Romero and Hall join Midway

Former Ion Storm and Monkeystone Games frontmen John Romero and Tom Hall have signed on the dotted line at Midway's San Diego studio, the publisher officially confirmed yesterday, as new CEO David Zucker furthers his efforts to galvanise the company's development arm.

According to reports, Hall will join the company as creative director, overseeing a number of titles, while Romero will be more hands-on, working as a project lead on a forthcoming action title (GameSpot cites one Midway insider as saying it's a Gauntlet remake). The duo will start work on Wednesday.

Well known figures in the Dallas development "scene", Romero and Hall have a rap sheet longer than a samurai sword, both of them going back as far as the pre-Id Software Softdisk days (Dangerous Dave!), with Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D appearing on both their CVs. They diverged for a few years in the 90s - Romero sticking with Id and working on Doom and Quake; Hall sticking to Apogee titles Duke Nukem II and Rise of the Triad - but eventually reunited at Ion Storm, where Romero worked on the much maligned and critically savaged Daikatana and Hall worked on the vastly underrated Anachronox.

At the present time there's no word on the future of independent handheld/PDA development studio Monkeystone Games, founded by Romero and Hall amongst others after Ion Storm crashed and burned in a post-Daikatana market. Monkeystone's highest profile project had been a port of Volition/THQ's Total Recall-alike FPS Red Faction to Nokia N-Gage.