User:Ryan W

I was recently looking through some pages like this one, trying to list the most important video games of all time. Events that redefined the entire industry by destroying it, in the way that Star Wars and Thriller did. Titles that created completely new forms of merchandising, appeared on the covers of non-gaming magazines, and could by themselves force the purchase of a household's first computer or console.

I only found eight. One of them is Doom, and that is why I am here.

The experience of Doom is far too important for my generation of gamers to keep to itself. Amongst those persons who read this site, I would like every 9-year-old to survive the SSG room in MAP02: Human BBQ, and I would like every 14-year-old to have outgrown HOMs and unclosed sectors, and I would like every 22-year-old to know how to find deathmatch opponents of precisely equal skill.

My qualifications for contributing to this project include:


 * 1) Being geographically isolated from all my friends, who are therefore less able to persuade me that my free time ought to be spent constructively.
 * 2) That faint streak of autism which allows me to look at a map and immediately yell, "Hey, where'd the potion go?"
 * 3) A relationship with Doom/Doom II so intense and longstanding (in gaming terms) that it has affected the way I see the world, above and beyond gaming in general.  My maps and notes from Ultimate Doom, D!zone 150, and the first part of Maximum Doom are on my living room wall, and I still look at them every day.
 * 4) Apparently, a certain facility for actually writing about games after I've played them.  The following e-mail has to do with my being recruited as a beta tester for a Macintosh program called Technical Snapshot 2.0:

> I must report that my regular access to computing spaces is ending today and > may not resume for several years, so you may as well cancel any future pieces of   > electronic mail which may have been in store for me. I am very sorry to hear that. The world of computing will be a little more quiet and a little less polished without your voice. I hope that you are able to gain access again in the near future, and that such access will be on a Macintosh. Thanks for your help and critical eye. Sincerely, David Cook Storm Impact, Inc.   --

The name "Ryan W" was given to me by Popo2002. 

Milestones in my wiki career

 * 2005 June 08: First engine crash in a source port while doing wiki research.
 * 2005 November 16: Reading a one-sentence stub and thinking, "Wait a minute, did *I* write that?  No, that couldn't be; it sounds way too confident."
 * 2006 January 18: Spraying Drano on an anon user.
 * 2006 January 19: Offering driving directions around campus.
 * 2006 January 30: First new article from scratch (the others were all abridged Wikipedia material, one-sentence bug reports, or essentially non-textual infrastructure).
 * 2006 February 14: Taking screen shots for E1M2: Nuclear Plant means that I have now used a double-digit number of versions/ports.
 * 2006 February 24: Watching an entire demo on the automap.

Actual money I've spent on this project (in U.S. dollars)

 * 2005 September 30: $0.99 plus $6.00 shipping for a vanilla copy of Doom II v1.666.  (The Doom II disc from Depths of Doom, which I bought new, was DOA.)
 * 2006 February 06: $0.26 for a CD-R to bring home most of the COMPET-N archive.

Articles that bring out my unhealthy maternalistic instincts

 * How to download and run Doom
 * Doom, Doom II
 * Weapons, Monsters
 * Intermission screen
 * Monster infighting
 * Speedrun and its styles
 * Demo, LMP
 * Automap
 * Games, Source ports
 * Command line arguments
 * Status bar, Status bar face
 * To a certain lesser extent, every article linked here and in these tables