John Anderson (Dr. Sleep)



John W. Anderson (aka Dr. Sleep), born on November 7, 1956, is a level designer for five major PC game companies, a game designer and a writer. He worked for the following game developers:


 * Q Studios, who was developing a game for Apogee called Blood in early 1995.
 * id Software was finishing up a new fourth episode for the first commercial release of Doom, to be called The Ultimate Doom.
 * Epic who asked him to work on a game they were developing called Unreal. This was before Quake came out, and it was his first time working with a true 3D engine. But he was frustrated. Unreal was in the very early stages of development. The engine changed weekly, and levels that ran fine before suddenly wouldn't work right. It was his first experience being on the ground level of a development team.
 * Then he joined the new company John Romero had formed with Tom Hall called Ion Storm in mid-February 1997. "Working at Ion Storm and living in Dallas was one of the best periods of my life". He worked on Daikatana.

His most famous Doom level releases were, in May and June of 1994: Dante's Gate and Crossing Acheron. He also developed levels for id's next project, Master Levels for Doom II. His most recent contribution to the Doom community is the Doom Builder illustrated guide (a level editing tutorial).

He has been working on a major literary bibliographical project for the macabre writer H. P. Lovecraft. One of his web sites H. P. Lovecraft: A Pictorial Bibliography documents his books with images of every edition published for book collectors like himself and for Lovecraftian scholars.

Several current WAD Authors such as Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal and Paul Corfiatis base some of their level design on Dr. Sleep's unique and attractive designs.