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Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Doom Story?
I remember loading Doom for the first time from a 3.5-inch disk back in 1994. In 1997 the source code for Doom's Linux version was released just before Christmas. A hidden Doom level appeared in Microsoft Excel, and a Doom video was also used to promote Windows 95. By 2004 a drummer from Nine Inch Nails was recording the theme song for Doom 3...
There was that weird movie with The Rock and Karl Urban. Last year Doom was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. This January John Romero created a new level, and this weekend's release of a new Doom also featured a mod with one of the the original Doom II levels from 1994.
After a storied history, millions of frags, and thousands of hours of in-world gameplay, Doom holds a unique place in both the history of gaming and geeks. So share your favorite stories in the comments. What's your personal best-loved story about Doom?
There was that weird movie with The Rock and Karl Urban. Last year Doom was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. This January John Romero created a new level, and this weekend's release of a new Doom also featured a mod with one of the the original Doom II levels from 1994.
After a storied history, millions of frags, and thousands of hours of in-world gameplay, Doom holds a unique place in both the history of gaming and geeks. So share your favorite stories in the comments. What's your personal best-loved story about Doom?
I beat nightmare mode in 1&2, it took a lot of saves. It also was at like 5fps on my old computer for doom2. Also I made a null modem to play with my buddy before the internet.
God spoke to me
10b2 was the network of choice for playing Doom in my neck of the woods (around 1994-5 I think). I never had a direct computer-to-ISP connection (modem or otherwise) after that.
That game was the reason I got this card called a SoundBlaster that one of my buddies swore I needed. He was right.
One day when I was very frustrated with work and people, I fired up Doom and got to the last level with the Big Nasty...and went into God mode. I decided I wanted to inflict maximum pain (to work out my frustrations) so I went after him with a chain saw...It was WONDERFUL!!! I chased him around and had him howling for a good half hour, but didn't kill him. But that was the best use for Doom I ever had...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
I found out that the text chat in Doom used a standard IPX broadcast mechanism - when my father (a network engineer) came in and told me off for my choice of language.
I remember setting up bus coax Ethernet in our apartment complex to network everyone together to play. This was before WiFi and we didn't even have a hub. Good times, but don't forget to terminate the bus.
Doom was the first game that made me flinch IRL. I turned around a corner and an Imp launched a fireball at my face. I actually ducked IRL believing a fireball was really coming at me! No other game had such an impact on me before.
I beat nightmare mode on my abacus.
You are welcome on my lawn.
My family got our first PC in 1994, I was 13 at the time and it came with a Demo disc that had the shareware version of the game. We initially had 2MB of RAM in that 486 DX/33MHz.. so we went out and spent $90 on two 4mb 30pin SIMMS so we could actually play it. Doom was the game that finally pulled me away from consoles and got me into PC gaming, and soon after, programming. Which eventually lead to a career in Network Security / System Administration, and then my own company. I owe a lot to Carmack / Romero's ID software. Anyone else on /. remember the 3-screen configuration: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Three_screen_mode Seeing that in the golden era of LAN gaming was so awesome, good times =)
/* * pope1 */
After we had played the heck out of the one-disk Doom demo, someone gave us a bootleg copy of the 3-disk full game.
We played it, were suitably awestruck, and called the phone number in the game.
"Hi, we're calling because someone gave us a bootleg copy of Doom...
Suspicious voice: "And...?"
"...and we want to pay for it. How much do we owe you, and where do we send the check?"
Stunned silence, then "Send it to this address, and mark it attention [forgotten name]. Oh, and make sure you include your return address!"
Some weeks later, a large box arrived with a retail copy of Doom, and a whole bunch of Doom and Castle Wolfenstein swag.
I remember paying my month's worth of pocket money back when I was at school to get a book which described the inner workings of Doom. It came with 10 floppies with the Doom source code and tools.
Incidentally, the book was quite good. It described in details the BSP algorithm used to compute the visible areas, fixed point math and the way Doom used non-standard VGA modes to do backbuffer flips. This book got me started on computer graphics (though I haven't used it much in my career).
Apart from having Doom dreams, which I'm sure we all had (yeah?), I remember going to a supermarket after a long session, and instead of turning to walk into an aisle, turning before the aisle, and strafing out into it. At that point, Doom had leaked into real life....
I hooked up my computer to my home stereo to show the game off to my roommates. I lived in an apartment in a bad neighborhood at the time.
I started to play and got as far as two shotgun blasts in before pressing pause to answer the phone. Shortly after the phone rang there was a very loud and forceful knock at the door. Said knock was followed by 'open up, police!'.
I went to the door, confused why the police were banging on my door. Several officers were standing outside with their guns in their hands while I had my phone in my hand. In my confusion I asked them what they wanted. They said they had reports of shots being fired and demanded entrance to my apartment. I let them in and showed them my computer with the game still paused. They were incredulous and didn't believe me, searching the apartment instead.
Ten seconds later they came back after finding nothing of interest. They then let me show them the computer game. I then showed them that by clicking the keyboard I could make the shotgun noise they heard.
Many additional police vehicles were outside. The officers had not yet bothered to tell the many additional cops outside that the shotgun was just a videogame. Much panic ensued as the officers outside started to yell 'shots fired' with their fellow officers inside my apartment..
Moral of the story. Make sure the officers communicate to each other. Amazingly when all was said and done I got off with a warning (since it was before 10pm) and many policeman looking at how I hooked the computer into the stereo.
I was nearly 16 when Doom came out, as a young nerd at a high school in a rough area, it was certainly an influential game (as was my PC in general) to get escapism from the bullying one gets in a shithole neighbourhood and as a nerd, which 22 years ago, wasn't a cool thing.
I played the shit out of the game, at least for the next 4 years. I recall playing RS232 matches with 2 other pals, taking turns since it was only 2 player of course. Until we saved up pocket money basically for 16bit Coax network cards. (I still have my t-piece and terminator) I will say figuring out IPX / SPX when you have no goddamn idea what you're doing is tricky but when it works, wow.
I played basically all released versions of the game, none of the alpha stuff sadly. I recall getting hold of the patches which were differential patches back then. They took forever to patch the data but saved space. IIRC the release for Doom 2 was Doom 2 v1.666 at launch - they eventually patched the Doom 1 engine to the same level and beyond (last I recall was 1.9 or 1.9b or some such)
I learnt benchmarking thanks to Doom, in our MP matches, you had a 1/4 of a second advantage if the ............ loading dots would load the WAD quicker, I got VLB HDD controllers and all kinds of wacky stuff set up to get the game to load quicker and timed stuff.
I was a keyboarder initially, until we played it on a BBS in Melbourne, Australia - where I eventually learnt to go full mouse controls, I was one of the better keyboarders out there, but mouse playing was a whole new level.
I bought specific mice for the game, like the Logitech Wingman gaming mouse, no wheel to get the way or excess buttons, great shape. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=logitech+wingman+gaming+mouse&hl=en&tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr&ei=Zyk5V8rHJ5Do0gS11JqQCQ
I remember E1M1 at some point in development was modified, the original version didn't have the button to the left near the platform, which opens the window, to go out to the slime (armor) secret early. Dunno when that was modified, perhaps at the stage of Ultimate Doom.
I've finished the entire game 100/100/100 (items / secrets / kills) but doubt I could anymore.
Like many advanced MP players, I know the trick to fire the BFG directly at a wall you're facing, then strafe out from behind the wall to kill people instantly.
We used to wall run too, mostly on Doom 2 Map01 along the hallway.
I played in the 1'st PAX Australia 2013 classic gaming Doom event over in their PC hall. I think about 30 or 40 players entered. I came in 4'th IIRC, kid who won was like 24 or 25 (I was 36 at the time) I was pretty impressed to be honest, to see someone so young have a reverence for Doom. (Although I've always had a beef with using the plasma as a bit of a 'cheap' gun and to this day, I'm still reluctant to use the thing)
I know Doom 2, map30 is almost unplayable on a recommended requirements system, if you're not quick at finishing it. The amount of enemies the icon of sin spawns in, combined with the archviles means the map ends up with a heap of enemies on screen at a time and the game effectively 'swaps to disk' Even just 5MB of ram instead of 4MB, makes a world of difference.
I know the BFG noise trick, on map01 of Doom2, if you time your fall off the ledge along with your firing of the weapon, the BFG firing screech is silenced by your drop sound instead so people don't hear you fire it.
I know, in my *opinion* Doom 1, Episode 1 is 'real doom' to me. The atmosphere is fantastic, it's dark, the maps have an overall mars base theme and tileset, there's monster closets, the monster quantity, for the most part isn't unreasonable. I still think Doom 3 was underrated, it captured the atmosphere well. I still don't 'get' Serious Sam, 9/10'ths of the game felt like a shitty .WAD f
Thought I'd cleared the level, was going back scumming for ammo and goodies when one of those pink things jumped me on the stairs
Yearrghhhh !!!! - oh shit, I'm looking at a mouse with the cable ripped in half and my wife is standing there laughing with tears pouring down her face
Well Doom and Quake were the (3D) killer apps that drove thousands (millions?) of gamers to upgrade their hardware. 386 to 486 in the case of Doom, and 486 to Pentium along with the 3Dfx graphcis card in the case of Quake.
While Wolf3d and Duke3D are an important part of gaming history, no other shooters even come close to the same impact as Doom + Quake which defines the FPS genre for decades. (Although Counter-Strike deserves a honorable mention.)
with Doom. I remember him working through the levels on nightmare mode working his way down through the weapons. So the final games he played were only using his fists. He said the trick was to maximize the screen so he couldn't see his health, that way he didn't hesitate. Prior to that, we would play deathmatch over the two phone lines we had. Before long, I would only agree to play him if I got the "fast" 486SX and he played on the 386. And he couldn't use the damn rocket launcher.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
I didn't really care for Doom, though a co-worker relating how he ran out of bullets, went melee and punched some dude in the neck was pretty funny. Now Quake, that was another matter. I got a lot of mileage out of Quake. I loved using the grenade launcher to bounce grenades off the walls and send them spinning after people. I haven't really liked the weapon feel in any FPS since then. The ones in Quake 2 felt like plastic toy pea shooters.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I had my first taste of network gaming with Snipes on some old PCs back in the 80s, and later on Netrek, but nothing compares to the leap with LAN gaming (or even dialup) with the first Doom. Such a blast playing with friends. Even though the network code and graphics got prettier, there hasn't been such a big jump in the type of gameplay as with multiplayer Doom.
The other big thing Doom brought was community-contributed mods, from individual maps to total conversion mods like the very well done Aliens Doom. All of a sudden, whole new worlds were opened up beyond the core game and there was nothing like it. Many happy times including being a play tester for some of these levels. Yet nothing will compare to recording ridiculous voices and mapping them over the Doom event sounds when you're drunk. Burps, insults, snippets of political ads, assholes we hated on campus and any other ridiculous crap that only college kids would find funny. We had whole themes done for various things, especially professors in lectures and the odd photo that made certain college classes tolerable.
P.S. The Aliens Doom conversion mod led to the Aliens Quake conversion mod which was the best Aliens game that ever came out (if a bit buggy) until Fox killed it with a cease and desist.
Our software engineering company (FileNet) network performance came to its knees every day between 5 and 6 pm. Networks team and engineering working hard to identify a possible network denial of service attach or an intrusion. Lots of multicast packets flying everywhere at a high rate of speed. Took about a week for figure out it was some staff playing doom.
Back in high school, a classmate had set his computer to boot directly into Doom.
Was over at a friend's house and his little brother was playing Doom. Didn't think much of it since he had his screen so dark I could barely see what was going on. A week later my friend suggested we should play it co-op, all he needed was a null modem cable which I had. He already finished the first two episodes so I started with him on the third. Straight into hell! :D
Eventually I wanted to play 4 player deathmatch so I started looking into the cost of network cards. Eeeep. Way to expensive for a student. Lucky for me a friend's father's company was upgrading their network and I bought 4 arcnet cards and a passive hub for $50. Now I just needed cable. As look would have it there was a roll of several hundred feet of RG62 coax in my basement. Asked my dad what he was going to use it for. Nothing. Sweet! Just had to buy some ends.
The other problem is the cards had no jumpers. Configuration was done via software and the software sucked and didn't work. So I ran it through a disassembler and wrote my own version with nice menus and everything. Now I could play 4 player Doom in my basement with my friends. They'd lug their computers to my place around noon. I covered the windows in the basement so we were in total darkness and we'd play straight on through until 6am. Eighteen hours of pure doom, fueled by cheetos and jolt cola with breaks only for the washroom while I grabbed a new wad file from FidoNet (I ran a node).
One night one friend couldn't make it and we were short for our usual 2 vs 2 deathmatch game. Called up one of my SysOp friends and asked him if he wanted to play. Nope. But he had another SysOp friend of his, who I didn't know, three wayed into the phone call. So I asked if he wanted to play. Sure! Thirty minutes later I had a stranger on my front doorstep with a computer and big CRT monitor in tow. We've been best friends ever since.
So transferring the new wad files to 3 other computers by sneakernet was getting annoying. Especially when one computer could not read the floppy written by another. Booting into Windows for Workgroups was a pain so I had an idea. I told my friends to play without me for a bit and I pulled out the packet driver docs I had handy. "What you doing?" "Writing a file transfer program" "Seriously? Guess you're not playing with us tonight" "We'll see".
In half an hour it was ready. One or two minor bug fixes and it worked. The target machines would fire up the program first. The sender would start last with all the filenames to send. It would send to all receiving machines at once. I used broadcast to send out the file and the receivers would ACK or NAK each packet in a round robin manner to avoid collisions on the arcnet. Fast and efficient. They never doubted me again when I said I'd write something quick. :)
Eventually my new friend started complaining that he had to pull out his ethernet card and swap it out with my arcnet card. So we started hunting around for cheap network cards. We eventually found some and I bought 2 (one for myself and an extra) and he bought an extra. Got some RG58 cable and BNC connectors and we finally were on ethernet. We ended up having a flaky terminator one night so I shoved two 100ohm resistors in parallel into one end and electrical taped it in place.
Eventually my friend got a 4 port 10baseT hub and we switched over to twisted pair. I soon got one as well and we linked them together with the hub's 10base2 uplinks. So we started moving onto games that supported more than 4 players. And that was the end of our Doom deathmatch marathons.
Yep, Doom was the cause for my 486DX -> 486DX2 -> 486DX4 upgrades. And it was Quake that pushed our LAN Party group to go Pentium. We would always competed who had the faster processor. One time my friend got ahead of me but on one particular warm night his machine kept crashing. So he started taking the case off. "What are you doing?" "Putting it back to 166MHz" Busted!
We all had Matrox Milleniums for Doom and related games. Those cards had an amazingly fast framebuffer. Eventually I was the first to get a 3Dfx Voodoo card when games started supporting it. I think it was a raceing game called Whiplash that we played that was the tripping point. Next LAN party everyone else had one. :D
Then it was the Voodoo II. SLI. Eventually I jumped off the 3Dfx bandwagon when they started their Banshee and Voodoo 3 fiascos. Switched to an Nvidia based TNT card and later TNT2 but my friends weren't convinced. Then I got the GeForce 256. Next LAN Party everyone had one.
I was also the first to get a Gravis Ultrasound card. The look of amazement on my friends faces when actual musical instruments were playing in my games was priceless. Next LAN Party everyone had one.
Beating nightmare in 1, 2, TNT and Plutonia without save scumming every 5 seconds.
My 'self imposed' rule was i would save at the beginning the level after arriving from the previous level. No saving during the level, thus all reloading returned me to the beginning of the level.
I have incidentally beaten ep1 and ep2 without ever reloading. But I've never beaten ep3, ep4 "Thy Flesh Consumed"; or Doom II without reloading to the start of at least some of the levels on "Ultraviolence".
I haven't played TNT or Plutonia... although I do see I have them on steam. (as "Final Doom").. I really should play those through. :)
I've only beaten most of ep1 and part of ep2 on nightmare using this rule; and honestly just didn't enjoy nightmare mode enough to bother as Nightmare is more about speed running, avoiding getting trapped, and leading/losing the hordes (especially vs non-humanoid opponents) than it is about killing everything that moves. And I prefer to kill everything that moves when I play doom.
it was a Packard Bell 486 DX2 with 4 MB ram. My parents bought it because they thought it would be "good" for me. My uncle came over with a baseball card cardboard box's worth of pirated 3.5 disks. One of them was Doom.
I remember installing doom and then having to have a "boot disk" to give me enough RAM to run the thing. Glorious, pixelated violence meant i was the coolest nerd on the block for years. So many imps died. So many friends looking over my shoulder and taking turns as we cleared Phobos of hell's minions.
Doom taught me a lot. Configuration. Boot disks. Zip files. Ms-DOS commands. Piracy. Modding. The internet (happypupy and bluesnews led me straight to some sort of Doom .wad depository, wherein I could download custom mods of Doom, including an MST3K sound replacement .wad I still insist on using whenever i boot the game up)
My uncle passed away around a dozen years ago, after a futilely stupid battle with type 2 diabetes (stupid as in, not following doctors orders and losing your legs, kidneys, and vision). But i will always remember him as the uncle who brought me Doom.
hookers and grits.
Doom had *awesome* mods (there were so easy to create because the monsters weren't 3D models, they were just a bunch of 2D textures, like an animated gif). There was a great one which changed the sounds to a Monty Python theme (every gun shot said "Ni", etc.). Throw in two more mods and I got to kill the most evil demon of all (Barney, singing "I love you, you love me") by firing frozen chickens at it, to the sounds effects of the flying cow. I think this is the most fun I had playing an FPS ;-)
Reading some of the other comments is making me remember more stories about Doom.
Playing two player co-op the first time via null modem cable at a friends house. He goes into a room and a door closes behind him that I can't open. "Get in here!" "I can't! Door wont' open" "Help!" So I switch to his view to see what's going on. A huge horde of monsters is advancing on him and he's cornered. "Yeeeeech" as I switch back. "I don't want to watch the slaughter" We reloaded and this time we both stepped through at the same time.
One level in Hell we got toasted quick. So second attempt we just ran for this central building shaped like a Y. I ran up the stairs and cleared out one branch quick and then the other. Since only the two sides were open to the outside we stayed in there and used it as a shooting gallery. It went on for 15-20 minutes as we slowly depleted each weapon. When all monsters were finally dead I had 5 handgun bullets and my friend has completely out. Had to wait till the adrenaline wore off after that.
I started playing the game keyboard only as I would suck with the mouse because of not being used to it. I'd always switch back to keyboard only. Then one time my friend was circle strafing around me and I could not hit him. I got so mad that I moved my right hand over to the mouse and every singe shot of mine hit him. Never went back to keyboard only after that. My friend asked how I did that and I said, started using the mouse.
Had a friend nearly punch me as every single frag I did on him on one level was with the chainsaw.
My friends could not figure out how my computer would load Doom so fast. I was always the first one done with the loading dots and waiting for the others. And this wasn't a slight speedup, it was significant. One day my secret got out. My friend was standing next to me when I rebooted my computer. "Why is is it taking so long to boot?" "Ummmm. It's copying the doom directory into a ramdisk...." "Oh! You bastard!"
Our favourite map was called dick. Yes, the filename was dick.wad :D It was a very small map. Transporter from one side to the other. Lots of open rooms, a few long corridors. Ammo and health everywhere. I'm mean literally everywhere. If someone fails to kill you quick you just run around and you're back to full health and ammo. But because of the small size we actually wrapped the frag counters really quick. The replaced the respawn sound. First time someone died and respawed all we heard was a choir sing the word "Alleluia". We had to stop playing for a few minutes because the four of us were laughing so hard.
Played this one map where my friend Bill was hiding in a room. Every time I opened the door he'd start shooting out of it so I couldn't come in or fire back. He had ammo in there so was not going to run out soon. Switched to the BFG. Opened the door, he fired through it as usual, door started closing down. Fired the BFG and swung over to face the door while it still had a crack left at the bottom. Shot hit the door. Splash damage made it through the crack. :D
Same map. Fired a shot at Mike across the large central open area. I'm up top he's on the bottom. My shot goes straight. Doh! But he gets on an elevator. As he's going up the shot is moving across. They meet at the other side up top. As he dies he yells "What the hell just got me?" "BFG from across the map!"
Same map yet again. Drop Mike with a rocket. "Hey, meet rocket boy!" My friend Jon frags me from behind with the plasma right after I say that. "Hey rocket boy, meet plasma man!" Laughter erupts in my basement as I just groan.
Two vs two deathmatch. One map had a room with pillars in the middle. They were up normally but when someone came through the lower passage they would drop to let the person go through down below to the other exit on the opposite wall. I was in the room lining up a shot on Mike with the shotgun. Just as I pulled the trigger my te
My most memorable Doom moment was the first time we had a mouse user play on the LAN with us. We were instant converts. Well, after he slaughtered us endlessly and strafed us faster than we could turn.
In Quake 2 my most memorable moment was killing six people with two railgun shots. I freaked out. The other players on the server freaked out. It was awesome.
And no accusations of being a botter, which was nice.
It sure as hell did make sense. The slower VGA frame buffer implementations required many more wait states when accessing video memory than the fast ones did.
The Tseng ET4000 chipset was particularly respected back in the day, but God help you if you got stuck with some POS with a Trident or WD Paradise chipset, or if you don't get off my lawn in the next 30 seconds.
Because there's a new one out obviously. Just talking about a thing that exists doesn't make advertising.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Got hooked, like many here I'm sure, playing on a 386. Had to crank down the quality to half, and knock down the screen display by a few notches to make it playable. Didn't matter, was soon ignoring the world around me. Would get up in morning, clear Doom before going downstairs for a pee, it became instinct. Then speedrunning through Doom2 before going to sleep. Every day. For months.
And the Doom dreams.... Don't tell me no-one else, when playing crazy amounts, wouldn't have dreams where the movement was Doom, the fast speeds, the strafing. Could be a regular other dream, but the movement would snap me out of it.
At Uni, we had a trip down to..hmm. can't remember if it was Birmingham or London, some tradeshow. Met the lovely David McCandless and the rest of the PCPro?(PCGamer? PCZone? Was a bit ago), and didn't do too bad. Everyone else was bitching about the 486's running slow, but after being used to 386, it was fantastic. Got through to the end of the informal matches, just McCandless beating me. Got a few freebies that were much appreciated.
Got into making own levels for when we had a lan party. The local shopping mall level was very popular (so wish I could find it again).
Left Uni not long after, got a job, then had a funny phone call out of the blue. "Hello, you don't know me, but I'm a producer for a TV show about computer games, and we heard you could make levels, we're based in Leeds, could you come and make a level of the studio for us please?" "Sure, uhm, how did you even begin to get my number?" "well, we rang directory enquiries for iD's number in the US and the guy asked us what for, when we told them we wanted a level, he said it'd be unlikely they'd have time, but he knew a guy... and so we're ringing you!" (thanks Malcom!). Funnily enough, was dating a girl from Leeds and was there most weekends anyway. Got to see some film they covered the tix at the cinema for, got to see the Playstation and play Tekken before it was released in the UK ("this is going to change everything!"), and made some levels. The other guy they contacted to make the monsters look like the presenters ended up being the Doom UK champ for a few years, but never got chance to meet him.
Was an amazing game, it was all down to getting it working that I got a network card, learned how to configure it, first ipx/spx, then later tcp/ip, that's come in very useful in my career. Enjoyed the creation of maps/monsters, that's also been a pastime in later years, nothing professional, but enough to amuse me.
Been a blast, BFG blast.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
It wasn't the real Wolf3D. It was originally an expansion to Wolf3D that iD decided to cancel. I don't expect you to care about facts, but someone else might.
May the jewce be with you. Always - Obi One Jewnobi.
I went from Norway to Utah in 1991, there I met John Cash who used to spend a night every week or two playing Doom deathmatch.
When he fired up his network sniffer he discovered that all LAN communication took place over IPX global broadcast, i.e. they would traverse all routers and end up at every single one of the 6000+ PCs on Novell's internal network!
John found the email of a guy at iD who seemed to know something (John Carmack :-) ) and sent off a message stating basically that the networking code sucked.
A few days later he got a reply: "Sorry about that, we outsourced that development. Here is the source code, please fix it!"
This was "put up or shut up" time, so Jiohn rewrote that code over the next couple of days and returned it.
A couple of years later Cash was hired by Carmack and Abrash as the third core programmer on the Quake team.
Terje
PS. I personally sucked at Doom, but since I was involved with Quake asm development from the beginning I became significantly better at that series.
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"