I talked to Aaron Seeler!!

[FirebrandX]

Many of you might know that Aaron Seeler was the lead programmer for Doom 64. I wanted him to know that the game still had a lot of loyal fans who really appreciated the game and the style of level design and textures. Unfortunately, he did not save any copies of the Doom 64 textures (darn it). Here's a portion of what he said to me:



"Amazing! Great to hear. The making of Doom 64 was quite an endeavor at that time, so there are many stories and many versions. It was very problematic development. Lots of content and team turnover. We used to say we were bleeding out of our eyes to finish it. The product’s original theme was going to be the marines descent through hell, where the epsiodes were derived from various culture’s concept of evil and their architecture, arriving at the mother of all demons. That was a little to far out of the envelope, nobody could agree – So, what was done was a little more expected. At that time, as dm purists, most everybody involved thought it silly to play dm split screen, where you could see everybody else. So, we chose not to do it. 007 beat the crap out of Doom 64. Quite a regret. I left Midway about a year later. It doesn’t surprise me that Midway has very little info on it – It’s ancient by game product years, and it’s not really their core type of product."

[Crendowing]

May God help Aaron Seeler for making such a horrid creation and the fans for liking it... ;D ;D ;D

[FirebrandX]

Aaron just told me of a secret on Club Doom for the PSX that nobody has ever found! At least nobody has ever mentioned it on the Internet if you do a word-search. It's nothing big, just a special marker of initials way off the map down below and to the right a little.

[cybdmn]

You're wrong with this.

Look here. Kaiser asked for what it means a couple of weeks ago.

[FirebrandX]

Yeah, but I know what they mean

(actually, I told what they mean on another forum).

[cybdmn]

FirebrandX said:

actually, I told what they mean on another forum.

OK. So be nice and tell us too, plz. ;D

[FirebrandX]

They are just the initials of the QA team. For example, "R" stands for "Randy Estrella" who also happens to be the lead level designer for Doom 64. Aaron tells me Randy is now working for Microsoft's Xbox team.

[Danny]

For me Doom64 was flawed genius in a way.
It had pretty decent levels, and not bad graphics structurally, but the controls were simply appalling.
Analogue didn't feel right at all, and digital a la Playstation was downright bugged.
The enemies looked like a joke up close - like cardboard cut-outs.
If it wasn't for these 2, I'd love the game.

[FirebrandX]

Doom 64 enemies were actually more detailed than the ones in any of the previous versions. It was the N64's Bi-linear filtering that made them look bad.

I do agree about the control. Many buttons simply did not work correctly if you switched them around. I also can't stand the N46 controller in general. I'd ultimately like to get some sort of converter to use my PSX controller on the N64. Until then, the only other alternative is to play on emulator, but that's pretty buggy too.