Twenty-five years ago

I do not know if this level was actually ever published as I cannot find it on the old idgames2 archive but around the time I had published other levels, but they were mostly for Capture the Flag on Quake2 rather than the original Quake. As for Quake3 I remember making maybe one or two levels but I have not even tried looking for the asset files. Back then where files were kept on my computers was far from organised with a directory structure that followed what I vaguely remember as highly dogmatic and dubious ideas, which is a major reason why when I went to New Zealand whole hard drives were simply imaged. There is even some Apple Macintosh System 7 file-system images in there.

After having to make one as part of a group project in the early-2000s I lost interest in computer games and aside from the odd demonstration mostly avoided playing them for the rest of the decade. I am pretty certain I still have a game or two that are still within thelr cellophane wrapping, as even when I did start playing computer games again, it was almost always a source port of the original Doom using a fan-made expansion pack. When I was making Quake levels I was very into online multi-player team-based gameplay but these days I am only interested in off-line games where I don't have to deal with the crass attitude of teenage boys that I disliked even when I was one of them.

To play a modern computer game would require a signfiicant investment in a high-end graphics card and I suspect in practice I would have to build a dedicated gaming rig that ran Windows rather than my usual Linux — an investment too big given my level of interest. Looking at YouTube videos of the latest Doom Eternal it is now all about graphics and I think a lot of the ‘new’ ideas it has are basically rip-offs of various mods for the original Doom, most notably from the rather over-the-top Brutal Doom. I doubt I would play any game more recent than Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which incidentally I never got round to completing.

Looking back my interest in content creation was more to do with technical interest rather than any artistic merit, and even with Quake3 level design had moved a bit too much towards 3D modelling whereas the earlier games were more like computer-aided design. I never even attempted any Doom3 level design even though I think a level editor was actually built into Doom3 itself. How the whole computer game industry operates with digital download subscriptions rather than shrink-wrapped delivery is alien to me, and I have long moved onto other things.