The Doom and Quake co-creator says the shooter Microsoft stopped funding in 2025 is alive again with a new publisher he can't name yet. Romero Games went from 110 people to five, brought 10 leads back, and rebuilt the project as a brand new game using the old one's art, weapons and code. Here's everything he said, and what it means for Xbox and PC players.
The shooter Xbox walked away from isn’t dead. John Romero, co-founder of id Software and the designer behind Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, told VGC and IGN at Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show this week that his studio’s unannounced shooter has signed with a new publisher.
He won’t say who it is. “I just contacted somebody that I knew, and we basically did a deal, and so we have a new publisher,” Romero told VGC. “Can’t say anything about who it is, or when the announce is, or any of that stuff.”
What you need to know
- New publisher: confirmed by Romero, but unnamed. He told IGN the reveal is “up to them.”
- Team size: Romero Games went from 110 people down to five. It has now “brought 10 people back,” the leads of its old sub-teams, for a team of about 15 to 16. Romero says that’s where it will stay for now.
- It’s a new game: the original 110-person project can’t be finished. “This is a complete redesign of a totally different game,” Romero said, built to reuse as much of the old work as possible.
- What carried over: characters, art, weapons and code. “Shooters have a lot of common code,” he said, so the team got “a big head-start.”
- Who owns it: “We 100% own everything. We own the name, we own all the IP, all the art, all the graphics, the code and everything.”
- Engine: Unreal Engine 5.8, per IGN.
- Still unknown: title, platforms, publisher, release window and announcement date.
How we got here
Romero Games lost the funding for this shooter in 2025, when its publisher pulled the deal during the wave of layoffs and cuts across Microsoft. VGC says that publisher was later named as Microsoft. At the time, multiple employees said the “whole studio” had been let go, while Romero Games said it wasn’t closing and hoped another publisher would save the game.
Microsoft pulled the plug. Romero kept the IP and kept going.
Romero told VGC the studio kept people on as long as it could while hunting for money: “Eventually we decided that we can’t keep everybody on forever… We were 110 people, going down to five.” Speaking to IGN, he called the Microsoft hit something that “really sucked,” but added: “I don’t have bitterness because that’s not who I am, really. I always move forward.”
What kind of game is it?
Romero is keeping it vague, but he’s dropping hints:
- “It’s a shooter, that part totally makes sense, but everything else around it is really new,” he told VGC.
- He told IGN exploration is “a big deal” for him, and compared the feeling to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where you head for a tower and get sidetracked by everything in between. He also name-checked Blue Prince.
- IGN says he stopped short of calling it open world, but implied a lot more freedom than a typical objective-based shooter.
- Back in December at Salón del Videojuego de Madrid, he said he’d “never played a game like it” and said the things you do in it would feel as new as going through Elden Ring did.
No big publisher, no producers
Asked by VGC if he’d work with a large publisher again, Romero said: “No. Because I really like to be in the game.” He says the studio has no producer right now and is “pretty much flat,” with him designing hands-on in Unreal Editor. And on the new deal: “The publisher we’re with right now has zero creative goals for this game. They’re like ‘you make what you want, we’re publishing it, we’re not going to tell you what to make’. That’s the perfect deal, you know?”
OnPoint’s take
Real talk, this one is a feel-good story even with the Xbox L baked into it. Xbox pulling funding in 2025 cost a lot of people their jobs, and we’re not going to pretend that didn’t happen. But look at what nobody else is pointing out: Romero Games kept 100% of the IP. That means the work Xbox helped pay for didn’t vanish into a vault. It’s getting finished, by a smaller team, with the guy who helped invent the first-person shooter making every call himself.
And that’s good for Xbox and PC players. A Doom co-creator making a shooter in Unreal Engine 5.8 that he says plays like a Breath of the Wild-style adventure? That’s exactly the kind of game that should land on Xbox Series X and PC, and with no platforms announced yet, there’s no reason it can’t. Microsoft’s 2025 cuts were a different chapter. The Xbox we’re watching now is in a much stronger spot, and a studio like this showing up on Xbox down the road would be a full-circle W. Respect to Romero for not being bitter and just going back to work. It is what it is, and he’s moving forward.
Sources
- VGC (Chris Scullion): John Romero confirms his axed Xbox game has a new publisher and he’s rehired some staff
- IGN (Tristan Ogilvie): John Romero’s Next Shooter Survived the Microsoft Purge
- tbreak: John Romero’s Axed Xbox Shooter Gets a New Publisher
Image: John Romero photo by Official GDC (CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons) / OnPoint 4 Gamers
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