John Romero, Adrian Carmack announce new video game and not much else

How deep—and selective—does your first-person-shooter nostalgia run? John Romero and Adrian Carmack, who cut their teeth on Doom and Quake before Romero burnt his reputation to the ground with Daikatana, are curious to find out. The ex-id Software staffers launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new video game on Monday with little more than fond memories and concept art as selling points.

In a four-minute video, Romero told fans that new game Blackroom "hearkens back to classic shooter gameplay," but the Kickstarter campaign doesn't currently back those promises up with hard details. Sci-fi concept art is shown as Romero describes a hologram-obsessed plot and tells us to expect "circle-strafing enemies and, of course, rocket jumping." But as of press time, the campaign isn't forthcoming with anything that looks like gameplay, let alone any enemy, level, or weapon descriptions. (The closest we really get is a recent Romero-built remake of a Doom level, and it's admittedly a damned good take on e1m8.)

We also have no idea who is going to build the game alongside Romero and Carmack—remember, that's Adrian Carmack, id's former art director, not John Carmack, id's original lead programmer. Romero is listed as the game's only programmer thus far. Instead, fans are assured that the project already has a "metal composer" in the form of George Lynch, who has played in bands such as Dokken. More staffers will presumably be hired to help build a "10-hour" single-player campaign and a multiplayer mode that consists of six Romero-made maps plus whatever the community creates, since the game will be "fully moddable" and support custom maps and dedicated servers.

What the campaign currently lacks in details, it more than makes up for with a weird social-media gamification campaign. Romero wants your selfies—and wants you to hold a physical sign that reads #blackroomgame in each of them—in all kinds of locations. Go to a "wild west town," "an island with visible beach and palm trees," "next to a police car," or near a number of real-life, id- and Romero-related locations to snap yourself with sign in hand. When enough of these are taken, Romero will release... wallpapers, animated GIFs, and five-second samples of Lynch's metal guitarwork.

Short guitar licks will have to tide hopeful fans over until at least "winter 2018," assuming the campaign reaches its $700,000 goal within the next 31 days. Really, we want to see a return to Romero's greatness, and if he's sitting on a killer, FPS-of-old concept, we hope it hatches with gnarled fangs and bloody claws. However, this is the era of Kickstarter fatigue, and as such, more hard gameplay details might assure fans that Romero is not repeating his over-promising mistakes of old.