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After defining the FPS space with Doom and Quake, John Romero went on to work on a host of other projects. One of them was an ambitious MMO known as Project Redwood that essentially merged World of Warcraft and Pokemon for younger players, and it sounds like it was pretty fun.
During a recent event, Romero spoke about Project Redwood, revealing his aspirations and a distinct educational undercurrent within the game. "In World of Warcraft, when you're on any path, if you go off the path, you aggro something, and get into a fight. For little kids, that's kind of scary," Romero explains, per Time Extension.
"So I kind of flipped that upside down so that certain towns will be under siege by robots, but everywhere else you can run all over the world, and the world is full of animals," he states. Players would then commune with these animals to enlist their help through music, with a trust meter rather than HP.
"You could have people playing three different types of instruments to make a song, with the tracks being layered depending on what came in," Romero says. "Then, finally, when you get them onto your side, you can take them home and get a loot drop kind of thing."
The fundamental loop would've been going out into the wilderness to grab some of these creatures, training them, then using them to ward off encroaching robots in different areas. Relatively straightforward, and you can see the potential appeal on the back of WoW's huge success.
There was an inflection of learning, through guilds. "You didn't feel like you were in a school; you didn't feel like you were doing any education at all," he states. "In the world, there were certain things that you needed to figure out, but most of the math stuff was hidden inside a guild that you needed to join to get into that stuff."
Just to be clear, "When you played the game, it felt like you were playing World of Warcraft," he adds, to make sure nobody thinks the Doom Guy himself was moving into edutainment. Project Redwood was in development for several years in the late 2000s, through two studios, Slipgate Ironworks and Gazillion Entertainment.
Eventually, it fell into purgatory and that was that. Bits and pieces of concept art and visual tests have surfaced, giving us some impression of what Romero was getting at. There was clear potential, but it appears the man behind the Doomslayer didn't much suit pacifism. Who knew?
