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Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

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Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#14
post #9

Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop, more or less. Who is John Romero?

Romero seems like a guy who has a ton of fantastical designs that needs a more conservative designer to help trim them down and bring them into reality. For id Software, that was Tom Hall.

Have you seen Rise of the triad? Tom Hall also needs someone to trim him down.

One thing that kept both grounded was the brutal timing of their releases. Doom had 6 months or so, and if it failed they knew they had to go back to boring jobs.

Apart from that, Masters of doom paints doom-id culture like the 1970's rock n roll band stories. A group comes together, works as well oiled team for a while and produces genius results. But the success and differences in personal growth trajectories inevitably pull the group apart. There is typically a painfull divorse phase between the main egos. The reality was that this kind of synergy never lasts more than a few years in any case.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#15

Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop, more or less. Who is John Romero?

The impression I got just watching as a casual player throughout the duke nukem/keen->wolf3d->doom->quake days and the subsequent breakup of id and interviews Carmack has given, is that Romero let the early fame and success get to him and lacked the self discipline to keep pulling his weight while Carmack was substantially carrying the company along from his perspective.

They had equal shares and were all very young, the only option for them at the time appeared to be parting ways. Carmack has voiced in multiple more recent interviews that in hindsight there were probably better options to make things work out, but they didn't have the maturity and experience at the time to pursue them.

Given this context I don't think it's surprising that Romero would crash and burn on his own after being pushed out of id. The self-discipline and maturity side was only more critical to success without the id team's support, not less.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#16

Romero is a strange figure. Why wasn't he able to really make it after id? From Daikatana to Empire of Sin, everything was a flop, more or less. Who is John Romero?

This is a common pattern in a lot of creative industries; some people have early, groundbreaking success, but once they're successful have a tough time replicating that. Some combination of now that they're rich, no longer really the pressure to succeed as they already have, they were in the right place at the right time and no longer are, they have less pressure from other people telling them "no", they no longer have the passion of youth in their favor, they were better at the "inventing a new genre" than competing in a more mature marketplace with everyone else who has already learned from their previous success, etc.

I don't know enough about the specifics of Romero to say which it is, possibly more than one, but it doesn't seem to be unique to him, I see this kind of pattern in pop culture all the time.

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#18

$75 for just levels. The game doesn't come with it. That's asking more than a AAA game.

It's free and only 2MB. You're looking at the fan merchandise. https://romero.com/sigil

Direct download link: https://romero.com/s/SIGIL_II_V1_0.zip

Re: Sigil II, a Doom WAD from J.Romero, has been released

#19
post #10
post #3

Also, today is the 30-year anniversary of DOOM's release.

What a time to be a kid. Computers and games were absolute magic . Some of us were lucky enough to have a 386 and if we squished the screen down far enough we could get a reasonable framerate. Some of us were lucky enough to have mates with a 386. I was particularly lucky in that my mates dad had a small pc store in his shed. So we also had a laplink cable for transferring software and a serial cable for multiplayer…

I fondly remember playing Doom with my brother. Our dad had made a serial cable for us. One of us was playing on the PC and the other one on a laptop with a grey scale display and terrible ghosting. We had so much fun and it felt like magic indeed :)
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