Thanksgiving Fun Attack

November: Things That Have Happened This Month...

...over the years! Well, back in 1992 id Software finally moved from an apartment to a real office space in Mesquite (the Black Cube). In 1996, I started Ion Storm with Tom Hall and our first office space was in the Quadrangle building near downtown Dallas.

Interestingly, we've never released a game during November even though the pressure is on in a huge way to release as early before Christmas as possible. It always happens that things get finished up to the latest possible point!

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Stevie and I did!

EXULT : Ultima 7 - The Black Gate

Finally, someone has developed a native Windows port of Ultima 7, one of the best Ultimas in the series! Ultima 7 was released back in the late spring of 1992 and we were developing Wolfenstein 3D when it hit -- I was extremely impressed with the complete reworking of the interface to maximize visible area (few games back then had done that). The Voodoo Memory Manager wasn't a cool thing, but that's something the port fixes!

You need to have the original version of Ultima 7 installed on your computer before running Exult. You can install Exult in its own directory, then it will ask you where your U7 directory is. Try it out - it has lots of great video settings!

NewWolf

Finally, a Wolfenstein 3D port that works great! It even runs in Wine under Linux. It's a Russian site and it's kinda slow from my place, but it's worth the wait. The site was last updated yesterday, so the very latest version is out right now. It even supports the shareware version, Spear of Destiny, and has some experimental hires texture support in there (you can download textures and new models). What more could you ask for? How about an automap? YEP!

I just played halfway through episode 5 (mine) and it's just as crazy-fast as the original -- and I'm surprised it's still so fun!

October: The Month of Many Birthdays

Man, last month was hella busy for me and I forgot to announce all the fun birthdays that took place! We have 5 birthdays that happened last month, so let's begin:

October 28th :
John Romero - 35 years old (!)

Yes, I'll announce myself first before the other ones since they're, ya know, not living beings. I just turned 35 and, yep, I feel old! Big surprise there, eh? Well, it's been a fun time and I do look forward to the future. I'm having a ton of fun now that I'm back to coding and learning lots of new stuff.

Random fact: Julia Roberts and I share the same birthday and age! Bill Gates was also born on the 28th.

October 10th, 1994:
DOOM II - 8 years old

We held the launch party for DOOM II in New York City at the Limelight, a really cool old church right in the middle of New York that's a dance club. It was amazing: when you walked in, there was a huge holographic generator that displayed DOOM's monsters (you could walk through them and it was weird); the entire place was booming with the music from MAP28: The Living End - it sounded awesome. There were lots of people deathmatching in a special section, lots of news media was there (local NYC news channels, game press, etc.) During Jay Wilbur's speech some crackpot even claimed we were responsible for corrupting the youth of America! Shawn Green yelled out, "Suck it down, dude!" Hahahahaha, awesome. DOOM II was selling so fast that in Best Buy they didn't even bother stocking the shelves with it - they just dropped the pallet right there inside the door.

October 30th, 1995:
Hexen - 7 years old

I loved working on this game with Raven. We got right to work after shipping Heretic, so it was at the beginning of 1995 that Hexen work had begun. I came up with the Hub Design for Hexen since I wanted this game to be a little more involved than Heretic. I still think the first Seven Portals map has 4 portals too many, but if you're serious about playing the game you can get through it. I still remember when Raven first showed me the Wraithverge model and it was a nice, shiny gold cross. I was like, "What? This thing looks like it's a GOOD cross!" It needed to be dark and awful and the next version they sent was perfect. I came up with the idea of the spirits *blasting hard* out of that weapon and Ben really did a great coding job on that. We had some really fun co-op sessions at Ion Storm through this one - 8 players, too! For old-times sake, just play it again but in JHexen this time.

October 10th, 2002: Age of Mythology - Just Born!

Ensemble Studios held the Age of Mythology launch party at a local company here in Dallas called AMS. It looked just like Disneyland inside the place! Tony Goodman sent a limosine to pick up myself and the Monkeystone crew and drive us the 45 minutes to the event - what a cool guy Tony is. I was in the Celebrity Deathmatch tournament and I played with Lucas Davis on my team. We played against The Fat Man and his chosen partner: the best Age of Kings player on the planet. Ugh. We lost, but it was a great night. Lots of fun, food and friends all talking about games! AoM is an instant classic.

In case you hadn't put 2 and 2 together, DOOM II and AoM share the same birthday!

In other news, I am very close to finishing our latest game here at Monkeystone Games: Congo Cube! It's a cross between Bejewled and Tetris Attack and so far our beta testers have loved it even more than Bejeweled (which is a good thing!) Stevie Case and I attended the Smartphone Launch Event in London, England over a week ago, where Congo Cube was featured on the Smartphone and on the PC.

Cool Little Games - Link Night

Check it out - this is a rockin' little fun game! It's like Worms 2, but it's realtime and is really violent and funny! You can have a bunch of people play together on a LAN or Internet and there are hundreds of people playing online right now! Go to the Servers section on the Soldat Hompage and put the IP address in and you're in the action!

Another crazy hilarious "game" is Porrasturvat, the Stair Dismount (as seen on TechTV). Basically, you get points for the most damage you do to the little guy you're slamming down the stairs. The secret is in spearing down through his foot at just the right angle, causing him to stay in one spot, taking damage the entire time, until he falls... Heh.

Here's another great site to find all those old games you wanted to play! There's tons of links on this page that will lead you into a subculture that you may not have known existed: the archiving of all old computer games.

Spear of Destiny's Birthday!

It's that time again - time for another of my game's birthdays and this time it's, yes, Spear of Destiny! Good ole SOD is now 10 years old as of today.

I still remember how fast we got this game together - it only took 2 months of making levels and new monsters immediately after shipping all 6 episodes of Wolfenstein 3D (and Wolfy's Hint Book, of course). Two months! And it went straight to retail and sold okay, although not having the magic words Wolfenstein 3D in HUGE letters did hurt sales a little. The box did say "A Wolfenstein 3D Adventure" on it, but it was in smaller type.

Believe it or not, the first time we all saw the cool box for Spear was when it was already shipped out to stores. We received a shipment of boxes along with all the retail chains and it was our first look at the design -- and we loved it! In fact, we really loved having our names printed on the sides of the box when you lifted the LucasArts-like cover. Heh, "Adrian Carmack - Master Of The Pixel".

Comix

There's a petition in the forums to get me to post the X-rated Melvin comic up, but I'm still holding out. To keep y'all from eating me alive, I posted a couple more Melvins in there: Breakin' Melvin and Smoking Melvin.

I'll slowly post more Melvins one or two at a time to keep that section moving along... I also have several non-Melvin comics that have to do with general mayhem and I'll probably post them in the Melvin section at the end. I have several of these from long ago.

I don't know if it's just me and all the people who have emailed us about this, but Steed's book cover looks an awful lot like Stevie "KillCreek" Case! I talked to the publisher at WordWare and he was told that the skin was modeled after a secretary at Wild Tangent... I'd like to see a pic of her for a little proof. Heh.

Interestingly enough, I may write a book for WordWare about cross-platform game engine programming to mirror my class at UTD this fall.

Last note: I smacked up another Random Pic and it's from the DOOM era like the last one.