[Gnome Eater]

Originally Posted by Venjenz

All this defending of Romero is killing me.

Go to Doomworld and look at who designed the levels for Doom, Ultimate Doom, and Doom II. You'll see that Sandy Petersen and American McGhee designed most of those levels. Of the 68 levels that span those three games, Romero designed 15 of them. He did 9 of the 36 full levels of Quake, and 2 of the smaller hub/boss levels.

-John Carmack writes the engine.
-Mike Abrash and John Carmack optimize the much vaunted Quake engine.
-Adrian Carmack does most of the artwork.
-American McGhee and Sandy Peterson design 75% of the levels for the first three Doom releases.
-American McGhee, Sandy Petersen and Tom Willits design most of Quake's levels.

And Romero gets all the press because he plays the games the most on the Internet, most famously getting beat by Stevie Case, who was the first famous Quake-whore.

Sorry, but long hair, dating the chick with the bit titties, and playing the game a lot in the clans doesn't make him the "reason behind id's success." To whit, Carmack and crew have sold tons of games post-Romero. American McGhee using a licensed Quake III engine made a great game with "Alice." And then count the games that have been built on id engine technology.

Carmack drives a Ferrari because he is brilliant. Romero drives a Ferrari because Eidos Interactive gave him $millions in advance for Dai Katana, which he wasted in no small fashion. I played Dai Katana, and even if you take out the engine, which sucked ass compared to anything id, Valve or the Unreal folks had out, the artwork was lame, the story was lame, and the gameplay sucked. He's a hack who just happened to work at one time with a bunch of wunderkinds, and he got married to a big tittie chick Quake player.

Like Koster, he has all sorts of great theories, but has yet to implement them into anything that resembles a great game.

This says it all really. The proof is in the pudding, ID has continued to do amazingly well without Romero, Romero has done fuck all without ID, and the only decent games that Ion Storm has released were those where he was not involved at all.