNinch
replyJohn Romero: No way. As soon as that changeover happened, and they got rid of myself and the studio manager, the team was extremely upset. The new guys who came in were good guys, but they just had a mission to get the game done. They basically cut it to ribbons, eviscerated it, and within two weeks of my leaving the lead designer quit because he couldn't handle what was happening to the game. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows is not anything like what we were almost done building - it would have taken one extra month for the game to be pretty much done. We were so far down the road but all that mattered was that the game came out in Q4.
They threw away probably millions of dollars worth of work just to make Q4. All the cinematics and story were gone, even two thirds of the levels were gone - there were 45 levels in the game but it shipped with 15. They destroyed that game, but they got it out, and the world's got another typical Gauntlet game instead of the redefining property type-of-thing that I was doing. It was fun to work on, I got experience inside a big company - it was a good break from the company running stuff that I had been doing since 1991.
This makes me mad and want to smash!-
But it's also true that John Romero is usually full of shit.
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Quake 3 was great but you're dead right about the other two slow moving, no action, no skill pieces of shit.
Shame Romero wasn't on board for them. Diakatana multi-player nearly had the best duel mode ever but there were hardly any 1on1 maps the ones in the game were terrible. -
you suck at sarcasm because q2 was a piece of shit (no mp maps at release wtf) especially compared to quake1/quakeworld. as for quake3: it took everything that was awesome in quakeworld made it slower/balanced thus more beginner friendly and added the only thing that was good in quake2 , the railgun....
hmm lets see,
with romero: wolf3d,doom1/2 quake.
without romero quake2/3, teamarena (fucking lol), doom3(way to take a shit on their most important franchise)
well i think they did better with romero than without him.-
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some people loved it,some hated it ( guess who ) but there is no denying that putting out a sequel to a franchise as netquake/quakeworld, which was the foundation of the whole internet deathmatch scene and came as a successor to the doom deathmatch legacy, without multiplayermaps or modes was plain stupid. the netcode was beyond bad and the game didnt even have the slightest thing in common with the original quake but for the name before the 2.
the gameplay was dated and technologywise the only thing that was added was colored light which wasnt very impressing to anyone that had played glquake. again there are people that loved it but compared to doom/quake it was a turd. gameplay and technologywise
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He does seem like a good guy, but also someone who chronically underestimates the time and effort needed to finish, really finish, a grand game design.
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