The Romeros: Developing digital games

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I've spent more hours than I should probably admit,

running through the demon-filled corridors of doom. It was the game that rewired my imagination

as a teenager, the one that made me wonder who on earth dreamt all this up. So when I got the

chance to meet John Romero and his wife and creative partner Brenda, it felt like stepping through

a portal into my own past. So he given the chance to follow them as they created their latest game

would be a front row seat to a new megawatt. Okay, okay, I know there's only going to be gamers

that get up. When you make a game on a computer, it's one of the most complex

things a PC can do is run a game. In the service of making an experience that is better than

anything that exists right now, movies, books, everything, it is like this experience that is the

next-gen thing. To me, to be like the film director of that kind of an experience is really fun,

and it's on the edge. It's like we're on the edge of the latest technology that is available.

We are at the edge of design, and being at the edge like that is really, really fun. Like, coming

up with what's going to happen in three years for gamers, because when you're making a game,

you have to see into the future. You have to know in three years that this idea is good,

and that people will be interested in it. I mean, that's, I think that's it, it's core.

I'm Kurt Brooks, and this is the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service,

with game-making supremos John and Brenda Romero as they embark on their latest creation.

You might think a story about one of the most influential families in modern gaming would be

centered somewhere else, somewhere with glass offices and venture capital, somewhere that calls

itself the centre of the digital universe, Silicon Valley, Seattle, maybe Tokyo, but we're not in

any of those places. Instead, I'm on the edge of the Atlantic, on Ireland's west coast, in Galway.

A city known for traditional music, fishing boats, and weather that arrives without warning,

not the obvious home for a global game studio, and yet behind these medieval streets and

sea front cafes, you'll find a surprising creative community, artists, coders, designers,

storytellers, and it was enough to attract one of the most successful partnerships in gaming,

John and Brenda Romero. We were at the time in Silicon Valley where it's a very doggy dog culture,

in the notion of wanting to make enough from one game to be able to make the next game,

that's almost not enough. Why do you just want to be able to keep doing your thing? It's always

what is your exit? Neither of us wanted to exit, we just wanted to make enough to make the next game.

We could live anywhere in the world we want to live, so we made the decision to move to Ireland,

and move to Galway specifically, because it was weird. It was weird in

already, and like you say, people might not think of it as a tech centre, but Galway itself is

home to 65 tech companies, and there are tons of programmers in Ireland, so it seemed like a really

good decision. Hello. Hi, Joe. How are you? How are you doing? Come on in. Thank you very much.

So yeah, what's this, John? Well, let's see on my shelves, I have a ton of stuff. I got a

British version of the Ultimate Doom box, because that was like the biggest marketing thing that

happened back then. Actually, Doom 2, when Doom 2 came out in England, the company that was

marketing it sent guts to all the journalists, and when they opened up the bags, it was horrible.

It was the biggest, netiest marketing thing ever. Quake is up here. It was the game that was made

after Doom, Danger Stave, which was the first thing that we did, so the Danger Stave game is

actually bigger than Doom in India and Pakistan, because it was installed on every computer in those

countries. And I got a lot of characters, a lot of Doom characters all over the place,

you know, Archfiles and Pinkies and Soldiers and all that stuff. Pac-Man, the huge inspiration for

me, got a bunch of all the Pac-Man characters up there, but yeah, I got lots of Doom stuff.

Here's the painting, that Ejun Carmack painted of a demon with a bunch of rabbits in this

thing. It's basically a game as dream in this room. Polybius was a game that has never released

new arcades, but was made, and so it's like an urban legend kind of game, so that's an actual

working version of it on this mini arcade, just like I did over here. I'm Empire of Sin. That was

our last game that we launched in 2020, it was a grand strategy game. So it was like a 1920s mob game,

and you're basically taking control of a mobster and trying to take over the whole city

in Chicago in the 20s. It really is amazing what John and Brenda Romero have achieved over the years,

and after a lifetime of shaping everything from early shooters to modern roleplaying games,

the Romero's are now deep in another project. It's early 2025, and I'm excited to see

where they're taking things now.

But game development lives and dies on time and in perception, and I soon learn that there are

limits to what can be shared. Actually, John, yeah, I would like you to rephrase that every

single thing that you're listing right now, I already see the article, so I would like you not

to talk about specific features. Do you understand why? Yeah, yeah. I know it's not ideal, but you can

say it had lots of different modes, but please stay away from the specific features.

As Brenda explains to me, one stray detail in the wild can jeopardize months of work.

Games are ferociously competitive, and no games are more competitive than first-person shooters.

So people hold their secrets very close to the vest until you're too far ahead to catch.

I guess, you know, that's just the way the industry works, but also John and I have had two

games that were the ideas for those games were taken. One of them was actually released,

and another one was developed and got cancelled, and you know, we're positive. Those were

with the gun shooting in the background. We're positive that those were our games.

But the other thing is especially when you're early in development, you might decide to cut

something, right? And, you know, I would say there are a few people in this industry who know the

danger of a hype train as well as John. People talked about Dicotana when it was in molecular form,

and it went through a lot of different challenges during its development, and what came out was not

the hype that people wanted. So, you know, it's just best to say nothing until you've got something

to show and something to say. So, in the interest of not giving anything away, we have to agree

on a code name. Think of a name. Come on, you're good at that.

That's heavy trigger, okay? You're okay with that?

Heavy trigger. Let's call it heavy trigger. Go ahead.

So, heavy trigger it is. And with that code name confirmed, I'm keen to glimpse what Romero

Studios are building. It's a vast undertaking, more than 100 developers across writing, design,

animation, but what is the new game? Well, at this stage, John can only really tell us so much.

It's a shooter. Yeah, I mean, it's still, it's a shooter. We're using all of our weapons,

all of our enemies. Here a character with the gun. But he does hint it will take things in a new

and exciting direction. I want to make a really good game. I don't want to be like, well,

I figured he'd do that. You know, he's just writing his doom laurels, whatever, because I know

how important it is that when you're going to put a game into the world, there has to be a reason

for doing it. You don't just do it because you feel like it. It needs to belong and be new.

It needs to be something that when people see it, they learn something new, or they're intrigued by

some of the things it does. So, you know, I want people to not like, what has he done since Quake?

Because I've made a lot of games in games that people have never even heard of

that went on to do better than Quake. And I just want to make sure that the thing people

hear about is cool in this positive and people like it.

It's the summer of 2025 in Ireland and things have gone very quiet.

I haven't been able to reach Jon O'Brender for weeks, and I'm getting concerned.

I'm under pressure to tell the BBC when we can deliver a finished edition of In The Studio,

and we still need a lot more recording before that can happen.

It's the 3rd of July and I send Brenda a text asking for an update.

Hi, Brenda. Any word from the publishers?

Moments later, I'm scrolling through the trade press and see a story about funding being pulled

by different publishers from a number of major games projects across the industry.

And suddenly, I get that sinking feeling. Something might be wrong.

I text Brenda again.

Hi, Brenda. I've just seen the news. I'm so sorry. She confirms it's bad news.

So, what do you do when your funding is taken away, partway through a major development?

I'm trying to get my head around what Jon and Brenda are facing, and now I've learned something else.

Brenda is battling cancer. Suddenly, they're dealing with a professional and personal crisis

at the same time, all while carrying responsibility for a big team.

The next time I speak to Brenda, she tells me she'd sensed something was afoot in the industry.

There have been rumblings that our publisher was going to be doing big layoffs.

However, I didn't think something was going to happen, but I mean,

your job as a CEO is to be prepared in case it does, even if you think it's a lower percent chance.

There's a team you only hear from at the beginning or the ending of the game.

And that's the person who's getting all the contracts buttoned up.

And that's the person you're going to hear from if everything's going awry.

And so it was six o'clock, I think.

And I saw an email come through from that guy, and I knew before I even looked at it,

you know, I knew because he's not emailing me to say, hey, hope you're doing well.

And so I looked, you know, and there was a, could you join us in a phone call?

We went into the meeting and

Jon thanked them for all of their faith in the game, everything that they had done up to that

point in time to get the project from idea to where it currently was.

In fairness, we have all the rights to everything.

And they even provided us with a letter slash statement that said, like, this is a budget decision.

This is a good idea.

So the first task Jon and Brenda had was to tell their staff.

One of the senior team who survived the impending call was Keith O'Connor.

It was absolutely good.

And it really was.

It was such a horrible day.

It was really difficult.

I mean, there were tears.

We were fully expecting before this that there would be sadness to be.

There'd also be anger and there'd be blame.

And, you know, all of the normal things that people go through that didn't really come through.

It was just sort of universal love coming from the team.

Which made it actually harder.

And at that point, you were dealing with a lot of staff at Shakey Keith.

I think we were just about reaching our full team size.

I think we only had a handful of roles left to fill.

In fact, Romero Studios were employing 110 creators at the point their funding was pulled.

The top priority was to make sure the team's okay.

You know, trying to match up other companies that we're looking for people with our people.

And game development is such a collaborative effort

that when a leadership is forced to lay people off and people lose their jobs,

there's definitely a feeling of responsibility there.

And you've been day and day out, friends with these people.

And working with everybody and you want them to succeed.

I'm Kurt Brooks and you're listening to The Documentary

in the studio from the BBC World Service.

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So after finding many of their team work,

what next for the Romero's,

and the heavy trigger game they've spent so many years developing?

While they're in the middle of this hiatus in early autumn 2025,

I learned that Brenda is now undergoing intensive treatment to tackle her cancer,

but she's still working, and now traveling with John on a trip across Europe.

We're at St. Pancras Station in London,

and we are on our way to France, like Paris right now,

and then we're going to be going to Italy right after that.

So we're doing a lot of traveling, because just after our game lost funding,

we decided that we would just accept all the speaking advice that we've been getting.

And yeah, it's a break from what we were doing before.

But we're not dead yet.

The Romero's are moving from city to city,

speaking at conferences and festivals that celebrate their legacy and expertise.

One trip involves a visit to Italy to talk to fans about doom and their other landmark games.

And then in another country, John Delovis is a speech on the state of the industry.

Now we can start.

So today I'm going to talk about this inflection point, the rise of AI,

the return of micro teams, and what happens when platform owners become publishers

and creators become studios.

Brenda and John keep me up to date while they're away on their thinking about the future

of heavy trigger. And I received this voice note from Brenda.

We had a number of options after the game lost its funding.

Everything from just go forward and keep making it with a team of 110.

A lot of people reached out to us a lot of companies that wanted to talk to us.

About going forward that's a game, but the reality is it's a big game.

And it had certain features that required a lot of online servers.

And that's expensive and there are only so many companies who can really foot that bill.

Anyway, we decided, I don't know, we decided.

I think it was decided in part for us to go forward.

It was something smaller, kept the core of the team, and we're working on something now.

I wish I had been the one to say this, and I don't remember who said it,

but somebody other than me said, as long as there's a Romero, there will be Romero games.

And I got that message when it was sort of mid-collapse.

And man, that was exactly what I needed to hear.

So anyway, that's what we're out.

So we've got something in the works.

We've got a smaller team, but yeah, like John says, we're not dead yet.

So the Romero's are continuing with heavy trigger,

but now we're the team of just five instead of 110.

It raises real questions.

How do they keep funding this game?

There is some funding out there for what they call it, finish funding.

So basically, situations like this, where a project loses funding or whatever,

that another publisher can come in and step in.

Great, we'll have a half finish game for free, and then we'll fund it to completion.

But the reality was just in the state that the industry is in at the moments,

it's very much a reduced set of publishers that are even looking for new games,

and the ones that are the budgets that they would be looking for would be a lot smaller than

in previous years.

And so taking our game, I mean, I can't talk about numbers, but 110 people for another

year, year and a half, something like that is going to be a lot of money.

And so we got some interest, but most of the replies were, sorry, that's too much money.

Publishers are being very safe and pulling back.

As we're speaking, our funding is not coming from a publisher.

It's coming from us.

There's the possibility that that can change.

You know, we may work with a publisher to get the game out there.

They just, you know, we have development expertise in a publisher as publishing expertise.

But, you know, we're certainly, and we won't be in the position that we were in before.

So when you say that you are funding it, do you mean you and John, the

Romero's of Romero games?

Well, I mean, it's kind of one and the same, right?

Like the company, there are four owners of the company in John and I are the majority owners.

And the other two owners are also part of our micro team.

So it is Romero games funding it.

And with a smaller team, how do they achieve what they originally set out to do?

The time for micro teams is here.

I think, okay, let's pull everything back.

Let's take what resources we have and put that to us.

Something small and focused.

We feel we can get out the door and that will be the game that we want it to be without.

A massive like working with a large publisher.

What always happens is new stuff gets added.

Like, oh, you know, we need to add this new feature.

We need to serve this particular demographic.

We need to, you know, well, you can't release a game without this.

Things grew and grew and grew and we're like, okay, at the stage, we can't make that game anymore.

We do still have all the assets and we still have all the source code and everything.

So let's take the game, but redesign it for a really small team.

Once the team was up to such a large size, I was just in meetings all day.

There's only back to a very small number of us.

Everybody needs to be able to make the game.

And so I'm back programming, which I missed a lot, to be honest.

What are your roles as they are now?

I'm doing whatever needs to be done.

If it's a just putting a deck together to say this is what the game looks like now.

If there is a design sounding board that John needs, I can be that.

I focus mainly on the design, so the redesign of the game.

Basically, the stuff that a game director does plus other things because there were an indie team now.

It has been really interesting to see how you take a game that was this big, visualize my hands very

far apart. How do you take that game and games go through iteration all the time?

But what kind of iteration is required to make it a smaller scope but still keep the soul of that

game? So that from a game designer's perspective was super fascinating.

How is Heavy Trigger now evolving then? I'm excited to find out.

We've spent years making characters and creatures and weapons and all that.

We're using them. The design has changed, so a smaller team can make it.

But all the really cool stuff that we've made, we can't wait to show everybody.

This is it. I'm going to see Heavy Trigger as we've been calling it.

There we go. Oh wow! I can't be too descriptive, but I can just tell like the people that

would buy a game with your guys name on it would be expecting something like that.

Oh my word!

So what I do is go to the Alpha Challenge here. What's the Alpha Challenge?

This is a speedrun challenge and you can it's not started yet so I'm just looking around.

Yeah. And you can see that building over there at least mountains.

And then I can switch start positions. Here's another position.

So if I start down here. Yeah. All I have to do is just start moving.

Yeah, the speedrun here, if you look on the left hand side, it says what you're supposed to do.

Oh yeah, there we go. Yes, there's like heads up display along the bottom that's showing you

ammo and the weapon that you're using. Then I'm assuming that's your help.

It's so anyone who's played like first person shooters would recognize what's going on just

generally. Right, so I didn't even think that a pre-alpha build would look this good.

But to my eye, this looks like I would go out by this tomorrow.

Well, that would be pretty cool. Oh, that creature that he's fighting there, that is like one of

the more terrifying ones actually. Yeah, that was like a, it looked to me like a plane

rain. Oh, kind of. Yeah, I mean, he didn't get close enough up to it.

That's a very big gun, which, uh, Jon's known for having in these games just here there.

Yeah, sorry, I'm disrupted Jon Romero from playing. He's obviously quite enjoying that.

Just watch the master at work when it comes to first person shooters.

And what I'm basically seeing here is it's raining. There's a character that looks organic,

scary, but there's like a mechanical aspect to it as well and it's got wings, but there's

there's lightning in the background. You can see the color comes alive like as the lightning comes

through and you can see through what looks like it's feathers and it's wings. I suspect that people

listening to this would think, oh, robot, in man, you couldn't be further away. If you could just

imagine something terrifying that is organic, like you can see some kind of screwed up flesh

here, but that organicness is augmented by, um, I'll just say this beauty. So am I one of the

only people outside of Romero Studios who has seen that? I'm obviously

execs and yeah, that's about it. Yeah, not many people have seen it. You are the only press person.

Yeah, definitely. You wouldn't even have seen what you saw with a publisher. There would be so

many levels of, I mean, you even know you've been sending me emails for how long to talk about

this. And I'm like, yeah, I'd love to talk about it, but you know, I've got to get clearance to

publisher. Yeah, we can't do it. Yeah, publishers definitely wouldn't. No, it's not a chance. Wow.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people like, you know, I haven't seen a new Romero game and who knows how long

and there it is the first look. The Romero's have been on quite a roller coaster with heavy trigger.

And John says there are still more hurdles to overcome before eager fans can get their hands on

the game. I'm just hoping that enough people can hear about it. Discovery is really the number one

issue that any indie has. Yeah, that's the number one thing is just people being able to play it

because there's a sea of games. New ones coming out all the time. Big releases everybody's

looking forward to that no one wants to release near. It's like a crazy obstacle course. So,

2026 starts with the Romero's despite all the setbacks anticipating the launch of yet another

in their long line of legendary games. And it also begins with some personal good news too.

As Brenda was officially given the all clear following her cancer treatment. I wish I could be

that person who's just like, well, that's business. But it's more or more than that. It definitely

takes a toll. I mean, not just on us obviously, but on everyone and in some ways you feel responsible

for that, even if like, I mean, I didn't cancel the funding, but nonetheless, you know, it's heavy

on your soul. And I was thinking about what I had gone through in 2025, you know, from chemo to

radiation to all the other stuff that comes along with that. So, yeah, it wasn't ideal, but I

survived. And the company survived. It really does give you a perspective on what is important. And

how you want to spend your time and who you want to spend your time with.

You've been listening to The Documentary in the studio with Game Supremos John and Brenda Romero.

The program was presented by me Kurt Brooks and produced by Ashley Burn and Kurt Brooks.

It was a made in Manchester production for the BBC World Service.

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