The source image for Romero's head

It's fair to say that almost everyone has heard the story by now of how John Romero became the boss brain for Doom II MAP30. Just to recap, here's the story as it's told in Masters of Doom:

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Late one night in September 1994, Romero sat at his computer, tweaking the final sounds for Doom II. With the game near completion, he took it upon himself to polish the audio effects for the final enemy or "boss" of the game, called the Icon of Sin. To win the game, the player had to shoot the Icon - a hideous beast that spit out cubes that could spawn into other monsters - between the eyes.

 

Romero ran around in a special mode that allowed him to, for purposes of testing the game, pass through walls - effectively going behind the images the player would see in the game. He had just passed behind a wall in back of the Icon of Sin when he stopped cold. Did I just see my own face? Shrugging it off, he went on with his work, thinking maybe he had been there too long. But then, as he ran behind the beast again, he thought he saw his face once more. How weird, he thought, slowly creeping back. And then, to his shock, he saw it: a digital copy of his head, decapitated and bloody, writhing on a stick. "No fucking way!" he said.

 

Romero raced his character back around and fired a shot at the Icon of Sin, then followed the trajectory of the rocket: it sailed through the beast, through a back wall, into the hidden chamber, and smack into Romero's head - which would twitch in agony. Romero got the joke. The player thought he was winning the game by shooting the beast, but in fact he was shooting Romero. Romero was the Icon of Sin.

 

The next morning, word spread around the office that Romero had found the Easter egg and left one of his own. Adrian and Kevin booted up the final scene of the game and began firing off the rockets at the beast. All the while, they heard demonic sounds - like a backward track of a Judas Priest song - coming from the hidden room. The words were indistinguishable but, when reversed, perfectly clear: "To win the game," the voice bellowed, "you must kill me, John Romero." With another blast of the rocket, the Icon of Sin was dead.

Romero had his head added into the game without his cooperation. Where, then, did the picture of his head come from? From a magazine scan:

"Not the exact pic" but from that photo shoot. Well, I found the image. This is a one page article from Wired magazine, July 1994.

Whether it's correct that this photo shoot was taken for Businessweek is unclear. Businessweek published their article in August 1994 while Wired's article appeared a month earlier in their July issue. Shots reused from a single photoshoot? It's hard to tell. While I was able to get hold of a copy of Wired, there are far fewer second hand copies of Businessweek on eBay.

Here's a comparison shot for the skeptics:

The photo has some weird purple lighting going on. I'm not sure if the Wired editors added this themselves or if it's part of the original shoot. However, it might explain why these multiple Romero head captures exist - perhaps the result of some struggles with Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop to try to cancel out the tint effect. Some of these look like they have a similar purple tint.

I'm uploading a huge (10MB) hi-res scan of the page to the idgames archive under the name bbrn_src.zip in case anyone wants a really high quality version.

OMG "drink my knob" had me laughing. Yes, I mis-remembered the magazine – this is the one, not BusinessWeek. That's some other photo I will dig up at some point. I've kept a lot of magazines from that time. I also have a stack of printed Wolfenstein 3D press from 1992 that you can't find online.

Also, it's a pool table we had, not a snooker table.

We had no company badges, ever.

My face was definitely hand-edited after being Fuzzy Pumped.