In an alternate timeline, Doom co-creator John Romero made System Shock

Gaming history is filled with 'what if?' moments. I often wonder what would've happened if Square Enix's Shinji Hashimoto hadn't bumped into that Disney exec in an office elevator, eventually spawning one of my favorite gaming series ever, Kingdom Hearts. The butterfly effect, for me at least, likely wouldn't have brought me into games media. I'd also have avoided a few more headaches from trying to make sense of what's actually happening. Well, here's a new one for you: what if id Software co-founder John Romero helped make Thief instead of Doom?

Speaking on a recent episode of Nightdive Studios' Deep Dive podcast, Romero shares that he was approached in 1989 by then-Origin Systems colleague Paul Neurath to help spin up a new studio called Blue Sky Productions. This would eventually become Looking Glass Studios, the developer of some of the best PC games series to come out of the '90s in System Shock and Thief.

The Doom creator recalls that, when he first joined Origin Systems in 1987, he was first tasked to port post-apocalyptic RPG 2400 AD from the Apple 2 to the Commodore 64. The port was canned several months later as the game had sold poorly, and Romero was shifted over to work on sci-fi flight sim Space Rogue, which Neurath had already spent a couple of years developing.

By the time Space Rogue was nearly ready to ship, the duo had resolved to start up their own projects. Neurath made his offer, but it was not to be as Romero had cemented plans of his own just days before.

"Paul had asked me before I left [Origin Systems] if I would start a company with him," Romero nonchalantly notes. "And I told him I'd already promised the week before to found a company with my manager there."

If Romero had never co-founded Inside Out Software, then the odds are he'd never have gone on to meet the other id founders at Softdisk. Considering how much Doom and Wolfenstein helped redefine the shooter, the DNA of which is still intertwined with some of the best FPS games of recent times, modern gaming would likely look very different had things gone differently.

Though I motion in the headline that Romero would have instead found himself working on Looking Glass' big hitters, again, there's no guarantee those would be what he and Neurath cooked up. Who knows? Maybe something like Doom still would've been made, except it has stealth mechanics; more sneak and stab than rip and tear, perhaps.

If this lovely bit of gaming lore has given you the itch to boot up a banger, check out our lists of the best new PC games you should check out right now, as well as some of the best stealth games if the Thief chatter has gotten you hankering for sneaky sneaky time.

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