History 1993-1995: Pre Internet
First contact with the Shareware version of the original DooM on 17.12.1993 (his 25th birthday) and was playing it heavily for the next 5 years.
He did a PC upgrade from his then 80286/16mhz with 1Mb RAM to the "superfast" AMD 80386DX2/40mhz with 4Mb RAM.
Played single player on v1.1 for the rest of 1994. (Remember that only with v1.2 team play via direct PC to PC connection was introduced and having not updated he didn't even know much about team- or deathmatch play).
Bought his new PC the day DooM 2 v1.666 went on sale October 1994.
End of October was the start for modem DFÜ activities including Deathmatches with one or two guys from his local chat mailbox. (Mailboxes were still the State of the art, with the Internet just beginning it's roaring success to the private end customer).
History 1995-1998: The Internet years Getting Internet in 1995 and finding the COMPET-N and DHT on www.cdrom.com was the kickoff for public appearance on the Internet. The brilliant idea of the DooM creaters to enable the players to record (and share) their performances to LMPs virtually kicked off the whole speedrun scene on the Net. From 06.05.1997 to 23.09.1997 he completed together with Steffen "Rini" Udluft all available titles from DHT6: D1M, D2M, D2Y, D1V, D2V, D1P, D2P, D1T, D2T, D1I, D2I. Also had some COMPET-N entries, mostly in the -respawn and MMH section. Was part of the "parcifist-team" to push the idea of pacifist style, which subsequently made it into DHT6 and COMPET-N. Played all his demos and LMPs with the default keyboard configuration and with "strafe-on".
History after DooM Finishing his studies and entering his 1st fulltime job as a CAD-designer in mid of 1997 drastically reduced the playload. And with DHT6 completed and COMPET-N getting more and more unbeatable interest in gaming switched to newer FPS. Having never liked the original Quake the road to followup was Unreal, Quake II, Half-Life, Soldier of Fortune, Far Cry - but never up to a point like (if only for days) holding the world-record on a speedrun like in DooM and DooM II. He lives still west of Munich, is married and a father now.
Contact: thomas.kroppen@gmx.de