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| Doomworld: Do you agree with the changes id made? |
| Ty: In several cases you'd have to say we didn't agree. But that's the way it works when you get stuff published, whether a game or a novel. |
| Did TeamTNT have any say about the method in which Evilution was included in Final Doom? Were you consulted about the inclusion of The Plutonia Experiment, the title of the game, the packaging or the advertising, etc etc? |
| No, no, no, no, and no, not counting the etc.'s. We got virtually no credit for it at all, had to beg for a link from an obscure web page, and even the ENDOOM screen that did refer to us wasn't seen by DOOM95 users (the main way it was released). We didn't even get a text file put on the CD. We did get some Tshirts and copies of a rather lame comic book, but no one outside of the 'Net has a clue that we did anything. |
| Evilution was originally to be a free product. How did you feel about denying Doomers a megawad they had been awaiting for months? |
| We didn't deny anyone anything except something for nothing, which is what we've been making ever since. Some folks never bought it, which is a shame because they missed out on some good stuff. Now it's hard to even find it. If id ever quits selling it, I'll try to get rights to distribute it on the 'Net. |
| By looking through old archives of postings to the Doom newsgroups, it appears that the mast majority of people fell somewhere between "upset" and "furious" when they discovered that Evilution might not be a free product as they had expected. Did this overwhelmingly negative reaction surprise you? |
| You need to look at that over time. There were many who felt sold out (and told us so, trust me), because they knew that id Software didn't want anyone to make money off wads and here we were doing it. It took us a couple of weeks to get decisions made and agreements with id, during which time we couldn't say under what circumstances we were selling. Once they discovered it was id Software itself that was the company we were dealing with, we not only got a different general feeling from the public, but specific apologies from some of the more outspoken individuals. The rest were of the opinion that they shouldn't pay for anything, so there was no satisfying them. Some no doubt had pirated DOOM already, so they weren't about to buy levels... |
| With the benefit of hindsight, do you feel that TeamTNT made the right decisions in regards to Evilution? Is there anything else that you would have done? |
| II think we did
OK, overall. We learned a lot, especially about how hard it is to
take 2-3 dozen people from all over the world and create a legal entity
out of them. That's tough. We learned about how little say
the little guy has in negotiations, and we could have cut through a lot
of frustration with that knowledge up front. Still, it was a good
experience overall, and we're proud of the results. Too bad id and
GTI never did get any fixes out for the product, and we probably spend
more time supporting the players than they do, even to this day.
I will say that I don't think I'd ever do it again. (Here's the opportunity for someone with bags of money to make a liar out of me) |
| When was Icarus started? |
| As soon as Evilution was done, which was really in October '95, we already knew we wanted to do more. TNT2, as we called it initially, was being discussed before Evilution was done because the final part of working on Evilution was the usual tweaking, packaging, etc. (done by a small "punch team") and level authors were bored already. So I'd have to say there's not much time between and you could almost say they overlapped. |
| Evilution seemed to be a compilation of mostly unrelated levels. In what way did you get around that in Icarus without making all 32 levels look the same? |
| Well, we cheated
a bit. Icarus takes place on a spaceship, so we had about a third
of the levels actually on shipboard, another third on the planet we were
circling, and the remaining third were simulations onboard the ship in
a Holodeck-ish simulator. The simulator levels could be anything
at all, so that allowed some freedom to innovate.
We did have several different sorts of areas on the ship, so other than consistency of doorways and decorations, there were opportunities to experiment there too. |
| How would you rate Icarus against Evilution in quality? |
| I think we learned a lot from Evilution, and it helped to have some good standards in place before we started Icarus. We had example levels, common exit pods, and stuff like that to lend a consistency to the product. We also were able to make good use of DCC (Rand Phares' Doom Consistency Checker) to eliminate a large number of common wad errors. Icarus has been very popular. |
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