Gaming Horror – it's a Game Dev's Life

Ah yeah, it is always inspiring to read up on John Carmack’s work. He has written about his experience converting Wolfenstein 3D to the iPhone, including how the project came to be.

In case you don’t know who John Carmack is — no, i’m not going to tell you the obvious story about the dark side of the moon where you must have been living for the last 20 years — rather i’m just going to state that John Carmack is the master mind behind Wolfenstein, DooM and Quake. If you have ever enjoyed any of these titles you will be delighted reading this book:

I know i have been.

You see, i got started with game development … no, that is not correct, my intention to get into game development got started the day i first connected to Compuserve. At that time an expensive service – a monthly fee plus (in addition – can you believe?) an hourly fee depending on where you spend your time on, plus the regular phone bill. I still went to school back then and everything had to be payed in US Dollars, which compared to German currency (Deutsche Mark) was strong and fluctuated a lot. There was always the possibility that next months bill was 20% more just because of the change in exchange rate.

So i logged on to Compuserve and after some orientation time i found the Compuserve Action Games forum – that was the place for me. Eventually i became a voluntary staffer there and later got recruited by Joe Siegler of Apogee/3D Realms as Sysop for their Compuserve forum.

But the real decisive moment was when i scanned the list of online users on the first day i logged on to Compuserve. And there, among two dozen other users, was … John Carmack. Or “jcarmack” i think his forum name was. I’ve exchanged two lines with him and was stunned – i just chatted with my hero, programmer of DooM, mano a mano! Ok, i could never proof if it was really him but the fact that he didn’t put on a show and answered in short, concise words was enough for me. From that day on i called myself “DooM Addict” (you see, with all the weird characters but not 133t speak) and having been so close (if only virtually) to one of the heroes of DooM i knew i wanted to be one of them.

Ok, eventually i realized that working for id Software isn’t ever going to happen but that realization eventually landed me a job at a small but local Gameboy Color developer. On a related note, i also got to know my long-term girlfriend on Compuserve.

And that’s how i got started in the game industry. In case you want to learn more about me… <– click here!