John Romero's plan for world
humiliation has finally been enacted. An article in
today's New York Times Magazine marks his offiicial graduation from being mocked by the
specialized gaming press to being mocked - without the comforting knowledge that his
tormentors secretly envy him - by the loftiest institution of the straight press.
John himself gets the ball rolling:
Romero is relishing his pumped-up status. "When I drive this
car [his ferrari],"
he says, "people know who I am." He chafes at waiting for a table for half an
hour at a crowded Dallas lunch spot. ("If they knew I was here, we wouldn't have to
wait."). He imagines his reception in Japan, where he's never been but where his
games are huge. "I'd probably get mobbed by Japanese chicks," he says.
Go ahead, reread that passage. I can't explain it either.
Maybe he didn't know he was talking to a reporter from the New York Times.
The author, Paul Keegan, paints a slightly more terrestrial picture of Romero and
offers an implicit assessment of John's chances with mobs of Japanese chicks:
He wears tight designer jeans and a black T-shirt, and has the
slightly pudgy frame of someone who has spent a lifetime staring at computer screens while
drinking Cokes and eating candy bars.
By the article's halfway point, Keegan has crafted such a clear,
negative image of Romero in even the most game-illiterate reader's mind that he can
introduce John Carmack, describe him concisely as the "anti-Romero", and
rest assured that everyone knows this is a good thing.
The only positive statement the Times can find from one of his peers compares John
Romero to Paul McCartney and comes from "a Dallas game developer who insists on being
identified only as Levelord." Leave it to the mysterious, drunken old
"ord" of the levels to go deep, deep undercover as himself.
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