John Romero Has Uploaded a New Doom Map as a Tease for Blackroom

John Romero has uploaded a new map for Doom, along with a promise of what to expect from Blackroom.

Yesterday, after plenty of teasing, John Romero officially announced an upcoming first-person shooter, Blackroom, which is being made in collaboration with fellow id Software co-founder Adrian Carmack.

In a tweet today, Romero shared a newly designed map for Doom, E1M4b, available as a free download. In the tweet, Romero said that the gameplay in that level is what fans can expect from Blackroom, which is expected to release in Winter 2018.

“Time for a surprise,” he wrote. “This is the kind of classic FPS gameplay I’m promising.”

Romero and Carmack are currently Kickstarting the project, and have raised more than $100,000 as of the time of this posting. In an interview with Shacknews, Romero said that failure is not an option.

“For Adrian and me, this is a labor of love. It is a design that we’re incredibly passionate about, and a game we have wanted to make for a while now,” Romero said. “‘What if it doesn’t work?’ and ‘What if they don’t like the idea’ hasn’t entered our minds, because we’ve focused very, very closely on what we know people like and what we know people want. The trick is to deliver that while still innovating upon the genre. We’re too excited about the possibility of Blackroom to focus on failure.”

The campaign page describes Blackroom as “a visceral, varied and violent shooter that harkens back to classic FPS play with a mixture of exploration, speed, and intense, weaponized combat,” and promises “unique multiplayer maps and robust modding support for the community to make diabolical creations of their own design.”