Romero and Hall's Loot Drop signed up by RockYou

Social game firm RockYou has signed up John Romero and Tom Hall's company Loot Drop to produce a social game. Hall and Romero are most famous for being co-founders of id Software.

RockYou will be funding, publishing and maintaining the game, which is planned for a summer release. RockYou's senior vice president of publishing, Johnathan Knight, has said that the signing of Romero and Hall's eight person team is part of a move to secure a new grade of top talent for the publisher.

Before starting Loot Drop, Romero was working at Gazillion, where he moved to social game development after a core MMO project he was working on was cancelled. The social game he created as a result, Ravenwood Fair for LOLApps, now has five million users a month.

Romero saw the opportunity in social gaming and left to found Loot Drop, where he aims to push the social genre with as much creativity as possible.

"I really like the faster cycles where you can respond a lot faster to the users," Romero told press at the time. "We are not interested at all in going back to the normal game industry cycle where it takes years to do a game. This audience is unbelievably massive, and we are very early in its history. I feel like it is 1981 again, and the industry is ready for an explosion of creativity."