Advertisement

The creators of 'Doom' and 'Quake' reveal a new sci-fi shooter

John Romero and Adrian Carmack helped define the FPS genre, and 25 years later, they're back with 'Blackroom.'

John Romero and Adrian Carmack helped found id Software in 1991, and by 1993 the studio had changed the video game world forever. That's when id released Doom, a genre-defining first-person shooter, and it was followed by Quake, another classic FPS, in 1996. Today, Romero and Carmack are back with Blackroom, a new FPS set in a future where lifelike holographic reality is the norm, but it's being overrun with sinister visions. The game stars Dr. Santiago Sonora, an engineer at the massive holographic company, Hoxar, as he investigates irregularities in the Blackroom military training system.

Blackroom is an action-heavy game, with rocket jumping and strafing, and there's no limit on how many weapons you can carry (you're in a holographic environment, after all). It features a single-player or co-op campaign, plus arena and one-on-one deathmatch modes. The game will be fully moddable and players will be able to run their own dedicated servers.

Blackroom is slated for PC and Mac only, and it's scheduled to release in winter 2018. Romero and Carmack launched a $700,000 Kickstarter campaign today, and if they hit that goal, they'll start development immediately and work with investors to secure the rest of the funding.

Just because Blackroom is set in a world of touchable, lifelike virtual realities, that doesn't mean it's going to be a VR game.

"I don't know if this game would work really well in VR," Romero said during a livestream today. He worries that VR makes people sick and that the tech isn't quite ready for prime time yet. "If there is any VR, it'll have to be later," he said. The same goes for potential console versions of Blackroom -- for now, the focus is PC and Mac only.

Romero teased us about his new shooter back in 2014 during the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany.

"I haven't made a shooter since 2000," he said. "So I'm basically starting to work on another one."

Coming from the man who helped make Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, the news was infinitely intriguing -- and two years later, it's wonderful to see Romero's promise come to fruition as a futuristic, sci-fi shooter with a classic edge.