Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is an American and Irish video game developer. He co-founded 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 the id 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, he 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 cancelled after failing to find a publisher.
Early life
Romero was born on October 28, 1967, six weeks premature, 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 video 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." Other influences include programmer Bill Budge, and Virtua Fighter.
Career
Early career
thumb|The Apple II owned by John Romero on display at [[The Strong National Museum of Play]]
John Romero started programming games on an Apple II he got in 1980.
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., Instead, Romero left Origin Systems to co-found a game company named Inside Out Software,