John Romero

Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is an American director, designer, programmer and developer in the video game industry. 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. Romero was born on October 28, 1967, six weeks premature in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Romero said 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. 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.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." 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.