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DOOM Has Been Very Good to Me
I
released my first levels in May and
June of 1994:
Dante's Gate and
Crossing Acheron. They were
featured on PC
Gamer Magazine's premiere
CD-ROM issue December 1994 with a few
others, and were published in
Tricks of the
DOOM Gurus and
3D Game Alchemy
by SAMS publishing in 1995 and 1996.
Several screenshots of Dante's Gate
were used as examples in DOOM Gurus.
At the time, I was thrilled for any
kind of attention, since I'd been
doing this just for fun. In
retrospect, the levels are a tad
primitive. But they were among the
first ever made before the glut of
amateur levels uploaded to the
Internet reached epidemic proportions
in the summer of 1994.
Yet I was lucky enough for
them to have caught the eye of Nick
Newhard at Q
Studios, who was developing a
game for Apogee
called
BLOOD
in early 1995. This was the first use
of the Build Engine which would later
be used with great success for
DUKE
NUKEM.
I frankly never got the hang of it.
Another
DOOM
level designer named Richard "Levelord"
Grey stuck with it, to his great
credit, and would go on to do most of
the levels for
DUKE
NUKEM
and later co-found the company Ritual.
Fortunately for me, id Software was finishing up a new fourth episode
for the first commercial release of
DOOM,
to be called
The Ultimate DOOM. I got a
call from Shawn Green at the beginning
of March, and he asked if I'd like to
contribute a level to the effort. I'd
have two weeks to finish it. Well,
naturally I was ecstatic. To actually
have one's work - and name - next to
gods like Romero, Peterson, and
American McGee? I'd been working in
DOOM II
mode the past several months and
developing a style for some other
levels I hadn't released yet; shifting
back to
DOOM
felt constraining. But I'm making
excuses. The level I submitted,
originally called Chiron,
ended up as E4M7, "And Hell Followed"
in Thy Flesh
Consumed. (David McCandless
of Britain's PC
Zone magazine would later
review the episode rather uncharitably
as "Thy Cash Consumed." Funny, but...)
As
for my level, id
Software liked it well enough.
And I never heard anything negative
from the
DOOM
community. It's not a bad level, but
frankly it's not a great one either.
Of course, having to follow an act
like Romero's E4M6 - which I think is
one of the best levels he ever did - tends
to build certain high expectations.
|
 John W. Anderson
Born: November 7,
1956
English Literature, California University.
(Click
here to see my separate personal web site.)
I've worked in a
funeral home, a coal mine, as a wedding
photographer, a grocery store clerk, a
caseworker in a government agency, level
designer for five major PC game companies, tech
support for an Internet bank, and owned
my own book store.
I have a son, Joshua, who is 21, and a cat
named Pooki. I play the piano,
sketch portraits, and practice Sumi-e
painting. I studied at a Zen Buddhist
monastery for 3 years in New York, and I
support John Kerry for President. (Yeah,
I'm a godless, left-wing Liberal. What of it?) I'm an
avid film buff and have a large
collection of DVDs. My favorite actors
are Kevin Spacey, Johnny Depp, and Jude
Law. My favorite movie is John Boorman's
Excalibur. I'm a fan of Akira
Kurosawa, Tim Burton, Alfred Hitchcock,
and Stanley Kubrick. (Yes, I think Return of the
King is the best movie of the
year.) Other eclectic favorites are
Dr. Strangelove, City of Lost
Children, Le Femme Nikita,
Dark City, Blade Runner,
Brazil, Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, Memento, The Bear,
Ed Wood, The Evil Dead II,
American Beauty, and The Ring.
My favorite book is Little, Big
by
John Crowley. My favorite classics are
Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick,
Crime and Punishment, and As I
Lay Dying. My favorite authors are
William Faulkner, Mark Twain, D. H.
Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Fyodor
Dostoevsky. I believe Shakespeare and
Dante are the foundation of the Western
Canon. My favorite group is The
Beatles. I also like Peter Gabriel,
Cat Stevens, (old) Genesis, ELP, Talking
Heads, Pink Floyd, and Joni Mitchell
(hey, I'm an old guy). I'm a maniacal
Monty Python fan. I like comedians Sam
Kinison and Richard Pryor. I don't like
Robin Williams and I don't like anybody
who does. My favorite philosophers are
David Hume and Bertrand Russell. I'm not
a PBS snob, but I really don't watch TV
except for The
Science Channel and Chris Matthews'
Hardball. I am an old
X-Files fan
and never miss reruns of The Twilight Zone
on the SciFi
Channel. I like to read (and own) dozens
of books on Quantum Mechanics, Cosmology,
Consciousness, Evolution, Politics, and Theology. |
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Ion
Storm group photo (1998).
I'd
have a lot more time to develop better
levels for id's
next project,
Master Levels for DOOM II.
Joining me were four other designers:
Sverre Kvernmo, Tom "Paradox"
Mustaine, Jim F. Flynn, and Chris Klie.
I knew Tom's work, but had never
communicated with him. The other three
were old and great friends. Working
together on such a great project
seemed like a wonderful dream we were
all afraid we would wake from. And we
had the entire summer to create as
many levels as quality would allow. I
immediately quit my 10-year job as a
Case Worker at the Pennsylvania
Department of Public Welfare. I work
slowly, but I managed to complete five
levels:
Virgil, Minos, Nessus, Geryon,
and - my favorite - Vesperas.
(I have one great regret with Vesperas:
I hid the secret ledge to get to the
Yellow Key too well, and I'm afraid
that many players didn't get to see
the final arena with the Cyberdemon.)
Except for Geryon, I'm still very
happy with the levels.
The
levels by the other guys represent
some of their best work, too. Id Software
was very happy as well, and did a
great job packaging the work. Our only
grievance was that the levels weren't
combined into a single PWAD. Reviews were very good,
but they echoed our complaint that so
many maps had to be loaded separately.
Just when I was
about to run out of money, Epic MegaGames
asked me to work on a little game they were
developing called
UNREAL.
It was my first full-time gig. I can't
thank Tim Sweeney and Cliff Blezinski
enough for the experience and
opportunities that they afforded me. This was
before QUAKE
came out, and it was my first time
working with a true 3D engine.
There was a lot
happening in late 1996 and early 1997.
QUAKE
had just been released and the game
industry was seeing a boom in the
formation of new companies. John
Carmack of id
Software got me an interview
with two guys from Microsoft
who wanted to form their own company
in Seattle called Hollow Box
and use the
QUAKE
engine. I had an interview a couple
weeks later, but they were looking for
a game designer, and I couldn't quite
claim that level of experience. A year
would go by before these guys
eventually got their act together and
formed Valve.
Their game would be
HALF-LIFE.
(And the game I happen to think is the
best PC shooter ever made.)
In January of 1997 I
got the interview everyone wanted the most: id Software.
John Romero had just left, and they
were starting work on
QUAKE2.
American McGee was especially friendly
to me, and I finally found out that
he'd been the one who got me my gig on The Ultimate DOOM after seeing my
level, Crossing Acheron. Tim Willits
treated me fairly and told me they
were also considering one other designer,
a fellow named Jaquays (of AD&D
painting fame). But they'd let
me know soon, he said.
After two weeks of
sitting on pins and needles, I got an
email from Sverre, who'd just been
hired by Romero to join the new
company he'd formed with Tom Hall
called Ion Storm.
Would I be interested in signing on?
Click
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