drygnfyre

I learned this because some source ports don't show a wall at all, they just show an open alcove. And on other source ports (or perhaps the official release), the wall texture is very different from the others. What took me longer to figure out was how to access the secret. For years I would just no clip up there, I didn't understand how to run in Doom for a long time so I didn't realize you had to quickly reach the elevator.

Yes. I didn't play Doom "correctly" until I was in high school. As a kid I just liked messing around with "God mode" and running through the maps.

I discerned this just from noticing that M3 had the secret exit. Just like Sigil put it in M6, I used that to figure out what episode these are supposed to replace.

A true throwback to the original release of Doom. The University of Wisconsin's servers crashed when something like 10,000 people tried to download the shareware all at once.

Nightmare! by id's own admission was not intended to be serious or balanced.

Yes, this appears to be a big issue. Romero was announcing new games, features, story lines, when they really were just proposals. Then they'd get negative backlash when proposals changed. Supposedly he did this with Ion Storm, too, announcing Daikatana 2 before the first game was even finished.

I think that was inevitable. Carmack probably knew that, too, but he wanted to stay small as long as possible. As "Masters of Doom" put it, Romero was the rock star, Carmack was the programmer. So that really drove their visions about how the company should be.

From what I've read, that seemed to have been due to the business differences I mentioned. Romero wanted id to constantly license their engine, keep working on new games, things like that. Carmack preferred staying small, and moving from one engine to the next, even if only one game used each one. And since Carmack was the programmer, the other owners sided with him. (This seems to be the simplified take anyway). But it seems outside of that, they've been on friendly terms for the most part.

Usually maps that had secret exits, disliked them because I was always frustrated trying to figure out how to access them. I hated E1M3 for a long time because that one room in front of the secret exit you could peer into, along with the soul sphere room, just teased me. At the time I was too young to really understand spatial thinking and of course in hindsight, figuring out how to get into both rooms is pretty simple. But until I learned that, I hated that map so much.

Do they really have bad blood? I'm not super up to date on this stuff, but my understanding was their issues were always strictly business, Carmack wanted to stay small, Romero wanted to expand. Was there more to it than just that?

Exact same logic with award shows. Your favorite movie not winning Best Picture doesn't mean it failed. It got nominated, it got recognized. Award shows are great for advertising films, regardless of if they actually won awards (read: glorified opinions) or not. There are a lot of Doom WADs I would have never heard if it wasn't for the Cacoawards. It them winning or not winning was irrelevant, it was the recognition that was important.

I think it's supposed to be Earth, but others have even suggested Heaven. After all it's supposed to sort of bridge the gap between Episode 3 and Doom 2, so I always assumed Doomguy returned to Earth, but the invasion already began? Episode 4 has my favorite skybox, though. I always like the sort of "perm-sunset" that it was going for, and episodes that have a similar style and look are always some of my favorites.

Yeah, I didn't realize the first two shots are hitscan until watching some guy do it on a let's play. And it's still pretty quick to just do two-shot bursts. I started doing that and now I like the chain gun a lot.

Something I learned regarding it in the past couple years was it's not a range, like I always thought. It's a fixed series. Like, the damage dealt from bullets, I always thought it was 5-15 points of damage. Instead, it's either 5, 10, or 15. There's also some scenario where it's impossible to deal max BFG damage due to limitations in how the RNG works.

Something I learned recently, but it's more about Quake. Somewhat famously, id tried their hand at being a publisher and not just a developer. Quake was on an encrypted CD that contained the full game (as well as some others). You could get a hex editor and extract the CD keys to register the game. This let a lot of people get the game for free, and caused id to stop trying to be a publisher. Anyway, what I learned recently was the encryption technology was not limited to just games, and a lot of CDs from the era used the same setup. Which means you could also hack those and get free software. Unlike today, there wasn't much to stop people from either hacking the CD keys, or just installing the software, asking for a refund, then just promising not to reinstall it. I was familiar with the Quake story but I didn't know just how common that setup was in the 90s. I guess a lot of people were getting free software.