Doom Legend John Romero Is Bringing Zelda Magic To His Next Shooter

Legendary game developer John Romero was working on a secretive new project beginning in 2022 which was feared canceled after Microsoft pulled funding last year. It turns out that while that game isn't happening as originally envisioned, he's found a new publishing partner and is back to work with a smaller team on the title, which he says is both a first-person shooter and also "like nothing [he's] ever played."

Our HotHardware audience is assuredly familiar with the work of Romero, the father of deathmatch, but just in case, this man was a founder of Id Software and also of Ion Storm, which is already a hell of a resumé. But he's not just that guy, and it's not fair to characterize him that way; after all, those games were released a long time ago. Since then he's done lots of stuff, including Ravenwood Fair, Gunman Taco Truck, Empire of Sin, the SIGIL expansion episodes for DOOM and DOOM II, as well as a little gem from 2001 called Hyperspace Delivery Boy.


That last one is particularly important today because Romero also compared his vision for the new game to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; The Legend of Zelda was clearly a key inspiration for his 2001 puzzle-action title. While he apparently declined to refer to the forthcoming title as 'open-world', Romero says that he loves exploration in games, and that the games he likes the most are "the ones that just let me go, 'Okay, what is this?' This place is crazy or this place looks really interesting, and just like, turn around and go that way, you know? Like, do whatever you want."

According to IGN, he continued from there, talking about how he enjoys getting distracted in games on the way to a larger goal. There's plenty of opportunity for that in all kinds of games that aren't open-world, but Romero specifically notes that the upcoming game is a shooter project played from the first-person perspective, made in Unreal Engine 5.8. Despite those seemingly pedestrian specifications, Romero told Salón del Videojuego de Madrid "the things that you do in it will be new to people [in the same] way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience."


That rather seeds the idea that it would be a fantasy game, although he didn't say that. It would be fascinating to see Romero potentially returning to his fantasy roots; the Id Software guys played D&D together, and the game Quake was apparently named after a D&D character who wielded a powerful hammer, a concept that was realized (after a fashion, anyway) in Quake's first mission pack, Scourge of Armagon. Quake obviously strayed quite far from its fantasy-game origins, but it's clear Romero hasn't lost his love for the genre as he namedrops Elden Ring, Zelda, and Blue Prince.

There really aren't many details available about Romero's new game yet, but he passed the buck on that to the new publisher, who apparently prefers to remain anonymous. He says progress is moving right along, though, and apparently the assets from his canceled game with Microsoft are giving the team a head start. Back in the late 90s, I was an early believer in Daikatana, and I still maintain that it was a pretty cool (if flawed) game. Twenty six years later, I'm once again making the questionable decision of getting hyped to see what Romero is cooking up.