Never mind that John Romero designed DOOM and Quake, two of the most influential video games ever created, and ushered in the era of the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein 3D: "I was just trying to make stuff that I really liked to play," he says with a humble shrug.Romero recounts with a grin the day he was introduced to computer gaming, at the Sierra College computer labs. There he saw Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the earliest text adventure games, where there are no visuals and users merely respond to written instructions. "'Holy crap,'" Romero remembers thinking, "'that's the best game I've seen.'" It made creating games seem "attainable," Romero says.
Advertisement