Disk Cleanup
Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend column delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every Saturday to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “how tidy is your desktop?” and “what game will you never uninstall?”
John Romero is the co-creator of legendary first-person shooters Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, but both his gaming tastes and development history stretch much more broadly than the genre he helped create. Over his career, Romero has worked on platformers, mobile games, MMOs, even strategy games, and he’s always on the lookout for something new to try: “I keep my eye on the indie scene a lot,” he says as we chat over a video call. “That’s where a lot of really great ideas come from.”
Romero is also currently working on Hellion, a new Doom 2 WAD that will follow on from Sigil and Sigil 2. Then there’s his unrevealed FPS project with Romero Games, which was salvaged from the spectre of cancellation after the studio lost its funding last year. “That was a time,” he says, though he doesn’t go into detail. “We’re still alive. We’re still working.”
Romero took a beat from his various projects to guide me through the monster-strewn labyrinth of his gaming library, which took us from Romero’s earliest development days to the bleeding edge of extraction shooters.
What game are you currently playing?
John Romero
Co-founder of id, co-creator of Doom, co-founder of Ion Storm—John Romero is a PC gaming icon who’s been designing games since the ’80s and shows no signs of stopping. He’s currently working on Doom 2 WADs and his latest studio, Romero Games, is busy putting together a new FPS.
My game, when I say I’m gonna play something right now, is Arc Raiders, because I have a friend who likes playing as well. We’re both very much into it, but if he doesn’t have time to play, then I’m just gonna jump in and play personal progression. So that game is the number one for me right now.
It’s funny, because when you think about it, we could have done battle royale in Doom. I mean, we didn’t have the technology at the time of the internet to have 100 people in a game at the same time. Even with Quake, there’s all these limitations with client-server architecture. But Doom as a game could handle that many people, just not the communications part.
The cool thing about Arc Raiders is that, to me, it’s a different form of battle royale. It’s not a PvP focus, it’s a PvE focus, right? There’s PvP in it, but it’s really PvE against the Arc bots. And it still has that battle royale time, you can’t stay in the level forever because the exits are all closing.
It’s still very much like that time pressure is there, but it’s great not having player pressure. And that, the player part of it—are they good or bad? If you know how things work under the hood, you’ll know that mostly, if you haven’t been shooting people, you’re on servers where people don’t kill each other. If you’re in teams with other people that are in teams…and if you’re head-shotting everybody, then you’re on the server where people just murder each other. It’s great.
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
I am, like many people, addicted to Balatro. Been playing it since it came out, both on PC and the second it was on mobile. That game is just always played, you know, I haven’t done a C+ on it yet, C+ or C++. I haven’t completed everything. But I love that game so much.
To me, it’s almost a Minecraft story. Lone developer makes something amazing, and it’s so well designed. It’s such a good idea. It’s a meta-idea. Take a game everybody knows, and game design the shit out of it. Well, let’s Balatro Chess! Let’s Balatro Chequers! So, it’s really great. It’s such a good game.
What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?
On my computer, I have everything I’ve made since 1982. [There’s] a game called Dodge ‘Em from 1982, and it’s not a good game. It was one of my first games, and I was just learning how to do sound effects and how to use a joystick, read the joystick. And it had this radar-dish thing at the top of your screen that was trying to hit your ship, and then you try and shoot and hit the thing.
But it was such an early game that, when you shot, the whole game froze. Your gun [would be] going up like this, and the enemy is just doing a line going BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP on the screen. If you happen to be there, you’re dead. It was very primitive. But it’s the first game that you can find on my Mobygames listing.
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
It’s World of Warcraft. I have probably 3,000-plus hours in WoW.
God, I lived in that game every day for five years. Six hours usually, every day. And then weekends were as long as I could stay awake. I was making an MMO at the time, and studying that game was really important to me as far as “Why do I want to do this? Why am I putting up with this? What are you thinking about second to second while you’re doing this?”
I was in a raiding guild. You name it, I did so much stuff. I have five main characters with all the gear of different classes. And I had 10 characters total. When you start a new character, you’re starting the game from the beginning, but I knew how to optimise burning through. I could get to level six in half-an-hour.
It’s always important to look at those successful games and the systems that are in them as a battle-tested system. The way that they implemented this has been played by millions of people, and they have kept it for years. It works. That’s really important for design to just look at those examples. Not that you would directly copy anything, but that you understand why it was done that way and how it works.
What game will you never, ever uninstall?
There is a game I don’t think I’ll ever uninstall, and it’s called Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. And I love that game so much. I just love Ghost Recon so much. When the first one came out in 2000—I think it was 2001 or 2000—it was so good. It’s such a hard game, you know? You could get shot once or twice and you’re dead.
I played Rainbow Six before it and to me, [Ghost Recon] was such a big step up, because I’m like ‘I want to start playing the game’. I don’t care about planning. It’s boring to me. And the cool thing is, they let you plan, if you want to plan. [You can] bring up the map and tell each of your units which way to go and what to do. You can do that.
I installed the Desert Siege and Island Thunder [expansions] and I’ve beaten those so many times. If I get a new computer, I reinstall them and I replay them and I just, I soloed them so much in all of the castle levels, nighttime, daytime, you name it, going through and trying to speed run them.
The game did such a great job with randomisation. That was the reason why that game stayed with me. I played that game for 20 years and I played it because of the randomness, because I didn’t know going in where people would be and what they would be doing when it started.
I played it for 20 years, until Ghost Recon: Breakpoint came out. Then it was like “This is the new Ghost Recon game”. [It’s] open world, number one, hundreds of levels…in Breakpoint, [you can] get in a helicopter at night and fly up and just see all the different lights of every single installation in the place. It’s insane the amount of content that’s in that game, even though really they had to rush that thing out in a year and a half.
There’s even a stat for exploration. How much exploration of the world have you done? I’m at 100.7%. I’m at over 100, that’s how extreme I am with this game.
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
In this world of ultrawide screens—I have a 49′ screen—the notifications are over in the corner. They’re way over here. They just pop up in the corner and they go away, right? And our world is full of notifications for every walled garden that we scroll through, Tiktok and Instagram and all those…there’s a million notifications, right?
So the thing I have installed on my phone and on my Mac, PC—it’s on every platform—it’s called In Your Face. And what it does is it will, on every screen connected to your computer, pop [up], take over the whole screen and go “Boom, this is the thing that’s happening.”
And whatever amount of time you decide that you want to know ahead of time, you’ll get an alert four minutes beforehand, or whatever: “THIS IS HAPPENING”. It’s like “Oh, you will not miss anything.” Your phone goes off. You have to pay attention to your phone and turn off—it’s like an alarm going off— you have to turn off that event. If it’s in your calendar, you will get a notification on your phone, on your computer, everything.
How tidy is your desktop screen?
I have nothing on my desktop but some icons on the right-hand side for various folders. My right-hand screen has nothing on the desktop, and my main screen just has some icons.
I have various folders for different things. I have documents, PDF documents, music, movies, developer screenshots, whatever. If I click those things, they blow up into that type of file. Very tidy. Under the hood, if you saw the whole desktop, it’s like 1000 files. If that’s what I was looking at on the screen, I would organise the hell out of it.
I’m personally always organised and really clean. The kitchen has to be clean. Before we go to sleep, the kitchen has to be spotless. I like the house clean. I don’t like anything messy. My desk has to be nice. Can’t have stuff on my desk that’s messy. Like, why is that there? Anytime I see something, I’m like “Why is that there?”