John Romero

John Romero (born 1967) co-founded id Software and co-created the games that defined the first-person shooter: Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993), and Quake (1996). After the famous flameout of Daikatana, he re-established himself as an elder statesman of game design, co-founding Romero Games in Galway, Ireland with his wife Brenda Romero and publishing the acclaimed 2023 memoir Doom Guy: Life in First Person.

A super-Google — but not a designer

Romero is bullish on AI as a technology while drawing a sharp line around creative work. Speaking at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in 2024, he called AI the greatest technological leap since the internet and described using it as “a super Google for research” — while cautioning that “it still has its pitfalls.” In an Ars Technica interview the same year, he was skeptical that generative AI could produce genuine originality: “Making brand new things is not what generative AI does yet… it’s important that when you’re making an original game, you’re using your design sense and working with people and coming up with things that you have not seen before.”

His caveats are concrete: using AI “to come up with images or creative concepts” is “problematic because that’s not coming from your own data,” and he has repeatedly argued that the sources used to train AI models should be compensated. Romero also flags that AI-generated art currently lacks U.S. copyright protection — a practical reason, beyond the ethical one, for studios to keep it out of shipped games.