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21.09.2004, 20:28
Damocles
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Bin gerade fertig geworden, und kann das Buch uneingeschränkt weiterempfehlen. Es ist spannend, interessant und teilweise auch lustig. Man lernt viel über die Zusammenhänge in der Industrie und ich hab auch eine gewisse Nostalgie entwickelt, als immer diese alten Spiele beschrieben wurden. Auch "dunkle Kapitel" wie die Entlassung Romeros und Columbine werden ausführlich besprochen.
Und da der Thread so wenig Zuspruch bekommen hat, tipp ich mal ne kleine Leseprobe ab.
Romero knew Carmack. He knew that, at the beginning of a project, Carmack went into research mode, and there was nothing much for him to do but experiment with other things until the engine was done. As Romero had already noticed, American had taken on the role of experimenting with Carmack late at night. He didn't think anything of it - better American than him.
Romero was too busy experimenting with the brave new world that Doom was continuing to spawn. DWANGO and deathmatching were in full tilt. Raven's game Heretic was doing so well that Romero was already overseeing the sequel, Hexen. He had the big vision in his head: a trilogy of games from Raven based on the Doom engine, concluding with his final project, Hecatomb. He had also begun overseeing a Doom-driven game called Strife by a local group of developers called Rogue Entertainment.
These games were fitting nicely into what he wanted to be id's master plan: squeezing every last drop of business and marketability out of Carmack's engine. Carmack's technology was getting more complicated and, as a result, taking longer to produce. Why not use that time to pursue other projects? Id didn't have to just be a company, it could be a gaming empire. Though Carmack had been skeptical, Romero felt that Heretic's success had proven his vision. As the Doom II phenomenon grew, the obvious way to build the company was to release more Doom product. The answer: cash in on the Doom mods.
Every home, office, or school had someone in the back who worked on computers; now that person was working on Doom mods. Since Doom II, thousands of gamers had begun modifying id's products and making them available for free online. Doom fans would communicate entirely over the Internet to create mods of the game - often never even meeting in person or, for that matter, talking on the phone. It was a virtual company complete with job descriptions, responsibilities, and monikers like Team TNT and Team Innocent Crew.
As a result, the mods were growing in sophistication. Among the most popular was a so-called total conversion of Doom II to make it look like the movie Aliens. There were deathmatch mods based on schoolyard games like Freeze Tag or King of the Mountain. People were replicating their offices, their homes, their schools. A student in England made a photorealistic version based on Trinity College. Another released one simply titled School Doom. "School is a hell," read the introductory text. "Nobody really understands why you spend your time by the computer...You are being mocked....You think about commiting suicide, but then you realize it's not what you want to do. You should make the others suffer rather than yourself!...You will kill them all! You will burn the school building out of the map as if it never has existed...Who cares if you are right or wrong! It's your destiny...it's your hell...it's your SCHOOL-DOOM!"
Such mods were taken to be all in good fun - it was just a game, after all. But some people were beginning to feel that the game had real-life applications. In Quantico, Virginia, in 1995, a project office in the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office named Scott Barnett created a modification called Marine Doom - complete with realistic military soldiers, barbed-wire fences, and marine logos. The game was perfect for training real-life soldiers in teamwork, Barnett's supervisors agreed. Barnett contacted id, who gave their blessing, though they thought the idea of someone using their game to train soldiers was a joke. But it was the real deal. The game made its way across the Net and would be used by the marines for years.
Id decided to jummp into the game after discovering that WizardWorks, a publisher in Minnesota, had released D!Zone - a collection of nine hundred user-made Doom mods (which id obviously did not own); the D!Zone CD-ROM had, remarkably, surpassed Doom II to top the PC games ales charts, earning millions of dollars. It was a source of great consternation in the office - this was exactly what people like Kevin Cloud had been afraid would happen. In response, Romero initiated deals with a variety of mod makers to put out id-approved collections called The Master Levels for Doom II as well as one sprawling team project, Final Doom. They also put out a retail version of the shareware product Ultimate Doom.
As the other projects grew, one question lingered on everyone's mind: What about Quake? Many had gotten caught up in the hype; American McGee, Dave Taylor, and Jay Wilbur had even been talking up the game themselves online. An industrious fan began collecting any sly comment made by a member of id and began putting them together in an online newsletter called QuakeTalk. Romero uploaded early pictures on the Net showing how the world was shaping up. "In the screens where you see some pink/purple sky," he wrote in an explanatory note, "you can just imagine the wind whistling in your ears....You should see these screens in action. :)"
But back in the office by the middle of 1995, there was little to see. Work was proceeding chaotically at best. With Carmack and Abrash working on the engine, and Romero spening more and more time on other projects, the others were left to their own devices. After having found happiness in a recent marriage, Adrian Carmack was growing impatient with the lack of stability at work. He and Kevin, his now close friend and fellow artist, began churning out textures for the game based on gothic, medieval schemes as well as Aztec designs for a time-traveling portion of the game. Kevin also used the time to start learning how to create characters in 3-D, something they had never done before. Adrian, frustrated by the increased game technology, left the character work to Kevin, who began to wear down from the mounting challenge.
The newer ranks felt frustrations of their own. American and the other guys thought Quake was beginning to flounder. Romero, their project leader, seemed more interested in leading his own life than in leading them. When pushed at one point to create a design document for Quake, he grudgingly responded with a two-page sketch. The rest thought it was a lazy attempt. But, as Romero was quick to explain, independence had long been id's modus operandi. They never had a design document, never wrote anything down; the only person who'd tried was his old cohort Tom Hall, and it got him fired.
The guys at id responded by resenting both Romero and Carmack. Romero was off being a rock god. Carmack was off being a tech god. And everyone else was left out to dry. Something had to change. Months were passing, and Carmack's engine was nowhere close to being done. The Wolfenstein engine had taken only a couple of months. Doom had taken six. Already Quake's engine was passing a half year of development with no end in sight. Forget about the promised release date of Christmas 1995, they resolved. From now on if people wanted to know the completion date of an id game, the reply was "When it's done!" Kaufen und Lesen!
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Damocles
Die Hölle wird von jeder Generation in der Fantasie neu gestaltet. Ihr Gebiet wird nach Absurditäten abgesucht und in frischer Form neu erbaut; ihre Schrecken werden unter die Lupe genommen und, wenn nötig, neu erfunden, um dem jeweiligen neuen Klima der Grausamkeit gerecht zu werden; ihre Architektur wird abgewandelt, damit sie dem Auge der modernen Verdammten etwas zu bieten hat.
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