Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) 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". Among Romero's early influences, the arcade game Space Invaders (1978), with its "shoot the alien" gameplay, introduced him to video games. Namco's maze chase arcade game Pac-Man (1980) had the biggest influence on his career, as it was the first game that got him "thinking about game design."[5] Nasir Gebelli (Sirius Software, Squaresoft) was his favorite programmer and a major inspiration, with his fast 3D programming work for Apple II games, such as the shooters Horizon V (1981) and Zenith (1982), influencing his later work at id Software. Other influences include programmer Bill Budge, Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario games, and the fighting games Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting and Virtua Fighter.
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programming
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id-software
gaming
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pc-gaming
doom
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video-gaming
Work/ed For: id Software, Romero Games Ltd., Romero Events Ltd., Gazillion Entertainment, Loot Drop, UC Santa Cruz, Brainquake, Inc.
Shareholder at: id Software, Capitol Ideas Software, Inside-Out Software, Ion Storm, Romero Games Ltd., Romero Events Ltd., Gazillion Entertainment, Loot Drop