GP: In going back to Doom, has there been a "ghost of Romero"? Has the removal of Romero from a Doom development team had any impact at all?

Todd Hollenshead: I wasn't here when Romero was here. I did work with him a little bit when I was at Arthur Andersen, when he was still at id. But factually, there has been a separation from lore and truth, and I think Kushner fell into that with the book a little bit. I think part of that is probably publisher demands about for a book to sell, it's more important to be interesting than it is to get all the nuances of the facts correct. While I guess at least arguably that that interpretation is the correct one -- I think that's probably what John Romero would say -- at least based on what I understand from being here for seven years and knowing the guys before and afterwards is that's more of a romantic notion: Oh, we have one guy technology and one guy design, and they're sort of these polar opposites -- oil and water but they don't mix, and there was magic, and magic dust was sprinkled over the project, and boom, this seminal game came out of the conflict of these two personalities. It's almost Shakespearean in its approach to storytelling, and it does make for a good story, but I think that the reality was more mundane. There was magic because of a lot of things, but it didn't have to do with the guy who was Personality A and Personality B, and they're being roped together because of this one project.

John Carmack was the guy who came up with the game design idea. Every single monster in Doom, to my knowledge, is the product of Adrian Carmack's imagination. To the extent that any game design, fundamentally, is about what the idea for the game is and what creatures and characters you put in it, to say that Romero was the designer of the game when he was never credited as such, anywhere on the packaging, I think is giving him more credit than he even accepted at the time, and it's a bit of revisionist history.

I like John, and before he went out to work with Midway, he stopped by the office and said goodbye to everybody, but I do think there's John's version of reality and then, at least the version that I understand and based on everything I can see, is the real story. Not that John is not a talented designer -- not that he didn't do great work on Doom, Doom II, Wolf 3D, and Quake as well, I wouldn't at all want to take away from anybody what they contributed. But in that same mindset, there were a lot of other people who contributed to the process as well. To sort of lay the laurels at Romero's feet for all for the game design and all the laurels at John Carmack's feet for the programming and saying it was a product of those two guys, I think it really shortchanges the rest of the team.