“That was not at all what I expected.”
After the talk, I heard this line again and again. People came up to meet me and to shake my hand. Some asked me to sign their games or told me about their experiences playing DOOM or Quake or Wolfenstein 3-D. A few people, having seen themselves in the talk I’d given, shared stories of growing up in homes like the one I grew up in. They didn’t have to tell me much, because when you grow up like I grew up, you just know.
The talk itself was at a private event, a conference for a game company in eastern Canada. The three hundred people in attendance represented the complete spectrum of game development. There were programmers of every type, game designers, level designers, artists and animators, musicians, and audio engineers. I recognized some of the biz people from other game-dev conferences.
I remember when the HR and Events team first reached out to me about giving this talk. They told me they wanted something different. “People know a lot about your games. We wonder if you could talk about something new.”
I was puzzled by their request, though. What might I talk about to a room of game developers if not my games?
“We have an idea,” the Events person said. “We wondered if you could talk about yourself, your story. You know, everything that made you make the games you made. Where you come from, your background. We think people would enjoy that, and it could be inspiring, particularly to our junior team members.”
My story? My personal story? My life story was not something I had shared before. Of course, my family knows it. My wife, Brenda, knows it, but not even my kids know all of it. I wasn’t sure where to start.
“I suppose I could do that,” I said.
“That’s great. We’ll see you in November, then. Feel free to send along any materials or requirements you have in advance.”
A few days later, I was staring at a blank slide deck. I typed “My Life” on the first slide. It was going to be a forty-five-minute talk with fifteen minutes for questions. I had a lot of slides to go. Exactly what parts of my life did they want to know about?
Everything that made you make the games you made.
Everything.
So I put it all in there, the whole story—or what you could tell in about an hour, anyway.
Once I proofed and practiced it, I sent it off. Then I headed from my home in Galway, Ireland, to Canada to deliver the talk.
By the time I got to the slides about my family’s involvement in the drug trade, I could tell by the looks on people’s faces that this was not the story they expected to hear. Two first cousins were murdered. Two uncles ran drugs for a well-known cartel. My father and one uncle died from their addictions to everything from cocaine to alcohol. The rest of that generation managed to sober up before their addictions could claim them (my amazing Aunt Yoly miraculously escaped all of it).
From my position on the stage behind the podium, I saw mouths agape. At the word “murdered” there were more than a few audible gasps. Perhaps they expected something different—a middle-class, bright kid who grew up in a stable home in the 1970s and ’80s with lots of electronic toys like Mattel’s Electronic Football or Simon to inspire me. My reality was a lot different than that, but I liked my reality all the same. It was all that I knew, and it made me grateful for the good in my life, and there was a lot of good around me.
My talk started with 1972. I was a scrappy, impish-looking five-year-old with dark, wavy, unruly hair and thick glasses, which I’ve had forever, and nightmarish teeth that came in splayed and overlapping. We lived in a small house on South Oregon Drive in a low-income barrio in Tucson, Arizona. My parents, Alfonso and Ginny Romero, were young, both of them twenty-two. My father was five feet eight with jet-black hair, brown eyes, and sepia-toned skin. My mother was the same height as my father, hazel-eyed, and fair-skinned with blond hair that she wore pinned on the top of her head. My mom took care of me and my three-year-old brother, Ralph, and she sewed clothes for the family and others to earn extra money. My dad fought rock for a living in the Pima County copper mines that surrounded Tucson. As couples go, they were equipped with energy, love, laughter, and flashes of rage. There was always beer around.
“While my family is now known for programming and design,” I told the audience, mentioning with pride that my son and two stepchildren also worked in games, “my family has also known tremendous success in dealing drugs and drinking vast amounts of alcohol.”
I laughed, and a few others did, too.
My father grew up in the barrio in South Tucson in a house beside his father Alfredo’s junkyard. My grandparents’ house always felt like home to me. Walking in the front door, the first thing to hit you was the smell of my grandmother’s cooking. My grandma Socorro (we called her Suki) was a nurturing machine: She hugged and fed everyone, and constantly pressed out tortillas made from flour, Sonoran style. I loved everything about her food, especially the heaping dishes of frijoles, crispy tacos dorados, and Spanish rice seasoned with tomatoes, peas, carrots, green onions, cilantro, and whatever else she happened to throw in. Food is so central to Mexican culture, and no one makes it better than a Mexican grandmother. When my grandma passed in 2007, the surviving children and grandchildren spontaneously started exchanging her recipes—recipes we’d gathered over the years—and my cousin Trisha put them all into a binder, which was shared with the family. Every one of us treasures it. If you walked in the door of my grandma’s house, you were going to be fed. It was the way she welcomed you and told you that she loved you.
It was always the same when I walked through the front door.
“Hola, mijo,” she’d say before she turned and walked into the kitchen to get a plate. I’d sit at the table, and her food would appear in front of me. To this day, I still cook on my grandma’s comal, a flat, cast-iron griddle my grandfather made for her from the top of an iron barrel. Inside my grandparents’ house, it was a picture of domestic bliss. Outside the house in the backyard, it was often a party that went on late into the night. My father, aunts, uncles, and their friends were drinking, singing, and having a great time. My cousins added to the fun. It was a constant, chaotic family gathering with all of us running around. There was a lot of love, music, and food, and a whole lot of beer. Everyone spoke Spanish except the kids. In the 1970s, parents wanted their children to fit in and assimilate, so they didn’t teach us Spanish. It was a misguided hope that we would escape some of the racism our parents experienced, and it came at a cultural cost.
In addition to being Mexican American, I’m Yaqui on my father’s side and Cherokee on my mother’s side. There was a family at the end of South Oregon Drive who lived in an adobe hut with an actual tepee next to it. They had a rug for a door and dirt floors. I went to school with the boy who lived in the adobe hut, and we sometimes played together. No one else I knew had a house like his, particularly with the tepee (I would learn later in life that they were used by the Plains tribes and not the Yaqui). When I asked my parents about my friend’s home, they let me know that we were two of a kind, even if we didn’t live in houses that looked the same.
My mother’s family, in contrast, lived in the Glenheather suburb of east Tucson on East 17th Street. There was a shiny new school with a big field I could see from their back fence, and everything was paved and nicely landscaped, unlike the dirt alleys and random cacti near our place. My maternal grandparents, John and Ann Marshall, spoke only English. My grandmother was a small woman with mousy brown hair and a preference for polyester clothing. Grandpa John, who I’m named after, was a tall man, around six feet, with light-brown skin and gray hair. He loved game shows and had a habit of verbally assaulting the contestants on the TV. If those contestants were non-white? Watch out. He would unleash streams of racist curses and insults. As a little kid, I didn’t know any better, and I thought it was hilarious. He laughed, so I did, too. He didn’t know these people, but he spewed out naughty words that I knew you weren’t supposed to say. Though my mom always told me that Grandpa John was Cherokee, it wasn’t until later that I processed this and realized his behavior made no sense. He was a virulent bigot who hated non-whites even though he was non-white himself.
When my grandpa wasn’t yelling at the TV, their home was a quiet and docile environment. My grandmother read while my grandfather painted. My mom often left me with my grandparents while she ran errands, particularly if my father was nowhere to be found. That happened a fair bit.
I don’t remember my father without a beer. I didn’t know what he did when he was at work down in the mines, but when I saw him aboveground, there was always a bottle or a can in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. They were there when he got out of the truck after work, and more followed when he was talking to friends who stopped by the house. Working on the engine of his car, he’d sit a cold one on top of the fender. When he went to the drag races, he’d come back with two beers, one in each hand. Sometimes, he’d take us out to the Sonoran Desert to scavenge for mesquite wood to cook carne asada, and he’d have a beer between his legs as he drove and a cooler in the back that carried still more. My father was the life of any party—people tell me that to this day. He had a great laugh and a welcoming demeanor that made you want to be his friend. He was a mariachi with a beautiful voice who performed with Mariachi Cobre for a time. He loved to sing “Cucurrucucú Paloma” and “Malagueña Salerosa.”
Just a fair warning before you read further: The following events contain descriptions of domestic abuse and aren’t easy to hear about.
If my father didn’t have alcohol, bad things happened—he was irritable and easily angered, and things could shift in a split second. We walked on eggshells to avoid provoking him. If he did have alcohol, he might be loving and kind, or he might turn into a monster. I remember my dad walked in the front door one morning, hungry and looking for food. He’d been out all night at the bars. He stormed into the bedroom where my mother was still sleeping, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her out of bed and down the hallway, her feet trailing behind her. She yelled his name, begging for him to stop. I sat paralyzed in front of the TV where I was watching Saturday-morning cartoons, unsure what to do. I can’t remember what happened, but it still pains me to this day to think of it. My father was incredibly strong. He didn’t just make his living fighting rock—he beat it. He battered the earth down in the mines and won.
Aboveground, the battering continued. Sometimes, it was my mom. Sometimes, it was me or Ralph. When the beatings came, I felt like I deserved them, because, inevitably, I’d done something wrong. I didn’t always know what I’d done, and sometimes, it didn’t matter. Oftentimes, what I did “wrong” was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sometimes, it was others who took a beating.
There’s an oft-told story in my family about a hitchhiker who tried to rob my dad. It ended with a pipe wrench and that hitchhiker on the side of the road in the desert between Phoenix and Tucson. A lesser-told story involves my dad and his brothers getting into a bar fight with some cops. Many of my father’s fights took place in bars, but I suspect that one ended in arrests. Anything could set my father off, even when he did have beer. He wasn’t afraid of action. If he even suspected a fight was coming, he’d start it. I left many of these finer details out of the talk I gave that day in Canada for obvious reasons.
“We didn’t have much money,” I continued, “so we got by however we could.”
My mother used food stamps to purchase bulk rice, flour, and powdered milk. Sometimes, “however we could” involved my grandma Suki feeding us. Other times, my father came up with his own solutions.
“My mom told me how my dad once held up a Circle K to steal my diapers at gunpoint,” I told the audience. Everyone laughed, and it was funny in a weird kind of way—my father committing a felony for diapers of all things, not to mention its similarity to a scene in Raising Arizona. My mother had no idea he was doing this, of course. She only found out a few years later during a quick stop at that same store. The cashier spotted him, and they made a hasty exit.
At the conference, I advanced to a slide showing the Sonoran Desert. Behind me, a giant saguaro cactus was projected on a screen thirty feet across and twenty feet tall.
“It’s another day, and my mom was hanging laundry outside. I wandered into the kitchen and unscrewed a jar of rice and another of beans. When there are no toys, you make your own fun,” I told them.
“The rice and beans became ammunition. I was throwing them at my brother, and he was throwing them at me. We were having a massive food fight! Making a mess, flinging things at each other. We were having a ball. My mom came in the door and yelled, ‘Stop that right now!’ She was furious, but she was not a hitter. ‘Get out of here!’ And so we did. We went outside.”
We played in the yard, in the dirt with rocks and twigs, building little forts and looking out for scorpions and tarantulas. When my dad came home, he went inside. From outside, we could hear the fight brewing.
“Que pasó?” My dad wanted to know what the hell had happened.
“What happened? Look at this place. Your damn dinner is on the floor.”
“It’s just rice and beans. They must have been having fun.”
My dad was unpredictable. Something like this could set off his temper or make him laugh. My mother was having none of it.
“Fun? I’m an expert in fun. Fun is being here all day long with two little boys while you’re out drinking. Fun is going to your mother to ask for chicken so that we have something to eat. Fun is you working all night and coming home six beers into the day and me trying to keep these kids quiet so you can sleep.”
The fridge door opened and shut, and we heard my father crack open a new beer.
“Get rid of them!” My mom yelled. “I’ve had enough for today.”
My dad slammed the door and headed back toward the driveway. “Mijos!” he called. “Get in the truck!”
I opened the passenger door to the cab and helped Ralph climb in. He was four, and I was six. I could tell dad was angry, so I didn’t ask questions. I just sat there while he drove us into the nearby desert.
I came this way all the time with my dad. It was our source of firewood for the barbecues. My dad used a plumber’s wrench to knock dead branches off mesquite trees, and I dragged them to the truck. The desert was also a source of pride for my dad. He told stories about its history, plants, and animals. He told me about discovering pecan groves, how he would sneak in, climb the trees, shake the branches, and then scour the ground to harvest as many pecans as possible. The farmer spotted him and grabbed a gun. Sometimes he shot rock salt, which would sting like hell. Once, my dad caught a BB pellet in the neck. It remained there for the rest of his life, embedded in his right side.
The truck veered off the highway and onto a dirt road. We drove into the Sonoran Desert, the hottest terrain, day in, day out, in the entire country, where the sun baked the ground so hot it seemed to ripple on the horizon and the saguaros looked like they were dancing. He pulled the truck to a stop and said, “Get out.”
I got out first and then helped Ralph climb down. I looked at the cab, waiting for my father to join us, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he leaned over, grabbed the door, and slammed it shut. We waited for his instructions, but there were none. My dad put the truck in gear and pulled a U-turn. He was not looking at me. His eyes were on the road, and he was driving away. I watched the pickup vanish out of sight.
Get rid of them.
I repeated my mother’s words in my head. She hadn’t meant that literally, but he took it that way, or he was punishing her for blowing up at him. Either way, it was bad news for Ralph and me. Had he really left us out here? There was nothing but bone-dry desert and the dry bed of the Santa Cruz River. We couldn’t even see the highway. I looked around. I had been close to here before. The pecan groves were somewhere nearby.
Ralph started to cry, so I grabbed his hand and told him, “I think I know the way.”
We started to walk back toward the highway. It was hot, but being six, I was blessed with naivety. It’s only when I got older that I realized just how many ways this could have gone wrong. I hoped a police car would come by or one of our uncles or our grandpas. They could drive us home. I knew where to go, to the highway. I hoped Ralph could keep up. He had to.
“This is the right way,” I reassured Ralph. The larger saguaros were like landmarks.
We walked for thirty minutes.
I scanned ahead, and then, rocketing down the highway, I saw a familiar sight: Dad’s pickup.
It screeched as it braked to make the turn-off and headed our way.
The truck stopped, the passenger door swung open, and my mother ran toward us. She was crying, yelling our names. She dropped down to her knees and pulled us close.
My dad said, “Get in.”
I helped Ralph into the cab and then climbed in myself. Our mother got in behind us. Dad put the truck in gear. He didn’t look at me. His eyes remained on the road the whole way home. He didn’t say a single word. Neither did we. We knew better.
Years later, my wife, Brenda, asked my mother about this incident, and my mom drew in a shocked breath.
“Oh my god,” she said. Tears started to well in her eyes. “You remember that, Johnny?”
I had never discussed it with her. In my family, when something bad happened and was over, you didn’t bring it up again.
“I do,” I said.
She was crying, which, of course, made me tear up, too.
“Tell me you’re okay? Did it affect you?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay. It didn’t affect me.”
“Does Ralphie remember?”
I nodded that he did. Ralph and I had talked about it before.
She put her head in her hands.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mom.”
She told us the story of him arriving home without us and her asking him where we were.
“I got rid of them,” he said.
“You what?” she cried.
“You got what you wanted.”
She screamed at him to get in the truck, screamed all the way. “How could you? What’s wrong with you? Where are they?”
The truck tore up the road, past the edge of town, out by the pecan trees. That’s when she saw us walking. All these years, she’d kept the story to herself, hoping we didn’t remember, hoping it hadn’t affected us.
Most of the time, my father was fun—blasting music, singing, working on cars, laughing, cooking. We camped and explored in the desert. My love for our traditional food and my sense of humor come from him. He told me that he loved me every night before I went to bed. I love you, mijo.
When he passed away, in the same house in which he was born, he was ill from a lifetime of drinking and drugs. I tried to help him many times. I bought him a house and sent him to rehab. At the end of his life, he had just a few possessions, including a folder that contained the things most important to him: his GED and a photocopied magazine article about me, his son, mi hijo, who made computer games.
I told the audience all these things—how growing up in this family made me take nothing for granted, how my mom ended up finding happiness, how that happiness led to my first computer, and how that first computer led to the games everyone knew: Wolfenstein 3-D, DOOM, and Quake.
When the talk was done, I thanked everyone and stepped off the stage. The crowd of game developers applauded, and the chorus of “That wasn’t what I expected” commenced.