jro.jpg We've covered some of 3D Realms' fun 'The Apogee Legacy' series before, catching up with classic PC shareware types, and the latest talks to the notorious J-Ro, also known as John Romero, about his formative game creation years.

An amusing story, for starters, is Scott Miller's tactics to 'borrow' Romero from former publisher Softdisk: "Scott knew I worked at Softdisk and knew they filtered mail to make sure no one was trying to steal their programmers and artists. So he sent me about 4 letters in the mail, all of them pretending to be someone who played the game and wanted me to write them back for various reasons."

Another notable in the 'alternate history' department: "Paul Neurath asked me to join him as his first employee at Blue Sky Productions (later Looking Glass Technologies). I didn't take the offer because I had already planned on starting a company with my boss (Inside Out Software). If I had taken the offer at Blue Sky then an incredible amount of things would have been different. I'm glad I did what I did."