THE CRUNCH
Doom and Quake co-creator John Romero says Romero Games has secured a new publisher for the unannounced shooter that Microsoft dropped as part of a wave of layoffs. Speaking to VGC at Gamescom Asia, Romero confirmed some staff have been rehired, though he would not name the publisher or say when it will be announced.
This is not the original game resuming. Romero said the 110-person version could never be finished by a small team, so it has been completely redesigned as a different game that reuses as much existing work as possible, including art, characters, weapons and common shooter code. Romero Games owns all of that material outright, which gave the new project a head start.
The studio shrank from around 110 people to five after the funding was pulled, which Romero says happened last year, then brought back ten leads from the previous sub-teams, taking it to roughly 15 or 16 staff. Romero said that size is deliberate: the game is scoped for it, he prefers making design decisions hands-on rather than sitting in meetings, and he has no plans to add a producer. "We're just super happy," he said, adding that it remains a shooter but "everything else around it is really new."