Legendary game designer John Romero has revealed that the unnamed FPS title he and his team at Romero Games is still alive – it's just moving forward in a different form.
Funding for the game was pulled a while back, and while Romero has never revealed who the publisher was, it is assumed to have been Microsoft, as the announcement that the game was in trouble coincided with the company behind Xbox laying off staff left, right, and centre.
Speaking at Spain's Salón del Videojuego de Madrid 2025 (thanks, PC Gamer and Eurogamer), Romero reveals that the lights are still on at his studio, and the FPS project is ongoing:
"The game's been basically completely redesigned. The new game has nothing to do with the previous game, but it incorporates a lot of the elements that we had in the previous game, so we're not starting at ground zero. We have $50 million worth of a game we can take pieces out of and put into a brand new indie game."
He explains that the project is now "much smaller" in scope, but "more fun" from a development perspective. "Now we get to actually do the thing that we're really good at ourselves. That's why small teams are great," Romero adds.
He also says he's "never played a game like it before—other than it's a shooter," and likens it to a recent FromSoftware smash hit you may have heard of:
"The things that you do in it will be new to people the way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience. It was a very crazy place and a different world, and it was really cool to explore it and just see 'What is that?' That's the idea behind what we're doing in this game."