Who is Martin Hunsager?

2 hours ago, Skronkidonk said:

I was looking at the Alien Vendetta wiki just to learn a few things about the wad and I was curious who made MAP01 Sunset (Which is one of my favorite Map01's)

In the Doom wiki it was made by someone named Martin Hunsager who also made Nemesis in Alien Vendetta. So I was curious to see other creations this guy has, but come to find out there is really no information about this dude. 

So I'm wondering if anyone here knows more about his Doom career because I love his style of map making, Nemesis and Sunset are just great maps.

I guess I could let him answer these questions himself, but I'll add a bit of second hand trivia / input seeing I have some time to kill right now.

I've known Martin since we were about eight-nine years old. He was and is a part of the Norwegian Stavanger-based click that got heavily into Doom back in the mid 90ies. He wandered more to the side of Cooperative multiplayer / single player and mapping - while the rest of us dabbled in competitive Deathmach and speedrunning as well. Henning Skogsto, Jan Jansen, Zokum and Kim Malde were all part of the same click.

I still play Cooperative with Martin regularly, and yes, he's still mapping off the grid - so you might be in luck if you want more of his stuff. 

As for his maps, he did dabble with a few that didn't see completion, ment for previous local projects. Luckily two made it into AV. These are the only current public releases.

AV's "Nemesis" have gotten somewhat of a notorious reputation the latter years, the novelty of a huge sprawling open castle map seems lost on people now that limit removing mapping is the norm :)

It's still one of my favorite AV maps, and I belive popularly underrated, especially given the tools and engine it was designed for. There's an obvious hindsight issues with the caves being too cramped, and I'm sure there's other aspects of it he would have tweaked today - but the map is a grand adventure, and definitely a source of inspiration to several maps that followed it through the years. Slowing down the pace is the way to go in "Nemesis" - naturally this will not be to everyone's taste.

"Sunset" is a beautiful map, agreed. The basic layout is simple and slick. If you go back and look at the first release of AV, you can see the unedited version before Kim went over it with some extra detailing. Visually it became a darker and more atmospheric affair.
 

We received mixed feedback on the alterations done to Map01 from the AV team - Anthony Soto uttered clear disapproval and Martin wasn't too happy about it himself, but then (and still) it seemed obvious to me that it elevated the map considerably visually. For some added trivia, Kim did screw up one of the secret areas when adding gradient light as he accidentally left multiple sectors marked with the "secret" property. It was an easy mistake to make back in the day with the crummy tools and no sound cue to tell when you entered a secret upon testing.

For some more (useless) trivia while we're at it - both Martin and Kim opted out of doing monster and item placement in their maps, say for a few "key spots" (like some eye candy powerups, a Cyberdemon and a few Arch-viles in Map11 and Map20), so any gameplay frustration aside from possible architectural quirks must be blamed on me.

It just seemed like a natural thing back then that I'd do the monster placement since I spent far more time playing the game, and time constraints because of travles became an issue for Martin during the final AV stretch. It was more of an issue to do gameplay in Misri Halek than in Nemesis for sure, the map had plenty of opportunity for interesting combat. In any future releases, I'm sure mr. Hunsager will do his own gameplay as well, add to it he has 20 years worth of extra experience now. I would be anticipating anything he (potentially, eventually?) completes with the modern bag of tools.

(Hi Chris! - The review site might see more updates some time in the future, but lets be honest; there's better review formats out and about these days that do not put people to sleep :)