After 20 years, Doom co-creator John Romero looks back on the impact of a seminal (and Satanic) game (interview)

Doom was the beginning of so many things. When it debuted December 1993, it cemented the appeal of the first-person shooter computer game and spawned a genre that is now a multibillion-dollar business. John Romero, who still has rock star-length hair, was a big part of its success as a co-founder of id Software, the Dallas-area company that is now owned by Bethesda Softworks.

Romero, now the creative director of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s game design program, celebrated the game’s 20th anniversary at an event at the university’s Digital Arts Research Center. He and his wife, Brenda Romero (the program director at USSC), marked the anniversary with multiplayer “deathmatch” sessions, a little bit of trash talk, and some academic chatter about the violent and bloody game.