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Romero Games

@romerogames.bsky.social

Galway-based studio, passionate about FPS games. romerogames.com

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Romero Games@romerogames.bsky.social · last mo.

April 1991: Bobby Prince wrote to id Software about the painstaking work of finding the right sound for Commander Keen. This letter captures so much of Bobby: curious, generous, technical, musical, & fully committed to making games sound better than anyone thought they could. 🖤

In April 1991, Bobby Prince wrote to id Software about the painstaking work of finding the right sound for Commander Keen, experimenting with AdLib, Sound Blaster, MIDI files, and anything that could make a PC game feel alive. This letter is a small piece of that history, but it captures so much of Bobby: curious, generous, technical, musical, and fully committed to making games sound better than anyone thought they could. ✉️🎵🖤 Bobby’s work helped define the sound of id Software and an entire era of PC games. We’re grateful for his music and the enormous legacy he leaves behind. 🔹A note on the image: we’ve redacted a private, active phone number from the letter. The letter itself is otherwise shared as a historical document from 1991. It includes a dated racial term that is offensive today; we don’t use or endorse that language, but we’re leaving the document intact and acknowledging it here. Dear Guys, I appreciate your phone calls and and the chance to work with you and your group. I have been going through a fair to midlin steep learning curve for the past couple of weeks, but I think I'm almost over it. I have had only limited experience with the hardware (SoundBlaster/AdLib), but with some detective work (and Jason's help on the phone and soon to come by mail software/info), I have everything about ready to go. The biggest problem now is going through all the instrument sounds and learning what's there. The sound of the instruments will be as important as the music being played. Also, there are a lot of potential sound effects in the FMsynth, so I am listening to all octaves to see what may lurk in the background. I have already found a good gidget sound to go with the graphics in Commander Keen 3 (those electric arc things are called gidgets, I believe). So, I am going crazy listening to FM synth sounds, and if I don't make any sense the next time we talk that's the reason why. The enclosed tape has only samples of some of my sequencing work done for backtrack tapes. The choice of songs is arbitrary, except I included Gimme Three Steps and Born To Be Wild for the guitar players and old time enthusiasts. I do know my way around this stuff, but I don't want to send you any game or theme music until I have the right SB/AdLib sounds to put it across right. If I send you what I've done on the samplers, etc., you won’t won't think anything sounds right when you hear the SB/AdLib version. For comparisons sake, I'm including Color My World on samplers, etc., disk and a “translated” version for the SB (it’s on the disk, just type “PLAY” as the CMF driver, etc. is included.) Lay Cogs dron or thes Forgive my leaving out the drum parts on the CMF — I couldn’t get the &8$%# thing to go into rhythm mode for some reason. When I called Creative's Tech line, I did not get any help, and it was impossible — a southerner from Georgia trying to talk to an ori…
Romero Games@romerogames.bsky.social · last mo.

Question we get: Does the Shambler have fur or skin? We asked Adrian Carmack. “It’s skin. My original shambler concept. The holes would be a gooey painted texture but even with that & simplifying the form… it was too complex for an early process Quake character.“ #Quake

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Romero Games@romerogames.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Congrats to Ardán taking over the first floor of our old (but much loved) space in Galway City centre! 📍 We moved to our new, larger office in Dockgate on Merchants Road in 2023 (reception pictured). The old office had been used to store John’s archives! 🖤

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