Hidden out of bounds in Doom II's final boss is a digitized severed head on a spike, and it belongs to John Romero. This episode charts the life of the designer who helped invent the first-person shooter, coined the term deathmatch, and then suffered one of the most public falls in tech history. We start with his parents driving a 1948 Chrysler to Colorado with $300, his Pac-Man epiphany in the arcade, and his self-taught coding on an Apple II.

We follow Romero to Softdisk in Shreveport, where he recruited John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall, and through id Software's turbo mode era of 28 games in about five and a half years. We explore the level editors and tools he built, the clash with Carmack over Quake that ended in his 1996 resignation, the design is law premise of Ion Storm, the infamous 1997 ad, and Daikatana's failure in 200 ...