"You are incorrect": John Romero has been correcting Doom history for the past 4 years, and he's not about to stop now

Over the past few years, Doom designer John Romero has been disputing details shared by fellow id veteran Sandy Petersen on the development of the original two games. I have no idea how this social media feud got started, but Romero's polite-yet-brutal responses to Petersen's claims – usually starting with a "Hi Sandy, hope you’re doing well" – are quickly becoming a meme among gaming history enthusiasts.

Last week, Petersen responded to a joke on Twitter about the difference between old and new Doom lore by saying "I WROTE the original Doom backstory." Romero soon responded with "Hi Sandy. I hope you're doing well. However, you are incorrect. @ThatTomHall wrote the story for DOOM long before you joined id in September 1993, nine months into production. Summarizing Tom's story in two sentences does not equal writing the DOOM story. Not by a long shot."

In a follow-up tweet – posted before Romero's response – Petersen acknowledges that Tom Hall did, indeed, craft the original Doom backstory. "And then I did not have access to it when I wrote the manual for the original Doom, so the two-sentence backstory you got is what I wrote," Petersen said.

Petersen expands his version of the story in a later follow-up, and here, again, Romero disputes that version of events, claiming that Petersen didn't even write the story summary for the Doom 1 manual.

Regardless of who deserves credit for the Doom story, this kind of social media feuding has been going on since at least 2021, when Petersen claimed that the original Doom sold around 100,000 copies. "Hi Sandy, hope you’re doing well," Romero quickly responded. "The sales of registered Doom in 1994 were significantly more than 100,000. Just wanted you to know."

This pattern, where Petersen makes some claim about the development of Doom and Romero publicly disputes it in brutally courteous terms has repeated numerous times over the years, as evidenced by all the tweets you'll find embedded below.

I don't love seeing two of the fathers of Doom fighting, however politely, on social media, but, well... In a post-Not Like Us world it's easy to see why so many observers are enjoying the mental image of the words "Hi Sandy, hope you're doing well" accompanied by a Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl smile.

Without Doom, we might never have gotten many of the best FPS games ever made.