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IcarusWeb: How did you get involved in running Doomworld?
Linguica: Well, as you may or may not know, before I ran Doomworld I, along with my friend Dukrous, ran a site called Functional Entropy (which can be mostly viewed at http://home.adelphia.net/~dukrous/funce/index.html). It originally started out as a website about our Doom 2 TC entitled ID4DOOM but slowly morphed into a Doom news site. It sort of happened gradually and without any real idea of what we were doing, but we noticed that we were getting more hits, so we kept it up. In November 1997, FuncE (my clever nickname for the site) was one of two Doom sites mentioned in a John Romero .plan update about how the Doom community was still thriving. It was then that I sort of realized that Dukrous and I were in charge of a site which at the time was one of the hubs of the Doom community.
To digress a little, although the Doom internet community has been around since 1993, for much of the time it wasn't really focused anywhere. Nowadays, new games more or less get prepackaged communities made for them. Anyone interested in Anachranox or Duke Nukem Forever can go to planetanachronox.com or planetduke.com and get involved, despite the game not even being released yet. There's a "news site" mentality nowadays that wasn't even beginning to have been formed back when Doom was first came out. I guess the Place To Be for a lot of that time was the Doom Usenet newsgroups. Everyone really involved in Doom hung out there. I remember how projects were formed and released solely over the newsgroups -- a lot of them didn't even have websites, something which would practically be unthinkable nowadays. There weren't really any Doom mega-sites -- the closest things I could think of would have to have been Mr. DooM and Doomgate (both of which still exist BTW) but even those mostly consisted of links and some reviews.
Anyways... so on January 1, 1998, I was contacted by Marv of Telefragged, who told me that he predicted a resurgence in Doom popularity due to the release of the source code a week earlier (good call BTW, Marv). Basically he asked Dukrous and I if we would be interested in running it. We said yes, and we recruited Mordeth (who had also turned his TC's news page into a general news page, the copying bastard), Sir Alien (who was running Doom Central, probably the first webpage solely dedicated to Doom news), Covaro (who had run a Doom webpage for not very long but my intuition told me he'd be a good addition), the dude who ran the Doomoscope (which used to be a kickass, often-updated WAD review site), Superfly (who used to run a pretty damn popular Doom-related page), and Ricrob (you know who he is). It took us a while to make the webpage and get some content together, and we opened on March 13, 1998, with myself, Mordeth, Covaro, Dukrous, and Ricrob as the staff. Ricrob quite after one day if I remember right, and Dukrous left later that year after the whole Prower incident.
IcarusWeb: What do you consider your position in the Doom community to be?
Linguica: I run the biggest and bestest Doom website on the internet. That's it, really. I've been told before that I'm responsible for saving the Doom community, or that I'm the most influential Doomer currently around, but I think that's all crap. I just run a website that some people seem to like. Here's the list of things I feel I really deserve credit for (and I wish I would get some more for them, heh):
* Making sure Doomworld has been updated (almost) every day.
* 5 Years of Doom, you have no idea how much work that took.
* The Doom Bible, I actually coerced Romero into transcribing that entire thing.
* The GPLing of the Doom source, which I convinced Carmack into doing, as well as personally changing all the copyright messages in all the source code files.
IcarusWeb: Who in the community do you know personally?
Linguica: If you mean in real life, no one. I've never met another person that I know through Doomworld or #doomroom or anything else.
IcarusWeb: Do you get any groupies?
Linguica: Hahaha, Linguica groupies, that'll be the day. The closest would have to be Teppic, I would guess, who used to creep me out sometimes with compliments and stuff, and who still uses a quote of mine for his email sig/IRC quit message, despite my repeated insistance that the quote is not funny.
IcarusWeb: What's your opinion on the state of the community at the minute?
Linguica: Stable, more or less. Not many people seem to be leaving right now, but then not many people seem to be joining. There aren't nearly as many WADs being released as I would like, but I can't complain because I don't make any...
I'm not really concerned about people being drawn away to new games anymore. I mean, hundreds of new FPSes have been released since Doom, and if there are people still playing Doom, I can't think of much that's going to draw them away now.
IcarusWeb: How do you decide which projects get hosted on Doomworld?
Linguica: A lot of people submit their projects for hosting, and I turn down almost all of them. Why? Well, when I look at their webpage, there are really three things I look at:
1) Webpage layout. I know, making a Doom WAD doesn't have much to do with webpage design, but if a person has the aesthetic sense and technical knowledge to make a decent webpage, it leads me to believe that their project will have the same standards.
2) Spelling. Misspelled words are a gigantic pet peeve of mine, and if their page is overflowing with misspelled words, not to mention grammar and punctuation errors, it makes me wonder that if they care so little about what they're writing, how much can they care about what they're making?
3) Screenshots. I mean, duh. If the screenshots suck, why the hell would I want to host them?
IcarusWeb: How do you feel when a project dies?
Linguica: Depends on the project. We've probably announced 50 projects on Doomworld which have since died, almost all before they even got off the ground. Everyone has their "grand idea" which they think would make the greatest Doom TC ever. Hell, I had the same problem years ago with my ID4DOOM project. The only time I get pissed off when a project is abandoned is if it had a significant amount of work done on it -- or when it was a Doomworld-hosted project, because that makes me feel like my work setting up their site was for naught :)
IcarusWeb: What sites do you wish you were hosting?
Linguica: Lemme think... I'd like to host TeamTNT, Doom Legacy, ZDoom, RorDoom, Mordeth, JHexen / whatever its Doom counterpart will be, and especially COMPET-N, who I have asked many times but who keeps turning me down.
IcarusWeb: Why do think there is such a problem with flaming in the community?
Linguica: Is there? Yeah, there are some flames on the Doomworld comment boards, but Mordeth gets his jollies deleting them, so that's OK. I don't really read the Doomnation forums, but when I do I am surprised at the amount of negativity there. Actually, I think that we're in better shape nowadays then we used to be. You want to see flaming? Too bad you weren't around when I fired Prower in summer 1998, now that was some hardcore flaming.
IcarusWeb: Which project are you most looking forward to?
Linguica: I'll pretend you said "projects"... Covert Ops, QDOOM, Darkening E2 and ZanZan... all of which are by people who have proven themselves through past efforts.
IcarusWeb: What about the new ports?
Linguica: DOOMSDAY DOOMSDAY DOOMSDAY DOOMSDAY DOOMSDAY that is what the JHexen-for-Doom port will be called, right? Also, I'm really looking forward to seeing RorDoom completed. I want to see what becomes of SMMU, and for the love of god will someone make a Doom port with multiplayer as decent as Quake's...
IcarusWeb: Who else in the Doom community do you respect a lot?
Linguica: Well naturally I respect my Doomworld cohorts... I also respect Cyb over at Doomnation who not only runs that site but also takes the time to make lots of cool levels. Adam Hegyi and the entire speedrunning crew continue to amaze me with their demomaking exploits. I respect the coders who are actively improving the Doom codebase and adding new features, especially Julian for RorDoom which was done with no expectations or fanfare, and the maker of JHexen for creating what I think will be the best GL Doom-engine renderer. The entire team responsible for Boom needs to be thanked for making what is more or less a new standard in level features. Who else... Adelusion, Matt Dixon, Ola Bjorling, ... there's lots more but I won't list them here.
IcarusWeb: Who do you least respect in the DooM community?
Linguica: Now, that's just mean.
IcarusWeb: Doomworld's had over a million hits... how the hell did you reach that many people?
Linguica: To be honest with you, I have no idea. Looking at the counter of the main page, Doomworld gets between 2500 and 3000 hits daily, but I'm not quite sure what the number of unique visitors is. Currently there are 289 people registered on the Doomworld comments, which after this amount of time seems like it should be a pretty hefty amount of DW's total visitors. If each of those 289 people refreshed 10 times a day, it would seem to account for all the hits, but I would hope not...
IcarusWeb: Do you consider Doomantion and DoomHQ to be competition or comrades?
Linguica: I don't consider any other Doom websites to be competition... I used to worry about making sure that Doomworld was better than any other Doom site, and I wanted to make sure we got the most hits, and things like that. But now I believe the site speaks for itself, and I don't worry about the other sites much any more. I visit Doomworld, Doomnation, Doomshack, and DoomHQ every day, and each one offers something that the others do not.
IcarusWeb: What about Icarusweb?
Linguica: I like it! It's not often that a new Doom site comes around which deos reviews and inetrviews and all that good stuff. And it's even rarer that one inetrviews me.
IcarusWeb: Doom's effects on society: your thoughts?
Linguica: People who play Doom are vastly normal, upstanding citizens. albeit computer geeks, but what do you expect?
IcarusWeb: What do you think will be the ultimate fate of Doom?
Linguica: No one can Doom forever... I think. I thought I was going to quit DW late last year but I guess I never did, and I don't have any immediate plans to do so. I guess I'll keep running Doomworld until no one reads it any more.
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