John Romero says his new game has 'nothing to do' with recently cancelled Bethesda FPS

John Romero briefly talks about a new game at the Madrid Video Game Show 2025 convention, confirming that the new project is separate from his previous cancelled game.

2

Back in July, Microsoft laid off hundreds of employees, closed down a studio, and cancelled a handful of games. John Romero's new FPS had been among those cancelled games. Romero's studio was working on a new shooter for Bethesda before Microsoft pulled funding, leading to the game being scrapped.

That hasn't stopped Romero and his team. At a big gaming event in Madrid, the legendary Doom creator says that he's working on a new game that has a "completely different design"than the original project. To be clear, that original game isn't coming out, but Romero is taking pieces of that $50 million project and inserting them into the new game. The aim is to deliver something that brings the same sense of wonder that Elden Ring brought to the souls-like genre.

• Read more: Doom creator John Romero on gaming's future: 'The industry has mostly always gone up'
• Read more: Bethesda cancels John Romero's new FPS, cuts funding for 'several others'

Romero elaborates in his own words:

"We survived the cancellation of our huge game. There's a really good 110 people that have been working on the game every day, for years.

"The game's basically been completely redesigned. The new game has nothing to do with the previous game, but it incorporates a lot of the elements of the previous game, so we're not starting out on ground zero. We have $50 million worth of a game that we can take pieces out of and put into a brand new indie game.

"We have a lot of stuff to put in the game, and the design is completely different. The team is excited about the design, it's a much smaller game, it's more fun for us because the people working on it were all directors of different departments and they didn't actually get to code or design themselves, so now they get to actually do that--to do the thing that they're actually good at.

"The design of it, I can't talk about what we're doing in the game, just because it's new and interesting, but I've never played a game like it before other than it's a shooter--the things you do in it will be probably new to people the way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience. Elden Ring was a very crazy place, a very new and different world to explore. That's the idea of what we're building at this point."