Tom Hall, man Behind Rise of the Triad, Suffers Stroke

Tom Hall, known as the man and mind behind games like Commander Keen, and Rise of the Triad, along with others, suffered a stroke recently.  He’s currently in hospital undergoing rehabilitation.

I was surprised to see, while checking through the feeds of twitter accounts that I follow that contained a tweet where Tom admitted to having a stroke yesterday.

“Um, had a stroke. Yeah, I know right! The hospital food is decent though. (Excuse if I don't respond quickly though--lotsa tests.)”

“Thx for all the good thoughts. Start rehab tomorrow to fix strength/coordination in right hand/foot. Woo hoo! Rockin' the rehab! Oh yeeeah!”

“Thx for the love but don't send flowers! Hay fever! Send a card if you must. But facebook love is enough!”

“They took 20 vials of blood this morning. My arml went flat like apiece of paper. Lucky I had that inflation tube installed.”

George Broussard of 3DR Realms tweeted the following:

“Tom Hall, @tommune, had a stroke and is in hospital. Designed Keen, ROTT, Anachronox, more. id, 3dr, ion and king's isle. Wish him well.”

John Romero tweeted the following as well:

“@tommune had a stroke yesterday. He's in the hospital. Send him well wishes, please.”

George and Tom know each other quite well seeing Tom worked at Apogee Software back in the 90’s after leaving id Software supposedly after a disagreement with John Carmack over the creative direction Doom was taking.

Tom and John are friends who co-founded id Software along with John Carmack and Adrian Carmack.
Tom, in addition to being credited to working on ROTT and the Keen series, also worked at id Software on Wolf 3D, Spear of Destiny. After leaving Apogee after working on Duke Nukem II, ROTT, Terminal Velocity and Duke Nukem 3D, later on he worked on a little game called Deus Ex as well as Anachronox at Ion Storm with his friend John Romero.

He’s now at KingsIsle Entertainment.

Tom is also credited with naming the popular file format WAD, or "Where's All the Data?".
On a personal note, I wish Tom all the best. I’ve enjoyed playing his games over the years.
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Source: Twitter

Tom Hall, man Behind Rise of the Triad, Suffers Stroke

It’s Your Birthday: John Romero

On this day, back in 1967, Alfonso John Romero was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He turns 42 today.

John Romero is a designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry, and is one of the original co-founders of id Software. He’s worked on a number of their games like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Doom, Doom II and Quake. He also worked as Executive Producer and Game Designer on Heretic and HeXen.

Other than id Software, he worked at or co-founded companies like inCider, Capital Ideas Software, Origin Systems, Inside Out Software, Ideas From The Deep, Softdisk, Ion Storm, Monkeystone Games, Midway Games, Gazillion Entertainment and Slipgate Ironworks. Slipgate Ironworks recently experienced some layoffs. Slipgate Ironworks is owned by Gazillion Entertainment, of which John is the Executive Vice-President and Creative Director. He’s also the Chairman of the CPL Advisory Board.

Interesting facts about John Romero:

• He’s lived in Colorado, Arizona, California, and England.
• John started programming games when he was 11 or so.
• He is credited with coining the term "deathmatch", and is thought of as the “father of deathmatch competitions”.
• John likes to make sound effects and taunt people while he plays games. There’s a song in Doom II, called “Waiting for Romero to Play”, because he was so electrifying and entertaining.
• The pose of the space marine on the cover of the Doom box was taken from a photo of John Romero.
• Daikatana is labeled as one of the worst games of all time.
• John Romero was once killed but came back to life.
• John is a big fan of wikis.
• He refers to himself as “The Romero”.
• John almost worked at Blue Sky Productions, eventually renamed Looking Glass Technologies. Looking Glass Technologies made System Shock, which was technologically superior to Doom and Doom II, but was overlooked despite this.
• He once put his Ferrari up for auction on eBay. He seems to love them as much as John Carmack does.
• He’s been married about three times, including his current wife, and has three children. 
• His son works at Slipgate Ironworks.
• He’s named after his father, Alfonso. His mother is Virginia, and he has a brother named Ralph.
• John is often said to have the best hair in the industry.
• John was the final boss, The Icon of Sin, in Doom II. He was presented as a head on a stick.
• John likes listening to heavy metal music. This is why most of the music in Doom is inspired by metal bands, although the MIDI tracks were composed by Bobby Prince.
• John likes being in the spotlight. John Carmack said so.
• There’s a 95 % chance that John Romero will read this.

Quotes by John Romero

"I completely love playing and designing games and always will. I am so into games that I listen to game music all day. That may sound strange, but you can guarantee I'm a hardcore gamer and would never let you down by designing a crappy title." – Daikatana

"If you walk into CompUSA or Babbage's and see the vast array of game titles on the shelf, chances are that 95% of those titles are not worth playing." – Daikatana

"Daikatana will be the greatest game of all time"

It’s Your Birthday: John Romero

John Carmack’s Birthday Today

Today is the birthday John D. Carmack II, also known more casually as John Carmack. He was born in 1970, and turns 39 today.

John Carmack is one of the four original co-founders of the legendary id software, and the only remaining one of those co-founders still with the company (John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall have since left). id Software, which was independent for many years, was bought by ZeniMax Media this year. id is responsible for many well known game franchises such as Commander Keen (actually Softdisk), Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake.

John is also responsible for many innovations in graphics, with id’s games, particularly the Doom and Quake series but also Rage (currently in development at time of writing), having showcased the latest developments in game graphics. Doom showed off the id Tech 1 engine, Quake II the id Tech 2, Quake III Arena the id Tech 3, Doom 3 the id Tech 4, and Rage the id Tech 5 engine, which will also be used by future games like Doom 4.

These engines mentioned have been used by many other games like Hexen, Hexen II, Call of Duty, Half-Life, Soldier of Fortune 1& 2, and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

Interesting facts:

• John is a rocketry enthusiast and is the founder and lead engineer of Armadillo Aerospace, founded in 2000.
• John has a love for Ferraris, and even gave one of his away in a competition years ago.
• John was once arrested for breaking into a school and attempting to steal Apple II computers.
• John Carmack is a supporter of copyleft, or open source projects.
• John Carmack is an atheist.
• John Carmack is supposedly the one who coined the phrase, “when it’s done”, which was subsequently used and abused by Apogee, which initially published some of id’s early games like Wolfenstein 3D, and is now known as 3D Realms, particularly with Duke Nukem Forever. This is because of his tendency to avoid set release dates, which inevitably change over the course of games’ development schedules.

Many people in the industry, including gaming journalists, consider John Carmack as their hero and a genius.

John Carmack’s Birthday Today

Windows XP: The seven year itch is over

I read an article in the Techno Times supplement of the Cape Times recently, and apparently Windows XP is now being edged out slowly, and Vista's coming in. Microsoft allegedly gives each operating system about a ten year span. The first five years is for free guaranteed mainstream support, and that apparently comes to a close in April 2009. After this, it enters the extended support period which will last until 2014. If you add it up, it’s actually thirteen years since its release in 2001 to 2014, so XP has had quite a long run so far, and will continue for the next five years it seems, and software and hardware companies will have to continue supporting it for the duration.

If this is the case with every Operating System, then there’s little one can do. When Vista first came out, there were some very mixed reactions, with many judging that it did not differ so greatly from XP to merit it as a new OS. Even on performance benchmark tests, XP SP3 is on a level with and even outperforms Vista. Many have stuck with XP, and according to statistics, out of more than one billion computers worldwide, approximately 700 million of them have XP, with the remaining 300 million using Vista or another OS.

How desperate is Microsoft anyway? It’s a multi-billion dollar company; it’s not like they need the money.

It started off with Microsoft only letting Direct X 10 be compatible with Vista, boycotting XP users, and making them upgrade to Vista- and a new OS isn’t cheap. Then they come with this nonsense about now not having free support for us anymore.

I stuck with XP after I read and heard many arguments that Vista isn’t worth it, even one by John Carmack of id Software. In fact, I like playing classic games so much, and I’ve just got them working with XP, and I have everything the way I want it. I don’t need to switch right now, and most likely I won’t switch for the next five years until nothing supports it anymore, and I’m forced into it.

Windows XP: The seven year itch is over