Quake's lightning gun bug explained [video]

Yeah, I didn't like Petersen's levels much at the time, but looking back on them later as a designer (I worked on a couple doomed Unreal projects) I can see he was trying to be as creative as possible within the limits of the engine, as far as getting away from "find the yellow key" style design that frankly, everyone was already bored of.

I had a pirate pre-release copy of Quake that I'd wished I'd saved. But in any case I do remember there were changes to the maps all over the game, so the levels were definitely not done in order. The biggest difference I remember is the ending in the final game is totally different. The pre-release had a more Doom style waves of monsters fight on a sort of giant terrace. I didn't particularly like that doom style ending, but also felt the release game's ending was kind of an anti climactic gimmick.

> unless you're saying that the best part of the original Doom games were the labyrinthine level design

Not the best part, but certainly one of the best parts. Doom and Doom 2 did labyrinths really well, much better than wolf3d (wolf's labyrinths were too samey and dull due to engine constraints) and I think better than nearly any game since. Games started foregoing labyrinths around when Half Life 1 came out (see also: Daggerfall vs Morrowind), I think because labyrinths filter plebs. But if you stick with Doom it'll teach you to have better spatial awareness that trivializes level learning in most other games. The new doom games particularly have linear level design very reminiscent of Half Life with some arena sections interspersed; they don't feel like Doom levels at all (except in very superficial ways, like "mars/hell themed".)

Such modern games lend themselves to navigating levels without maintaining a working knowledge of where you've been; at each instant your navigation choices may be informed by what you see on the screen right then without regard for what you've seen before. You can play Doom that way too, you'll get to the end eventually through brute force, but Doom does an excellent job of encouraging you to do better and develop your skill. If you remember where you are in relation to where you've already been, you can anticipate when a path is looping around to where you've already been before you actually round that corner. Maintaining orientation in this way, especially in a labyrinth, is a skill Doom excels at teaching. When you get good at it, such awareness of the level instills a sense of presence that just can't be conveyed any other way. Most modern games don't try to teach it; they expect that novice players won't be good at navigation and so, in the name of accessibility and mainstream appeal, refrain from challenging those players.

> The amazing thing about QuakeLive is that it initially ran in a browser window.

The performance was complete dogshit. Just simply awful. I had modern hardware at the time which ran both the original Q3A and ioquake3 at hundreds of fps if uncapped but QuakeLive in browser burned my computer up for sub-60 fps even with the graphics turned down. Unplayable. Not to mention they dropped Linux support. QuakeLive made me quit playing Quake. If I sound bitter about it now, you should have heard me then.

> It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product.

This is true but you have to look at it differently. There are generally two ways of looking at history: the 'great man'[0] theory, or the 'of the times' theory.

If you look at it one way Woz and Carmack and Torvalds and the others were instrumental in shaping their surroundings and without those specific people we would have lost out on basically the entire technological world as we know it.

If you look at it another way, they were inevitable -- the times were such that it was bound to happen (or at least extremely likely) because of a great confluence of events that could never be arranged or predicted, and if Woz had electrocuted himself making the Apple I power supply module then someone else would have done something similar around the same time and we end up at the same spot (but Steve Jobs becomes a moderately successful Bay Area Benz dealer and we all use Blackberry phones with physical keyboards in 2023).

The era of an individual engineer or programmer making a paradigm shifting breakthrough in his or her basement may be over, but that just means the times have shifted into another dynamic. What that is can not be predicted, but if we do survive the oncoming crises upon us and somehow also never end up turning the planet into smoldering radioactive ash over a shipping lane dispute or something, there will be a time when such a person can be expected to emerge and do it again.

[0] excuse the masculine nature of this terminology, but unfortunately that is what it is called, though I haven't formally studied history in a while and it could have changed

> Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza.

I'm pretty sure I've read it in "Masters of Doom".