Decades after “breakup,” Doom’s Carmack and Romero are rehashing their legacy

 

For gamers of a certain age, the '90s break up of Doom co-creators John Carmack and John Romero is a cultural moment on par with the breakup of The Beatles. Now, as the 30th anniversary of Doom's original release approaches next month, the pair has announced plans to come together for a moderated livestreamed discussion of their most famous creation.

 

The Twitch-streamed event, announced on social media late last week by Romero, will take place on Doom's anniversary of December 10. Carmack and Romero will discuss the game and its legacy with moderator and Rocket Jump author David L. Craddock, whom Ars readers might remember from the Long Live Mortal Kombat excerpt that ran on the site last year.

 

Carmack and Romero reuniting might feel like a historic burying of the hatchet to those who have followed the pair's story over the decades. But "the two Johns" say that reports of their falling out have been exaggerated over the years, to say the least.

Past Masters

Plenty has been made of the tensions that developed between Carmack and Romero, who were still in their early 20s when the runaway success of the first two Doom titles made them PC game development royalty. As laid out in David Kushner's history Masters of Doom, though, cracks in the two Johns' relationship started to come to a head during the development of Quake. During that period, Carmack created a time-logging program that he said definitively showed Romero was slacking off on his work responsibilities.

 

Romero was "talking too much to the press, talking too much to the fans, deathmatching too much in the office, and now the rest of the company was suffering," Kushner writes by way of summarizing Carmack's feelings in late 1995. "We need to put Romero on the record that he is about to be fired."

 

 

While Romero's career at id Software survived that period with nothing but a small hit to his annual bonus, the accusations had an effect. According to Masters of Doom, Romero started to feel his ambitious, fantasy-inspired design for Quake wasn't being given the respect it deserved from the rest of the team, which was more interested in making Quake into a Doom-style game that showed off Carmack's revolutionary new 3D engine. When Carmack declared the coveted level slots for Quake's shareware release would go to newcomer Tim Willits instead of Romero, it was close to the final straw.

 

Romero left id shortly after Quake's June 1996 release, announcing the departure in his one and only plan file update. "I have decided to leave id Software and start a new game company with different goals," he wrote on August 7. "I won't be taking anyone from id with me."

 

"Romero is now gone from id," Carmack wrote in an August 8, 1996, plan file update. "There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects. I can tell you what I am thinking, and what I am trying to accomplish, but all I promise is my best effort."

 

 

The life paths for the two Johns diverged wildly from that point. Carmack continued working on game engine tech at id until 2013, when he moved on from the Bethesda-owned company to a full-time focus on his CTO role at VR headset-maker Oculus (now Meta). Just nine years later, Carmack left Meta with a frustration-filled departure message and now puts his professional time into AGI startup Keen Technologies.

 

Romero, on the other hand, saw his post-id reputation suffer following the infamously hyped and ill-received release of FPS Daikatana in 2000. But he stuck it out in the game development world, working on design and programming for dozens of games throughout the 2000s. In recent years, the Romero Games label has played host to Sigil, a Doom WAD file marketed as "the unofficial fifth episode" of the game (Sigil II will launch on December 10). Last year, Romero also started publicly recruiting for "an all-new FPS with an original, new IP" running on Unreal Engine 5.

Revisionist history?

Despite the widespread reports of their acrimonious breakup, both Carmack and Romero have lately seemed eager to put a happier sheen on their relationship. "The truth is that Carmack and I were friends, and we cared about each other, and we still do," Romero wrote in an excerpt from his recently published memoir, Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Romero also uses the book to accuse other writers over the years of playing up the "animosity" between the pair because "it makes for a better story."

 

Youth and inexperience had a lot to do with the way the Johns' working relationship ended, according to Romero. Carmack and Romero were "constantly crunching kids in our twenties with the whole world staring at us as we tried to do the best we could while creating a tech and a design that the world had never before seen," he wrote. "As Carmack stated in a 2022 episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast, this chapter of our lives certainly could have gone a different way if we’d been more mature and more experienced and not the twenty-somethings we actually were, and I fully agree."

 

In addition to SIGIL II (https://t.co/Ag7KlXUzNw), I've got some other great news to celebrate DOOM's 30th Anniversary. Join me and John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack to discuss DOOM live, moderated by David L. Craddock @davidlcraddock. Dec 10 8pm GMT on https://t.co/bODJojudA5. Thanks… pic.twitter.com/7lkVVksE1v

 

— John Romero ⛧ (@romero) November 3, 2023

Despite the apparent comity between the two Johns, Romero was clear in a recent Reddit AMA that "[Carmack] and I wouldn't work on a Doom game—it would be a new game." Before you get too excited about a new "Two Johns" game project, though, Romero quickly pointed out that Carmack is "not into game dev so much anymore."

 

Carmack struck a similar tone in a social media post noting the book's launch this summer. "To be completely clear—I wish [Romero] the best," Carmack wrote, but "to preempt the inevitable question, no, we aren’t planning to make a new game together." A blurb from Carmack on the back of Romero's book also recalls "the stress and joy of throwing everything we had at projects that truly did break new ground and touched millions of people... Only much later did I realize that Romero and I were at the nexus of a new era—the 3D game hackers."

 

"We could have stayed working together if we did things differently at the start of Quake," Romero acknowledged in the AMA. "We are both stronger in different areas. Working together put those strengths into a single game... "

 

Elsewhere in the AMA, Romero notes that he and Carmack had "talked recently" about their memories of the time. We wouldn't be surprised if some of those memories take center stage during the pair's upcoming livestream.