Fabien Sanglard
rome.ro · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
John Romero's site (rome.ro), with posts on id Software, Doom and Quake development, and game history, plus entries about Apple and NeXT.
What HN saysHN links it for Doom and Quake history, including early screenshots and anecdotes; commenters also admire the short domain name.
28HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
18stories submitted
725story points
3 months agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Planet rome.ro: Apple-NeXT Merger Birthday [2006]4 people · 6 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 2Game Tales: Cray YMP (2010)3 people · 59 points · first shared 2017 · 18 comments on HN
- 3Quake's Player Speed According to John Romero (2017)3 people · 26 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 4Happy 20th Birthday, Quake2 people · 213 points · first shared 2016 · 144 comments on HN
- 5Reflections on DOOM's Development2 people · 167 points · first shared 2018 · 91 comments on HN
- 6A visit to id software, 19932 people · 73 points · first shared 2009 · 16 comments on HN
- 7The Fall of the Big Box2 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 8Homepage2 people · first shared 2018
- 9Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM1 people · 170 points · first shared 2016 · 79 comments on HN
- 10The Saga of Dangerous Dave1 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 11John Romero on the Making of Doom1 people · 2 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 12IPhone app install issues1 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 13Doomguy's Identity1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 14Developing Doom and Quake on NeXTSTEP (Dec 2006)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 15Qe dev 726646.gif1 people · first shared 2011
What HN people wrote when they linked it
xabi · 2018-10-25
Love this kind of domains:
- http://abc.xyz (alphabet)
- https://rome.ro/ (John Romero)
- https://xa.bi (my own) :)
riverg · 2019-05-19
This exists because John Romero has a cool domain (https://rome.ro/) and I was j̶e̶a̶l̶o̶u̶s̶ intrigued.
sillywalk · 2024-02-05
ID was going to develop on a Cray 6400 series supercomputer, and they got cray to sell them one for $500k if they'd put cray computers into the game. SGI bought Cray, and the deal fell through.
https://rome.ro/news/2015/12/13/gametales-cray-ymp
joakleaf · 2020-11-27
This reminds me of Doom’s development, where they did the press release before writing the game:
https://rome.ro/news/2018/12/10/reflections-on-dooms-development
I always think of that anecdote before starting a new project.
speps · 2016-08-08
There's a lot of early and high-res (640x480) screenshots here when Romero did a blog post about the 20th anniversary of Quake about 2 months ago : http://rome.ro/news/2016/6/22/happy-20th-birthday-quake (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959765)
mambodog · 2011-09-21
Not sure about the machine but according to Romero[1] Quake (as with Doom) was developed on NeXTSTEP 3.3, which they continued to use, later running on Intel hardware, until 1996.
QuakeEd on NeXTSTEP: http://rome.ro/uploaded_images/qe_dev-726646.gif
[1] http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html
thought_alarm · 2011-04-23
John Romero wrote up a pretty cool post about the use of NeXTSTEP and Objective-C at id Software during the 90s.
http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html
PostOnce · 2018-12-11
This business model is cool, free game digitally, but boxed it costs money. (let's ignore the "you need the original doom" stuff for the purposes of considering this business model)
Also, the company providing the actual boxes, Limited Run Games, does cool stuff. I thought a game was going to be digital only, and then found them doing a version in a real box, DRM free, no steam activation required; I thought that was cool of everyone involved.
I miss big boxes. Apparently they disappeared because Walmart wanted to make room for DVDs by removing software SKUs, so the software publishers downsized the boxes so they wouldn't have to put fewer SKUs on the shelf at Walmart. https://rome.ro/news/2018/4/18/big-box-extinction (intro) and https://rome.ro/bigbox (actual blog post w/ story)
Lastly, John Romero, if you're reading: fix your blog ^ why is the intro not included on the blog post page?
terhechte · 2013-12-10
I just finished "Masters of Doom" a couple of days ago, and I've been on a sort of Doom/Quake/id/Carmack/Romero information frenzy ever since. It is beginning to consume almost too much of my time but very fulfilling since I was a huge Doom fan back when it came out (I created many levels and mods) and I also really liked the early Quake games.
So in the past weeks I read up on all the early id guys, and what became of them after they were fired or left, I did quite some (probably too much) reading on the mess that was Daikatana and how it came to be. I actually find this really interesting, to learn how a project backed with so many employees and so much money can fail so badly, there're probably lessons to learn here (I've even watched somebody play through Daikatana on Youtube).
While being on my search, I've found a lot of interesting or not so interesting things. So if you want to spend some time, here's an unordered list of trivia that I stumbled upon:
- Somebody playing through Daikatana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm3b0NJzhnQ
- Romero Himself on Daikatana, including a GB port of the game that actually got good reviews (never made it to the US though) http://rome.ro/games_daikatana.htm
- Awful public clash between John Romero and Mike Wilson (former Ion Storm Marketing guy): http://www.kotaku.com.au/2008/01/gamecock_head_tears_into_john_romero_…
- Ravenwood Fair is a Facebook game that Romero did a couple of years ago (so that's what he's…
agentultra · 2011-04-26
I'm not sure I know any genius people let alone programmers.
And I definitely do not know of anyone who programs in VB6.
However, I am some what familiar with John Carmack. I would consider him a genius programmer. Yet he uses C++ almost exclusively. You would have to ask him if he thinks it's the most powerful language available to him. However, I would hazard a guess that his choice of C++ was incidental (http://rome.ro/smf/index.php?topic=3086.0) -- it just happened to be the de facto lingua franca for developing graphics intensive video games.
By orhtogonality I mean to imply that attributes of one are not affected by the other. Lisp is and will continue to be a powerful language with or without genius programmers using it. In fact, if genius programmers are exceptional and rare as we say then I would imagine Lisp has developed over the last fifty years almost exclusively without the help of geniuses. Similarily, not all geniuses will think to use Lisp; yet they will still be exceptional programmers and produce exceptional software.
Update: Included link to thread about an alleged response from Carmack to an email asking about C++. Apparently he uses it and has used it since Doom3.