Quake Day

Happy Birthday Quake!

Today is Quake's 8th birthday! As the years march forth, my game babies get older...and older....and older. But I remain the same age! Well, mentally at least. Keeps me sane, I guess.

So, yeah, eight years ago it was a lonely Saturday afternoon when I was by myself up at ole id Software, putting together the shareware distribution of Quake and getting ready to upload it to The Planet. My, how times have changed. And there's a Quake 4 yet to be released, too. I'm excited to see how that one turns out - my friends at Raven have always done a great job on id's games.

Oh, and I can't wait for DOOM 3 as well. Major sequelitis. Let's see, since I've been gone we've all played Quake 2, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Commander Keen for GBA, Quake 3, DOOM/DOOM II for GBA, Wolfenstein 3D for GBA....and now we wait for DOOM 3 and Quake 4.

Okay!

Of course, I wish Quake's brothers well and they will all have some great birthdays, whenever they are, and maybe they'll eat some cake and grow some legs and arms and scare the hell out of some people and....ummmm....

Anyway, just wanted to say Happy Birthday to the most special Quake of all!

New photo section - check it out, you can click on the link that says "The ROME.RO Photo Gallery" and if you belong to the forums and send me your pic, you can be in there too!

Wolfy Turns 14

Happy Birthday Wolfenstein 3D!

Today was Wolfenstein 3D's 12th birthday! That means that the FPS market is 12 years old as of today, since many regard W3D as the first true game of the genre. It's cool to see how the genre's evolved over the past 12 years with the advent of the tactical shooter (Rainbow Six; Ghost Recon), online tournament shooter (Quake 3; UT2K4), and massively multiplayer military shooter (Battlefield:1942). I know there's some more but they are more nichey and one-off-ish.

Geez, we made Wolfenstein so many years ago that I can't remember anything that happened back then. JUST KIDDING! I remember everything almost as if it was yesterday. I definitely remember it being great fun - it was a great time for id. And it's great to see the legacy survive in Return To Castle Wolfenstein.

Sadly, on February 26th, a few months ago, the creator of the original 1981 classic Castle Wolfenstein, Silas Warner, died. I've always been an admirer of Silas' and Tom Hall and I went to his wake in Chico, CA in March. I was lucky enough to get Silas' last collection of disks and memorabilia which included a pristine copy of the original package of Castle Wolfenstein. R.I.P. Silas.

Dan Rock and DARKSTAR ... ROCK!

I just wanted to maybe turn some of you on to an amazing, talented guy, Dan Rock, and his music. Dan is the guitarist for the prog-metal group Psychotic Waltz and DARKSTAR is the side-project that he and his friend, German keyboardist Siggi Blasey have created.

This music is just awesome, especially if you love great guitar and great melodies together. Check out their website. They only have 2 CDs available but they are both really great. I can't pick one over the other, truthfully.

Click the album cover to the left to visit their website <em>(Ed: website defunct)</em>. Lots of samples from their songs so you can see that I'm not full of it!

Proxyconn Will Amaze You

Wow, they were not lying about this one. There's a company called Proxyconn that promises DSL speed over a 56k dialup line. AND IT WORKS!! I downloaded and installed the software expecting the usual lackluster performance and a quick uninstall immediately following my test....but wow am I impressed!

In the status bar area is a Proxyconn icon that will tell you the effective speed you're getting - right this second, mine is saying "broadband". Heh. Usually it says 150k or more. You simply must see this to believe it - in fact, if you already have DSL, try Proxyconn for Broadband so you can surf the net at T1 speeds!

Another great feature of Proxyconn is that it totally kills all bannerads and popups before they ever get to your computer. The way Proxyconn works is that your computer is constantly logged into their servers and when you send any HTTP requests, it will send it your way extremely compressed and faster than just going over the net normally. Their site explains all the technical details of how they achieve this amazing speed so I won't go into it here suffice to say that the speed is REAL.

Oh, and Proxyconn also speeds up your EMAIL! You just have to try this to believe it.

Birthdays Galore

HAPPY BIRTHDAY...

Dec 10: DOOM - 10 yrs
Dec 14: KEEN 1-3 - 13 yrs
Dec 15: KEEN 4-6 - 12 yrs
Dec 23: HERETIC - 9 yrs
Dec 23: HDB - 2 yrs

Man, December is the golden month of game birthdays! It's been quite a while since I updated - I did a full reinstall on my computer and I'm still not finished yet. For instance, I'm writing this update in FrontPage instead of Dreamweaver MX (I'll get up to speed soon).

That's 9 games in December alone...wow. We worked pretty hard to get Heretic and Hyperspace Delivery Boy out before January, as you can tell by the crazy date. Most publishers wouldn't release a game that late in the month when they're targeting retail... but we weren't.

So Happy Birthday, my little game babies! Well, maybe games should be measured in something like "game years" or something...like, maybe it should be 3 game years for every human year. That would make DOOM 30 years old....hmm. Thanks to numerous source ports it looks better than when it was a baby!