Adrian Carmack and John Romero want your money for new FPS

John Romero and Adrian Carmack revealed more information about the new first person shooter project they started teasing last week. Two of the four original members behind the first Doom game are now working on Blackroom, a visceral, action-packed FPS set in a holographic simulation gone rogue. John Romero is the game's lead designer, Adrian Carmack serves as art director and heavy metal guitarist George Lynch provides the games' soundtrack.

The duo created a new game studio called Night Work Games and rolled out a Kickstarter to finance the project. With over $610,000 pledged of the $700,000 goal in almost no-time this game looks like another crowdfunding success.

Blackroom will have a 10-hours single-player campaign with a wide variety of environments, from ruined Victorian mansions to Wild West ghost towns and treacherous pirate galleons and beyond. The multiplayer modes will consist of co-op, 1-on-1 deathmatch and free-for-all arena in an interesting mix of locations including hardcore military sims, hellish infernos and interstellar space. Furthermore, Blackroom will also receive full modding support.

The estimated launch date of Blackroom is Winter 2018.

BLACKROOM takes place inside a company called HOXAR, Inc. in the year 2036. They are absolutely at the forefront of holographic technology. They have created an environment that allows people to be anywhere at anytime all inside of a giant black room. The military recognized the potential of this technology very early on and got on board with funding that let the company grow. Commercial clients weren’t too far behind. So, now they have military sims and entertainment sims and many more. This gives a huge range of options to play with in BLACKROOM. However, what they also have is a pretty serious problem, and that problem is the unifying conflict that ties all this together. In order to address what’s happening in BLACKROOM, they have to explore where it’s happening at the source across these various HoloSims. Ultimately, all these things come together in the seriously abstract level design that is my forte. Obviously, we have designed the game to play to our strengths.

What seems to be creating these problems is something called Predictive Memory Technology (PMT). HOXAR, keen to hold its edge, investigated and explored where they could go next — and that question led them to their latest innovation. PMT was designed to make HoloSims as real as they could be by scanning the participants' memories and using those memories to craft personalized and realistic experiences within individual HoloSims. A soldier who regularly feared a certain type of combat incident would be faced with issues to test it. On the kinder side, PMT could recreate personalities from people’s memories of their loved ones so that they could have a conversation with them in BLACKROOM, a conversation that felt real. It was revolutionary. Unfortunately, it was also not without its flaws. PMT had not only the ability to “read,” it seems, but also the ability to permanently “write.” Thus one person’s nightmares became others, and all of these nightmares magnified over time, both inside and outside the simulation.