News that Microsoft carried out sweeping layoffs hit hard — id Software reportedly lost nearly half its team, with several key programmers among those shown the door. In the midst of that upheaval, John Romero brought up something that feels strangely urgent: the preservation of digital history.
Romero wrote on social media that he maintains a massive private archive — and, to be blunt, for the gaming world that collection matters a lot. He says it covers id’s earliest days, starting at Softdisk and running through August 1996, when he left. Inside are source code repos, intermediate assets, design docs, and other one-off materials; Romero claims many of those originals no longer exist in id’s own holdings.
There’s a dark pattern here: companies sometimes order destruction of archives during closures or layoffs, which has wiped out irreplaceable work before (see: Fallout creator Tim Cain’s experience). So Romero’s habit of saving files feels equal parts foresight and accident — relief mixed with a gnawing frustration that this sort of rescue shouldn’t fall to individuals alone.
He also voiced a hope — that someone inside the current id is doing the same for newer material: the modern code, the stories of devs past and present, etc. It’s easy to feel sentimental about floppy-disk nostalgia, but this is practical: archives are the fallback when corporate memory vanishes, and right now that fallback is mostly in people’s hands.