Romero Games is sort of going back to its founder's roots and is working on a new first-person shooter. The work is not very advanced, at the moment there are mainly vacancies. A “big publisher” should be on board.
Currently, studio co-founder John Romero has only published job advertisements for the new project on Twitter and other social networks. This is also tantamount to an announcement, albeit an announcement that is still poor in information. The basis for the game is the Unreal Engine 5, a completely new title is being developed based on a new brand. The project is being hailed as the “beginning of a new era” for the studio: the company is “100 percent focused on first-person shooters”, they are “the foundation that forms the basis of our studio and a genre”.
Exciting news! We're hiring for new FPS! https://t.co/3t6n6Oe2yP pic.twitter.com/bJ8Jd8lxWM
— Romero Games Ltd. (@romerogamesltd) July 19, 2022
Interesting, maybe promising
What makes the project at least interesting is the personnel. John Romero has a long history with first-person shooters, being one of the people who started the genre with Doom 1 in 1993. Romero Games itself has had nothing to do with the genre so far. The studio's last and most visible game to date was the gangster business sim Empire of Sin, which Metacritic says has garnered moderate enthusiasm. Unsurprisingly, Romero Games refers to the “decades of experience” of its employees and the involvement of employees in numerous shooter titles such as Quake, Far Cry and Crysis.
John Romero's balance sheet too is mixed. On the one hand, he won laurels with the first Doom, a shooter that is still actively played today, and on the other hand, with Daikatana, he released a mediocre shooter with an embarrassing marketing campaign – “John Romero is about to make you his bitch,” it rang out from the advertisements of all major gaming magazines with the addition “suck it down”, which then took on a completely different meaning in view of the quality delivered and the expectations raised. A Kickstarter campaign to develop an only vaguely described shooter failed as expected in 2016, the Doom Mod Sigil, which was released free of charge and released by Romero single-handedly, met with a generally positive response. Therefore, the new shooter project cannot be expected to be a sure-fire success.