Quake Strogganoff Spotlight: idTech

It should come as no surprise that I might have a bit of a biased slant towards idTech, although I do dabble from time to time in other engines like Unreal. idTech will always hold a special place in my heart as it was my first real entry into modding when I was but a wee lad and Doom was the game that rocked my world and started me on my path. A path which may have wavered from art to level design to project management to business to animation to writing and eventually to programming but it was a rainbow of learning and pain (it’s a good pain though) and fun (because I like pain).

The year was the mid-90’s, a few friends and I would gather around the warm glow of our CRT screens and take turns playing Doom in between classes mandatory by the [REDACTED] and while my friends and fellow classmates were content in simply whiling away their spare time playing, I found myself curious about what went into such a wonderous thing. I had never thought it could get any better than Wolfenstein 3D, but Doom shattered my entire paradigm and I was instantly hooked.

I remember it fondly, Father San had just sacrificed a few tourists who had been lured away from their group by one of the other members and it was during the cleanup after the Apsis Ceremony when the topic of game design came up. It seemed Father San had apparently taken notice and had even played the game himself which I remember thinking was such a huge deal, it was like a peasant finding out a king was into something they were and I’d like to think that it was this that connected us in more ways than just initiate and leader but that’s just my personal feeling on the matter.

He said he found my desires to become a game designer intriguing saying “to destroy is human nature, to create is one step closer to divinity.” And shortly thereafter gifted me a book called 3D Game Alchemy for Doom, Doom II, Heretic and Hexen. It was one of the only books I managed to save after the raid. It was a massive book which came with a CD-ROM containing level editors, free to use art and a bunch of user made levels. He suggested I first try to make a level and if that seems a daunting task, a single room. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I remember him saying as he wiped some blood off his favorite golf club.

That evening I was so excited (which was good since it was customary after the Apsis to stay awake for 48 hours) that I spent 2 days straight just absorbing everything I could, although if I’m being totally honest here it’s mostly a blur in retrospect, but what I do remember, I remember fondly. And upon waking up after finally making it through, I had my first user-made level for Doom 2 using WadAuthor.

Fast forward and one of my closest friends and I would make our own maps in Duke Nukem 3D, often on separate computers and then stitch them together in BUILD. Inspired by a CTF map in Blood we would make up our own bases, filled with traps and hidden passage ways. I even had a huge tower with a diving board on the top and a bullseye at the base where we would take turns re-enacting the Ättestupa.

Now, up to this point I felt I had a pretty good grasp on the art side. I could bring in new tiles and replace enemy sprites. Heck, I even ported a bunch of Doom monsters into Duke Nuke 3D, along with whatever Alchemy had to offer. It was an amazing feeling, if even just for myself and my friends, again this was before the internet plus any outside communication was often not allowed unless cleared by Father San.

Compared to Doom mapping, BUILD was amazing. You could actually walk through your level as you created it. This might not seem like much today with engines and WYSIWYG editors like Unity, UE4 or even DoomBuilder but most Doom editors at the time didn’t even have a 3D preview, or if they did, they were crude wireframes.

But alas, it wouldn’t be long until Quake. And the leap to true 3D. Something to also realize like Doom, Duke 3D wasn’t true 3D and despite some workarounds by BUILD, making true 3D geometry just wasn’t in the cards. Sure, you could fake a bridge by making sprites solid and locking them to a certain orientation but even pulling off the large torch stands in Quake’s start map was pretty much near impossible and I was hungry to jump into true 3D!

Plus, lighting was automated which I found amazing considering all lighting in BUILD is done by hand. So, just appreciate that when you play a BUILD engine game that a level designer had to shade every wall, draw every shadow via sectors by hand. This was truly the era of the level designer who would even sign their names, writing them out in sectors, like Richard ‘The Levelord’ Gray.

Quake was another entire shift in paradigm for me. Leaving behind the notion of sectors and linedefs and thinking two dimensionally. Like the square in Flatland being lifted up by a sphere I was about to elevate and see things from a whole different perspective. By this time I had gotten much faster in learning new tools, going from Qoole to Quarke and eventually to Worldcraft. Radiant at that time (Quake 2) was just too confusing to me. Plus, it had been mentioned that Valve was using Worldcraft for their upcoming game Half-Life which I was ridiculously stoked about ever since I read about it in Inter-Action magazine. So, I started learning Worldcraft and diving into the wonderful world of Quake and Quake 2 levels. It was going well but then… came the raid.

Bells rang and sirens blared and bullhorns projected authoritative orders to surrender. Gunfire erupted. I was in the computer lab at the time (I had practically taken to living there), trying to make sense of the chaos overtaking the compound when a mortally wounded Father San stumbled in. As the other members continued to fight outside, he told me to follow my dreams, pointing to the Alchemy book that had by then fallen on the floor next to him and was soaking up a considerable amount of blood. It was a somber moment and what else was said, I will take to my grave.

The fighting outside had stopped by the time he put a grenade in his mouth and motioned for me to go. After that, like many of the younger members, I was uprooted and scattered around the world. Foster care and institutions soon followed along with social workers before I would eventually find calm. But anyway enough of the boring stuff…

Once I was able to get set up again, I was back to making levels but it just wasn’t the same. Despite it being a dream of mine I had just lost all motivation. A motivation that would lay dormant, never disappear and in recent years has re-emerged. Thus, this blog and a love for the now retro gaming scene feels like a return to yesterday, picking up almost where I had left off. Perhaps in part it takes me back to the last time I ever felt truly happy and maybe in a way I’m still following my dreams after all these years and with any luck, dear reader, I hope you are too.