John Romero working on Facebook game

John Romero, the man who helped conceptualise and create Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein - not to mention Commander Keen and Dangerous Dave - is now apparently working on a new Facebook game.

The game is called Ravenwood Fair and is being developed by LOLapps, who have recruited Romero as a consultant - making it the first title Romero has worked on since an unreleased MMO in 2005.

John Romero, in case you've forgotten, was a founding member of id Software, but made a very public exit to go and form Ion Storm in 1996. The developer had a very chequered history; while the company also put out Warren Spector's Deus Ex and Tom Hall's Anachronox, it's more often remembered for Romero's own title - the ill-fated Daikatana.

Ravenwood Fair charges players with clearing a section of a forest to build a fair, which is made problematic by the denizens of the woods wanting to reclaim their land. At the same time as securing the plot of land players will also have to manage the fair itself and attract as many customers as possible.

While it's easy to snort dismissively at Romero's move to social games that nobody cares about, the numbers tell a different story - LOLapps boasts 150 million monthly active users across all its games. It's last major title, Critter Island, has attracted 1.2 million player in just a few months and, according to VentureBeat, is 'social gaming companies that no one has heard about'