Lunch with Co-founder of id Software

Lunch with Co-founder of id Software

corona labs team photo with john romero, co-founder of id software

Today, we had some very special guests visit the Corona office: game legends John Romero and Brenda Romero.

It was really inspiring to meet them. Together, they’ve had a profound influence on the industry that still reverberates today.

John designed such seminal games as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He co-founded id Software which holds a near mythical place in the pantheon of game development, and there helped ignite the whole first-person shooter genre. Brenda is most well-known for her work on the Wizardry series from the 1980s that served as a template for role-playing games that followed.

Here’s the awesome thing: they’re fans of Corona SDK!

It was surreal to hear John talk about the first time he discovered the auto-refresh feature of the Corona Simulator at 3 a.m., or what a “no-brainer” it is to use Corona instead of coding in Objective-C or even in Unity.

Of course, everyone has their wish list. 🙂

When he mentioned how Corona’s accessibility and immediacy brought him back to his early days of programming, I couldn’t help reminisce about my own experiences with turtle graphics on the Apple ][.

John and Brenda shared many gems about the current industry. One that stood out for me was how today’s students no longer want to work at large studios; they want to create their own games. More and more, there seems to be a decreasing desire to build 3D games. It just takes too long, and so much of what makes a game successful depends on the design and mechanics itself, not eye candy. So as an indie, you really do benefit from building ten games quickly instead of spending months (or years) on a single game.

Well, that explains why they like Corona so much!

walter
8 Comments
  • Chris Leyton
    Posted at 01:43h, 11 June

    Great news – please listen to these guys; be interested to hear how they would like to see Corona continue to evolve.

  • Dave Baxter
    Posted at 05:24h, 11 June

    I don’t blame students not wanting to work at big studios these days, there isn’t that many left! Think the bigger boys are realising they can’t keep spending a couple of years developing a single game and then it flopping.

    Doom was my first PC game on my Tandon 386/16n.

    Dave

  • OPus
    Posted at 06:34h, 11 June

    Wizadry was my favorite game! Although Return of Werdna was ridiculous hard. Never beat the minefeiled stage!

    Good to see 3D people hyping 2D!

    • Andreas
      Posted at 07:49h, 11 June

      Hi,

      I’m feeling with you, the game was incredibly hard. And I just have to share this story:

      We ( some game developers from Germany ) were in loose contact with Sir-tech in the 80s. They liked us, so they integrated us as NPCs in “Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna”, I was cast as a priest.

      And now the funny thing: To show Sir-tech how happy we were about this we made a session and shot lots of pictures of ourselves with different kinds of medieval weapons we bought and borrowed. And a few days later we were all picked up by the police because the photo service we used to have the photos developed told the police about us, they thought we were terrorists…

      Okay, we were able to clear this up, but the police kept some of the weapons. And Sir-tech was really amused when we told them about it. 🙂

      And now? Now I’m still developing games, and I’m using Corona, and it’s much easier than in the 80s.

      Best,
      Andreas

  • Dave Yang
    Posted at 13:08h, 11 June

    Great to see industry legends using Corona! Anyone has the potential to make it big in this Internet age, not just large studios. Using Corona makes perfect sense for this market that requires rapid development cycles with the balance of power.

    Dave

  • Philipp Lenssen
    Posted at 09:13h, 13 June

    > Of course, everyone has their wish list.

    Details please 🙂

  • Kenneth Ibrahim
    Posted at 09:18h, 13 June

    I’ve met John and his wife a couple of times through a mutual friend and it’s great to hear that he’s using and liking Corona!!

    I was hoping to come down to visit your booth at E3 but not sure if I can make it but I’ll likely be up in the Bay Area next Monday and hope you don’t mind if I pop in for in impromptu visit. It’d be great to meet some of the team creating the SDK I use 🙂

    Ken

    • Walter
      Posted at 10:59h, 13 June

      Of course! Send me an e-mail: walter at coronalabs and we can coordinate on time.