Romero Games’ unannounced shooter that was dropped by Xbox last year has found a new home, its founder John Romero has revealed during Gamescom Asia.
Romero, who co-founded id Software and co-created legendary shooters such as DOOM and Quake, told VGC that the project has found a new publisher, and that some of the staff that were previously working on the game have been rehired.
You know, last year we basically got defunded, like a lot of people did, and so we had to spend time figuring out what we were going to do. Eventually we decided that we can’t keep everybody on forever, and we kept them on as long as we could, trying to find funding to finish the game, keep everybody there, but as time goes on and people leave you can’t build that game again.
So at some point we were like ‘okay, we can’t do that, so we need to do redundancy and then figure out what we’re going to do with a super-small team’. We were 110 people, going down to five.
So we went down to five people, we had this big game that we had made. We 100% own everything. We own the name, we own all the IP, all the art, all the graphics, the code and everything. And so I needed to basically design a new game that could use as much of that stuff as possible, to just basically get a head start.
Romero confirmed he has “brought 10 people back” who were previously “the leads of the different sub-teams that we had,” nothing the current team of about 15-16 employees is likely to remain in place for the time being. “We don’t need to be bigger than that,” Romero commented, adding that the project is “going extremely well, we’re very happy with it.”
I mean, it’s a shooter – that part totally makes sense – but everything else around it is really new, and everybody on the team is so excited. We’re very excited with how the game is turning out.
Romero had previously revealed in December last year that the shooter had been salvaged but had been “basically completely redesigned,” but still “incorporates a lot of elements” from its original incarnation. He had previously pledged to save the game after Xbox dropped the title.
Prior to that, it had been reported in July 2025 that Romero Games had been closed as a result the then-recent layoffs at Microsoft, although the studio was quick to deny these claims on social media. However, the developer did confirm that funding for the shooter had been pulled and the project was scrapped as a result.
The unannounced shooter has yet to attract a release date or platform(s).
[Source – VGC]