Quake Freed - Book about Modding Thread

Hi all,

I'm a masters student writing a book about the evolution of the First Person Shooter, its relationship with modders and hackers, and its relationship with open source software. These 3 topics intersect best with games by id Software, with the unfolding of the Doom and Quake series generally moving in tandem with the growing modding scene. I will be covering other games critical to the mod scene also, your Half Life's and Unreal Tournaments won't be excluded. Here is a mock up of the book cover.

The book will be funded on Kickstarter.
The blog for the book is live here

I am looking for modders to come forward with mods (your own or others) that they feel are of historic interest to the development of modding. I am looking for personal stories or anecdotes about deathmatch culture, speed runs, modding, hacking, quake on linux etc.

Good content will be featured in the book. Please post here or send submissions to quake.freed@zoho.com.

Look forward to getting in touch with you guys!

I'd suggest the place to start would be Planetquake.gamespy.com

They're the last "original" resource still in it's non-archive.org state. A lot of the other older sites are gone and there's a ton of content/etc. that no longer exist. id's .plan archive is also a good place to look at.

I'd say there's no mod authors here that would be considered part of the "historic" period for Wolf3D/Doom/Quake era. They all moved on decades ago. Might be some.

Thanks Friar

Its a real shame doom3world disappeared into oblivion because there were a lot of interesting mods and users hanging around there.

looking forward to the book. Quake / Doom are the games that really started this website... used to love playing their mods / maps

Thanks Scott don't forget to email me at quake.freed@zoho.com so I can let you know when the kickstarter starts.

I want to say that two of the most influential old mod pieces of content ever done were Aliens Doom and gore enhancing for Wolf 3D (exploding Nazi's, melting Hitler, etc). Both were considered impossible to do at the time by most people, yet they were done (the guy who did Aliens Doom also made the Escher Staircase map for Doom).

Several of the former D3W modders post at Idtechforums.fuzzylogicinc.com now. Proflic Doom 3 modder Brian Trepanier (Duck Nukem: Four Feathers & Bubba Lego Tep staring Lego Elvis) still has an active youtube channel.

Enjoy contacting those guys.

Good stuff, I'll contact them.

I checked out planetquake, its a graveyard but good for archived posts. doomworld still has heaps of activity though.

Id buy this!

The new owners of GameSpy shut down the planet sites a couple years ago, but yeah, it has stuff from the near-beginning of modding in the internet. GameSpy itself was started because of Quake.

Proposal for a masters thesis that will become the Quake Freed book. Keep in mind its pitched at mod-illiterate professors.

Proposal
I intend to write a personal essay about the influence of hacker culture on the development of the first person shooter. The work will centre around the hacker ethic of the 1990s to early 2000s and its relationship with the creation of a brand new virtual reality experience, the first person shooter.

My personal input into the piece will be as someone who has taken active part in this culture and grown up to witness the 1st person shooter transform from its primitive Wolfenstein 3d roots to an industry that now surpasses film in size.

I myself am a hacker, or modder of first person shooters, and what makes this piece creative is that as the story of the first person shooter unfolds, so unfolds my growth in learning to hack the first person shooter.

In the early 1990s, the line between hacker and gamer was thin, with players hacking into the games themselves to produce new levels and modes of play. The story of FPS gaming is different to that of corporate software, such as Microsoft Windows. The game creators were oddball mavericks, university drop-outs who took joy from reverse-engineering software, tinkering, and upending existing paradigms. Their freewheeling nature put them at odds with commercial interests. For the hackers, reverse engineering, copying and manipulating the code of others was a way of life, for the Microsofts and IBM's it was stealing and needed to be stopped.

The moral is that throughout computer history, it is the nerd-mavericks living on pizza, mountain dew and Dungeons and Dragons that manage to continually push the boundary in a digital world where paradigms have never shifted so fast.

The history of the shooter is tied to the history of the PC itself, with these games having such clout that they transformed the way the both hardware and software evolved.

My intent in writing the piece is to expose a slice of gaming history crucial to the foundation of the genre which has never received due attention and now risks being forgotten. I see myself as the ideal journalist for two reasons. The first is that I was born at the right time to play and hack for myself the games and witness first hand the new medium go from nothing to a becoming a key form of entertainment. The second reason is that I immersed myself in the hacking culture early on and made it part of my life.

The reason for the format of personal essay is to inject some colour into what risks being an obscure subject matter. Most of us can relate to a wide-eyed child starting up a now ancient computer, listening to its bleeps and bloops, the unbelievable excitement of the first 3d shooter ever. There is also the important second presence in my father, an electronic engineer at the forefront of a burgeoning computer technology, who passed the hacker spirit on to me.

I will be drawing from texts such as Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, and Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution.

First review video here.

Please check out the homepage:
quakefreed.tumbler.com

Wouldn't let me post the video as a separate post.

Why wont it let me bump my own topic?

Edited by: whitewolfw2