Alfonso John Romero

Alfonso John Romero

Alfonso John Romero is an American director, designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. He is best known as a co-founder of id Software and designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, Hexen, Doom, Doom II, and Quake. His game designs and development tools, along with new programming techniques created and implemented by id Software's lead programmer John D. Carmack, led to a mass popularization of the first-person shooter, or FPS, in the 1990s. He is credited with coining the FPS multiplayer term "deathmatch".

Romero worked at id Software from its incorporation in 1991 until 1996. He was involved in the creation of several milestone games, including Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, and Quake. He served as executive producer and game designer on Heretic and Hexen. He designed most of the first episode of Doom, most of the levels in Quake, half the levels in Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny. He wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd level editor, QuakeEd level editor, DM for deathmatch launching, DWANGO client to connect the game to DWANGO's servers, TED5 level editor for the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny, IGRAB for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files, the installers for all the games up to and including Quake, the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others.