Logo made by Armando 'vinkka' Carmona - http://vinkka.telefragged.com
 
Doomworld: What happened to those levels which were not accepted?
 
Sverre: They're all included in my freeware Cabal1-7 series.
 
What was your inspiration behind the Cabal series?
 
Beyond my obsession with Doom-editing, the drive was to create a full 32-level episode, with a semblance of a story-line and solid thematic levels with some new design-twists.

Wait... did you ever play the upgraded versions of my Cabal levels? Those that are only available on Compuserve right now? It just occurred to me that none of those ever made it to ftp.cdrom.com and that any reviews made (or _not_ made ;) were of redundant versions of my levels... The ones on CiS had major bug-fixes and a few added areas, etc (one of the ftp versions had so little ammo it was almost impossible to finish).  The Cabal zip-files on Compuserve also includes demos of me finishing the levels, on skill 4.  Bet you never knew about those, huh?

 
Sorry, I dropped CiS a long time ago.  Speaking of which, when did you join Compuserve and discover the Action Games forum?
 
That was the fall of '94, my first year in Bristol, England. A friend was already hooked up on CiS and it seemed cool at the time. It actually WAS cool at the time since many of the early-day gurus hung out there...
 
Such as?
 
Besides id's early presence (mostly Shawn Green) there were such prominent names as John "Dr Sleep" Anderson, Alex Mayberry (Xatrix's ex-lead level designer), Richard "Graymatter" Gray (yep, different nickname for the Levelord back then), Mal Blackwell, Stormin' Norman, Anthony Burden, that DeeP guy (ugh) and several others that for whatever reason chose not to go full-time into the game industry, including the whole of the Eternal team. Oh, and the best female level designer I know of, Lisa Moore. She rocks, check her stuff out.
 
How was Eternal Doom first started?
 
I wasn't in during the first 6 months, but I believe it was started by Jim Flynn and John Anderson. There was little "real" progress in the first months of development, but when Paul Schmitz took over the reins as project leader things started taking off...
 
How did you get involved in Eternal Doom?
 
Ehrm... Let me see. I guess I was contacted by Jim (I already knew him from the Master levels) who invited me in, after my work had been "dissected" by the other members.
 
Did you only make three levels for Eternal Doom, or were there any that were not included?
 
Yep, only three. There were a couple of others that I started that never got done, including a "crashed" space-ship that was to be the first level. However Jim made some comment about the wall-textures looking like melted ice cream or something, and that sort of killed my interest in that level. Damn you Jim!!!!! The funny thing is that while Nucleus (Map 05) and Darkdome (Map 12) took me almost 2 years to do from start to finish (not kidding), Timegate (Map 04) took only two weeks. We basically needed a time-gate level to fit the story line and I slapped that one together using a few unused ideas from other levels. The bugger is that I've had a lot of feedback from people who prefer Timegate over the other two. What a waste of time, eh?
 
Apparently, many of the tectures in Eternal Doom were of your own creation. Has this graphical talent helped you in your current work at ION Storm?
 
I basically did all the original art, or everything that wasn't snatched from Hexen or some other internet-wad. I did over 600 textures for that one, I believe. That experience did help a bit here at Ion, especially during the beginning of Daikatana when each level designer didn't have assigned texture artists. Nowadays there's no use for my 2D skills since the texture guys here have talents far beyond mine.
 
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