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| Doomworld: Everyone remembers the "Deathmatch Database." Was that an original idea of yours? |
| John: Actually
I adopted it from Rogue Enterprises, which was a couple of guys in Canada
called Clint and Ian as far as I remember...
They'd been running the Deathmatch Database for a while, but it was getting too much for them. They asked for someone to take it over, and I volunteered. Out of all the people who contacted them about it, they picked me for some reason. ;-) At this time I was still at university, but I was spending more and more time on Doom and less on my degree. The Deathmatch Database turned out to be a huge amount of work... It took me about three or four months to redesign the whole site and catch up on the backlog of people waiting to get added to the list! |
| What about the "World o' Hurtz?" What was the World o' Hurtz exactly, now that I've forgotten? Was that the place with the WAD reviews? |
| The World o' Hurtz is what Spook's Doom Page turned into before I moved it all to GeoCities as part of the Gestalt666 Resource... All the reviews, FAQs and wads for the various games went in there. |
| Where did you get your nickname, anyways? |
| Actually it's a
pretty dumb story. I was going to keep my old nick of "Spook", but
when I went to get an account at GeoCities I found Spook was already taken,
so I had to think of a new nickname quickly!
Gestalt was just the first thing that came into my head. It's a German word, but it's also used in psychology and sometimes crops up in sci-fi as well. For example, a Gestalt conciousness is a sort of merging of different individuals into one whole... The 666 bit was tacked on the end because it sounded cool, and also because my address at GeoCities was TimesSquare/8666 Of course when I became Content Director of PlanetQuake the 666 was a bit suspect, so I dropped it and became just plain "Gestalt". |
| How long was The Talosian Incident in production? |
| Way too long!!! I think it took over six months in the end... Most of that was just trying to get all the levels together - it took much longer than I'd expected. |
| Was the final version of The Talosian Incident what you had hoped? |
| Not entirely.
I'm still proud of it, especially a couple of the maps and of course the soundtrack, which I did most of the music for. People said it was very atmospheric, almost like a sci-fi movie. Which was pretty much what we were aiming at... Originally it was
supposed to have more maps and there were a few things we had to
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| Do you still keep up with any current Doom info? |
| I drop by DoomWorld whenever I get time to keep up with what's going on. Since the source was released the whole Doom community has picked up again, with new maps and mods as well as Boom, DoomCTF and the rest of the ports... |
| We all know that you run The Coven now and make Quake 2 crap, but do you ever feel like doing some good ol' Dooming or Doom editing? |
| After The Talosian
Incident was released we moved on to Quake, and later Quake II. But
that wasn't the end of my involvement with Doom...
I made two maps for episode one of The Darkening, and I still think one of my maps for that is the best I've ever done - the lighting and shadow effects took me days to create, and the flow and architecture was great. I loved the little warehouse area I made in it as well, it was big and claustrophobic at the same time, and in hard mode there were three archviles running around it as well as a bunch of demons! Going in there and hearing the archviles muttering to themselves but not knowing where they were was scary... Unfortunately I haven't been able to do much since then. For some reason DCK didn't work on my new computer, and I don't have the time to learn a new editor. Until someone ports DCK to Win95 or I find an old PC to run it on again, I'm pretty much out of the scene. :-( |
| If not for Doom, what do you think you'd be doing right now? |
| Probably finishing
the fourth year of my Physics degree...
As it was I ended up spending so much time on Doom that my grades dropped off throughout my second year, and in the end I decided to drop out of uni. Now I'm President of my own small games company and make a living helping to run one of the biggest gaming sites around. Funny how things turn out... |
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