After 14 years John Romero is working on another shooter
The Doom co-creator returns to the genre he helped popularise.
Doom co-creator John Romero let it slip that he's starting development on a new shooter. His first since Daikatana in 2000.
The reveal was made on the Joystiq podcast where Romero said, "I haven't made a shooter since 2000. So I'm basically starting to work on another one."
Very little was revealed about the project though, and it sounds like it's in the very early stages. "I'm working with a concept artist, and so I've got some cool imagery for the main character," Romero stated. He also noted that he's "working on several games at once right now." As such, it could be a while until this project gets off the ground, but it's an exciting notion anyway.
While Romero's last shooter, Daikatana, was a notorious flop, Eurogamer contributor Lewis Denby found it a fascinating failure that was "both ahead of its time and stuck in the past."
"Released to middling rather than atrocious reviews, it fell victim to the hype machine more than anything else," he wrote in his Daikatana retrospective. "It was a frequently miserable, turgid, over-long and frustrating shooter, but the gaming world has seen far worse, and its failures were often so surreal as to be brilliant."
Romero's most noteworthy legacy Doom, however, managed to withstand the test of time when our contributor Paul Dean revisited it in honour of its 20th anniversary last year. "Doom pushed gaming in a dozen different directions at once, some of which mattered to me then, some of which I only appreciate now," he stated in his Doom retrospective.
We've sent Romero a request for more info on this project - and what inspired him to get back into the genre after all this time - and are awaiting reply. We'll update should he give us more details.