So, first you shampoo. Use Finesse; Pantene in a pinch. Rinse, condition, and give it three minutes to soak in. Rinse again, and towel-dry your radiant mane as much as you can. If you’re naturally a bit wavy, now’s the time to apply some straightener to your unruliest follicles. Next, flick your hair over your face and blowdry, gently brushing towards the floor as you do. Be strong – you need to wait until it’s completely arid, or you’ll curl up. Slip on a ponytail holder for five minutes – more, if you have the time – and when you’re done, massage a drop of Sebastian Laminates Drops between your palms. Apply the solution evenly, ensuring that you don’t over-grease your roots.

We’re a little perturbed that after two-and-a-half hours of conversation, we still know more about John Romero’s hair-care regime than his new MMO.

After all, throughout the ’90s, Romero (along with Peter Molyneux) was one of the videogame industry’s most outspoken figureheads. During his tenure at id Software, he joyously imparted information about every new feature his games would implement to ravenous fans. Nowadays, all he’ll let slip is the genre: Romero’s fallen in love with online worlds. “I really like them,” he enthuses. “I love what an MMO is. I’m insane about World Of WarCraft. It’s just such an awesome game. And after playing it, I thought, ‘I just I have to do an MMO – it’s the next big thing’.”

While WOW’s ten-million-plus subscriber figures might be a persuasive factor, it’s impossible to take Romero’s enthusiasm as disingenuous. He’s felt it for all the projects on which he’s worked in a career that spans three decades. In fact, it’s his ebullient attitude towards videogames that should have made him the eternal gamer’s game designer. But life, work, fame and tragedy got in the way.

Born on October 28, 1967, in Colorado Springs, USA, Romero fell in love with videogames at first sight. Targ (an Exidy arcade game from 1980) was the one to pop his cherry. “It was like: ‘What is this thing?’” he says. “And then you got it. Back then, it was this new thing no one had experienced. Ever. A machine that could play things! After a while, I thought: ‘You know, I need to figure out how to make these!’”

He got his opportunity in the summer of ’79, when a college friend took 11-year-old Romero and his brother to the local campus, and showed them the terminals there. The games available were text adventures; Romero wasn’t enthralled by them, but he started making his own, saving his work on punch-cards. When one day those cards fell off his bike into a puddle on the way back to the campus, he knew it was time to get a home computer. “And when I did,” he says, “I lived on the thing.”

He was a fast learner. Romero’s passion for computers was obvious, but his parents were nonplussed. “I’d show them to my mother,” he laughs, “and she’d be like: ‘Oh, that’s nice, honey’.” In fact, it wasn’t until he got his first prestigious industry job that they accepted he might have a future in games. That job was at Origin Systems. Determined to become a part of the game industry once and for all, Romero traveled to the ’87 Applesoft festival in San Francisco. After politely turning down several job offers based on prior recognition – Nibble magazines were strewn throughout the area, with Romero’s games on some of the covers – he made his way to the Origin stand. A line of Apple IIs were on display, showing off different games. Romero saw no problem with switching off the Ultima I port playing on one system, and popping in his own – a game written using the hardware’s tricky double-resolution graphics mode. Origin’s PR was shocked by Romero’s bravado, but the gamble ultimately got him a job.

At Origin, Romero was tasked with porting an Apple II game over to the Commodore 64. He quickly discovered he didn’t need to rewrite the whole thing. “It was much more efficient for me to just take the game’s code, and modify it on the Commodore. Cross-development. So I basically said: ‘This is what I’m going to do, so where’s your cable to get this stuff over to the Commodore?’ And they were like: ‘Uhh, that doesn’t exist. Nobody’s put out a cable that communicates between the Apple II and the Commodore’. So I went out to RadioShack, and I got this telephone cable; it had four wires in it, and I soldered the wires to the different pins in the Commodore based off the schematics for the system. Then I wrote some code to accept data from the Apple II, saved it, and ran it. After I did that, they gave me a 25 percent raise.”

Despite being well regarded at Origin, Romero left to try independence again, forming an ill-fated company with another colleague. Greater success was found at the company he formed in 1988 with his co-worker Lane Roathe. Ideas From The Deep gave him plenty of programming challenges, but the income proved unsteady, so he started looking for a job again. In March 1989, Romero found one. “Jay Wilbur was getting a job at Softdisk,” he explains. “Jay told them about us, so I called Softdisk and said: ‘I need to talk to the president’, whose name was Al Lekovius. Al flew me down immediately with Lane. We had a barbecue. It wasn’t freezing cold, it was Louisiana. Hot. Awesome. I was like: ‘I gotta get down here.’”

It was the decision that led Romero to game-making megastardom.