In a name: John Romero First off, I want to state that John is a wonderful human being and a great designer. He's a delight to talk with and the effort and out

In a name: John Romero First off, I want to state that John is a wonderful human being and a great designer. He's a delight to talk with and the effort and outcomes he is responsible for is commendable. In the early days of PC gaming lead designers were well known and often printed on the box of games; think Sid Meier, Chris Sawyer, Roberta Williams, Tim Schafer, hell even Derek Smart. It's my impression that this wasn't particularly true in consoles, or even on mac or amiga; save for some notable exceptions like Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto. But John Romero and Ion Storm are, I believe, the cause of the trend towards star designers being stopped dead in its tracks. John was hyped up as an absolute all-star designer, with the infamous "John Romero is going to make you his bitch" advertisement campaign for Daikatana; with the cost overruns, and the product's flop in the market, investors and publishers became exceedingly wary of tying their dollars and projects to the names of specific developers. They'd poured money into Ion Storm, and now Ion Storm's products were critically tainted by way of association with Romero. (A shame, because Anachronox is a rather nice game). After that, it became difficult and a point of contract negotiation for contributing developers to _even have their names in the credits_. Publishers became so protective of their brands and their associations that they were deeply concerned about what developer names were tied to their products.