Word: romero
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ability to work around the clock, along with his childhood obsession with games like Pac-Man and his Bill Gatesian decision to drop out of college to write software, are traits Romero shares with many top-notch programmers. He met Hall and the two Carmacks at a company called Soft Disk in Shreveport, La., in 1989, and within two years the four had launched id, settling by 1992 in a Dallas suburb called Mesquite...
...years later, id's 3-D bloodfests have spawned a worldwide gaming revolution and made its founders cult heroes and multimillionaires before age 30. Sports cars and magazine covers swiftly followed. Romero in particular wore the mantle of pop-culture godhood with aplomb. If the four founders were, as Wired magazine dubbed them last August, "The Egos at id," then Romero, with his lion's mane of black hair, his Tudor mansion, his Testarossa, BMW and Humvee, was the superego...
...hottest game-development team in PC history break up faster than the Beatles? According to Romero, it was because his vision of gaming perfection clashed with John Carmack's vision of coding perfection and lost. Carmack saw id as a boutique company, cranking out one title a year based on his latest it'll-be-ready-when-it's-ready game engine--which left lead designer Romero feeling like a second-class citizen. "We were spending all this time making data for this engine that wasn't even done yet," Romero says, frustration still edging his voice, "and then...
Carmack's perfectionism, Romero felt, was costly. Why were they waiting around month after month to make just one game using Carmack's Doom engine, when in the same time they could have released three variations on the Doom theme? "id was just too limiting," he says dismissively. "Too small. Small thinking...
John Carmack doesn't disagree with Romero's description of their clashing priorities. "I'm doing what I want to do now, and it happens to be making us millions of dollars," he told TIME last week, in one of his first public comments on the split with his former partner. Carmack doesn't want to grow id into a big company. "There's only so many Ferraris I want to own," he says. But he takes issue with Romero's version of their breakup. "John's a good designer, and he's got artistic talent. But the fact...