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News
Archive 07/26/2000 - 10/21/2000
So... I got my Hummer back from the audio shop - WOW. It cost quite a bit, but I believe it was worth it! The standard stereo that comes in a Hummer (back in 1997 at least) is a Clarion, which sounds pretty awful. The situation needed to be rectified, in addition to throwing in a few extra goodies. Here's the list of stuff I added:
Now the system is pretty much the coolest I've seen in any vehicle. The control over input/output sources is so complete that I can be watching the GPS, the second monitor can be watching DVD, while the audio I'm listening to is from the MP3 unit. Nice. I'm about to add an external input so I can have a Playstation One going.... all this stuff is great for long trips. But having the MP3 player is so much nicer than a CD changer. I can fit about 160 songs on a CD (the file format must be 128-bit MP3) and pretty much never need to change music. Right now I'm listening to my girlfriend Stevie being interviewed on www.allgameradio.com. She's attending the opening of The Stomping Grounds cybercafe and is having a pretty fun time. Hopefully she'll have some pictures when she gets back... if my camera isn't destroyed by water from a flume ride at the Mall of the Americas! Guess we'll find out about the camera situation tomorrow, heh. I haven't done any work on the site in a while, I just need to get motivated. :) I know many of you are dying to see the DOOM section (and Quake, etc.) but those won't be complete for a while to come. I'm going to finish up the first 2 years of games, then maybe skip ahead to the Keen era which will eventually lead to DOOM!
Well, I took Stevie to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio for her birthday to ride all 14 rollercoasters there. She is a major 'coaster fanatic so I think I planned the perfect present and she really did like it a bunch. Check out her site 'cause she can tell you better than I can about her little coaster problem.
I've been doing a little updating on the site...... I finished restructuring all the existing pages finally so they have no frames and also integrated both my Flash menus into one. Just got Flash 5 too, which is really nice to use. So, I'm going to continue documenting my early games. I'm thinking that I might make the site live after I finish with all the games I made in 1982 (they were pretty awful, but you can see where I started). I won't have the downloadable images available for a while though, but they'll mostly all be grabbable when I put them up. I won't be documenting the later games like anything after the 90's for quite a while, so by the time I do them I'll probably be able to make those pages pretty reasonable-looking. Oh yeah, Stevie did a photo shoot for her website -- whoa. I took about 1000 pictures on the digital camera and they are NICE! She put a few rough versions up on her site..... www.stevana.com. Clock 'em.
Gonna be heading out tonight to California for Don "Onethumb" Macaskill's wedding this weekend... god, I hate flying! Last weekend the trip to Arizona was pretty rough. We had to take 2 flights (thanks, Southwest Airlines!) and on the first flight, some woman started having heart problems so there were about 5 people crowded around her with rubber gloves on, white phone, etc. and the plane dove down to a lower altitude just in case we were going to have to land. Well, she seemed to be stable so they continued on to Albequerque, NM about as fast as they could go. The way that plane was doing S turns all the way down to the airport made a lot of people freak out. Then, the next flight was fun as well as we maneuvered through a storm. Lightning flashing outside the windows, the plane bucking like a wild bronco... I was standing when the turbulence hit and had to brace myself against the floor. The nearest flight attendant told me to "be *very* careful" and run over and strap myself into the nearest seat, which just happened to face backward toward the rear of the plane. Oh, that's nice. Sitting backward while the plane tosses everything around! Boy, I just love flying.
Four years ago today, I left id Software and eventually formed what would be known as Ion Storm with my longtime friend Tom Hall. Ironically enough, approximately 10 years ago, John Carmack and I began working on our bi-monthly game disk, PCRcade (soon to be renamed Gamer's Edge), while working at Softdisk. (Each of us was working on our own game for the first issue: I was doing Dangerous Dave and Carmack was doing Catacombs.) Within a month or so, we would be joined by Adrian Carmack in our little 4-person department (Lane Roathe was the editor; the management interface so John and I could concentrate on coding). And soon after our little group was busy working insane hours to meet an almost impossible deadline, Tom Hall began joining us after work so he could help us with all the non-coding tasks, namely, the design of the games -- characters, levels, sometimes even graphics. Today is also the last day of QuakeCon 2000. I wonder if there will be any more, now that the Quake franchise is pretty much wrapped up after four years? That would end up making August 6th quite an anniversary date, for me at least.
I'm doing a chat tonight at 7PM CST on http://chat.twcny.rr.com. It's going to go until 7:45PM or so, then I'll be heading on over to QuakeCon 2000 to hang out with my bud Levelord! Maybe I'll see some of you out there. Web-site-wise, I'm reformatting all my pages to be 800x600 friendly. There were a couple complaints that the type was too big and the main content area of the site was using frames, which really reduced the amount of scrolling content if you were in 800x600 mode.
I realize that many of you are itching to check out the development info on your favorite games, but right now I'm mainly working on documenting my earliest games and moving forward from there since my recollections come easier when I work with related titles. It's easier to recall my frame of mind back in 1982 when I'm only dealing with games from that time. Tonight I finished documenting my 1982 game, Phazzar. In addition, I've finished the entries for Crazy Climber (not the arcade version), Dodge 'Em, Alien Attack, Crazy Dunjun, and Bongo's Bash. It just takes a while to create the Flash4 titles, scrounge up old hand-drawn advertisements and packaging, recollect my thoughts from back then ("what was I doing??!") and grab screenshots from the games and the original arcade versions I was copying. Yeah, it'll take a while but it's looking pretty good.
Great news for those of you who have followed DOOM for a while. A year or so ago, Lee Killough took down his DOOM History site and a large chunk of detailed DOOM history was gone. The webmaster at classicgaming.com said Lee took *everything* off the site for good. Well, I've been in contact with Lee for a while now and convinced him that it would be a good thing to keep all that information available and that I would like to include it all in my DOOM section here. Last night, Lee transferred the entire site to me for inclusion in my DOOM section here. The knowledge is not lost! If you'd like to thank Lee, send me an email and I'll make sure he gets it.
Well, found out that NO fingerserver was hitting my site. Got lots of nice remarks about what people would like to see on the site and I'm planning on talking about most of what everyone was asking, except I won't be talking about my next project. When we're ready to put it on the market, that's when you'll know about it. At least that's the .plan. :)
Wow. Massive number of hits today... I suspect that a fingerserver is checking this page for updates because there's no way that many people are dropping by. The question at the end of the page (where you tell me what you're interested in seeing on this site) generated a lot of pretty interesting responses... and it also generated a lot of ShugaShack responses (we all know what we're talking about here, don't we? :) In answer to some of the questions posed, I can only say:
I guess that about covers most of the main questions I've received. If you have anything else you'd like to read about, go to the bottom and send me your thoughts. I like a good laugh! (j/k)
Hey everyone! I'm still working on the site... it's going to be pretty big. Mainly, this site is going to replace my .plan file and I'll probably have (close to) daily updates and provide some articles on Game Industry History and maybe some interviews with notable game designers, programmers, mappers, etc. Maybe my bong-buddy Levelord will submit to an interview, as long as we clear it with JeffK. A lot of the time I've spent on this site has been on the GAMES section where I document *all* the games I've written since 1982. There's about 95 of them, not counting all the games I started and didn't finish (not many of those, though), nor does that count the many utility programs I coded to develop these games, but I'll be detailing each of those as well. The largest amount of work will be on the most popular games I've worked on, such as Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, DOOM II, Heretic, Hexen, Quake and Daikatana. I haven't gotten to those entries yet since I'm desecrating my older games with my newly acquired Flash skillz. But when I do get to those games, there will be lots of development stories, maybe some pictures and AVIs, lots of development information on how the game designs evolved, my map drawings I did before building maps, and lots of other little fun tidbits! As I describe each game's development, I'll be digressing into stories that relate to the development of the particular game, such as why I started drawing little game ads for my games, how I did my own packaging for my games and sold them in stores on commission, etc. I've also been writing my career history from the day I saw a computer in 1979 to the present day. It might help some of you who are curious as to what it takes to get into the industry and how I got where I'm at today. If you are interested in seeing anything in particular on this site, please drop me a line. |
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News Archive 05/12/2001 - 06/27/2001 News Archive 11/2000 - 05/07/2001 News Archive 07/2000 - 10/2000 This
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