Romero denies N-Gage 2 comments

Doom and Quake co-creator John Romero has denied reports which quoted him as stating that he'd seen a prototype of Nokia's next-generation N-Gage hardware, saying that quotes attributed to him on a Russian website were incorrect.

"I've never seen a prototype of any new N-Gage," he told gi.biz, referring to a report earlier this week on Russian website Compulenta which said that he'd seen N-Gage 2 hardware, which would be smaller and would address problems with changing game cards and talking into the device.

"I was talking to some guy, who I did not know was a journalist, and he asked me what I thought of the N-Gage," explained Romero. "I told him, then he told me that he thought it had an awful design with the MMC chip and the way you talk on it... I just said, 'Yeah, well Nokia's fixing those problems in their next one.'"

"Interesting how entire stories get blown up from single sentences, but the Russians were really excited to see Tom [Hall] and myself over there so almost anything we said was blown out of proportion," he continued.

Romero and Hall were in Moscow for the KRI Conference, a Russian game developers conference. Romero previously worked on the N-Gage version of Red Faction while running his own mobile development company, Monkeystone Games, and is currently working on an update of the classic Gauntlet franchise for Midway.