Once upon a time, John Romero wrote a fan letter to Jordan Mechner

You probably know John Romero the Game Development Legend, but did you know that before then, he was just John Romero the Regular Kid?

Maybe not so regular, actually, because at 17, he’d already created “tons” of games and worked out how Jordan Mechner made Karateka. Most of it, anyway, although the scrolling background technique remained inscrutable to Romero, so he wrote a letter to Mechner telling him how awesome the game was, and asking him all about it.

“I am writing because you need to be congratulated on this game. I was absolutely stunned by the graphics, shadows and all,” he gushed. “You did a tremendous job, and have, I think, defined the state-of-the-art for future Apple games. The technology has been in the Apple all along to do those graphics, it just needed a programmer like you to use it.”

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Jordan Mechner at his Apple

He goes on to “betray” himself as a game developer too, “albeit an unknown one”.

“All in all, your game is absolutely amazing. I have studied Broderbund games and they all have non-flickering animation and excellent demos. I have made tons of games but until recently I haven’t used any advanced animation techniques like page-flipping and OR animation. Now that I know how good these techniques look, I am starting to use them (the page-flipping requires a tremendous amount of work!”

You can read the rest of the adorably adolescent letter at the link below.

Next week, Romero and Mechner will be joining Adam Saltsman (Canabalt creator), Tim Sweeney (Epic Games), Markuss “Notch” Persson (Minecraft creator), and Jane Pickard (University of Southern California academic) on stage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, to talk about indie game development.