Prepare to Meet Thy Doom

Prepare to  Meet Thy Doom: And Other True Gaming Stories

© 2015 David Kushner

 ~ 5 hours, read by Wil Wheaton

Masters of Doom enthralled me, covering the genesis of modern  PC gaming through its history of id software.   Prepare to Meet Thy Doom is an oddly-titled follow-up that is less a work in itself, and more a collection of articles that are generally related to PC gaming. I say generally, because there’s  pieces here on competitive chess, NeoPets, and bot-augmented online poker.   The more kosher offerings include a follow-up piece on id software,  as well as articles on Spore, Second Life,  and the GTA series.     Drawing on interviews with  designer icons like John Romero and Will Wright,   Kushner’s pieces often dwell on how PC games are continuing  to push the developmental envelope – becoming more complex forms of entertainment, as they allow players to make their own experience. In Spore, for instance, there’s no static content to begin with:  every bit of the animal and civilization that evolve are cobbled and produced by the player..   Rockstar Games is particularly notable for innovation: its latest games, GTA V and Red Dead Redemption II, are less games than ten hour cinematic experiences in which the player is driving the story. The game’s  lead character grows throughout, shaped by the player’s decisions.   

Those who are passionate PC gamers may find this of interest. Given that I effectively got it for free (Audible promotion), I can scarcely complain about it – especially since Wil Wheaton’s  narration was, as usual,  excellent.  The narrator is largely responsible for my having experienced this book at all, given its slimness and the reviews griping about the lack of  more substantial content.   As much as I liked Masters of Doom,     Prepare To Meet isn’t a stellar followup.  

The Perfect Thing

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
pub. 2006 Steven Levy
304 pages

I've never had an iPod, but given that Audible was doing a sale this week and that I seemed to be doing an Apple-related set, why not? The Perfect Thing hails the influence of the iPod and shares its history, both how Apple came to experiment with a consumer device and how it used the device to transform the music industry.  It's light "reading" (I listened to it, so the description is imperfect), and its datedness has appeal: this is an Apple book written before the iPhone took over everything else,  written when Jobs had announced that yes, he had cancer, but it was easily remedied with surgery and all was well now.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and pushed the company to focus on just four products -- professional and consumer variants of desktop and laptop computers --  his idea for the desktop computers was that they were to become key components in home entertainment, a "digital hub".  The iMac came packaged with software like iMovie and iTunes to allow users to create their own videos and play music from the computer -- and not just play the CD, but copy music onto the computer to allow the iMac to be a digital music library.  Around the same time, the .mp3 coding format had been established, and there were even clunky attempts at a consumer-marketed mp3 player.  Then the inspiration: what if Apple created its own mp3 player, one that would be designed to  link perfectly with iTunes?

Although its price gave cause for balking,  the device's ease of use and attractive design made it a marketplace winner, changing the way people approached music.   Although CD players had already started allowing for more musical freedom --  make it easy to listen to the same song over and over again, or skip weak songs in an album instead of having to manually fast forward and rewind tape -- the iPod and its clones would make it a breeze.  Although a certain artform was lost in the process (having an album that told a story when listened to in entirety, in order),  most people just wanted to listen to the music they lived, when they wanted it. 

The other great influence of the iPod on music was on the industry itself.   In the days of Napster and Kazaa, the record companies were seeing the rug pulled out from under them, with CD sales following as people were able to just help themselves to goodies out there for the taking -- along with viruses,  malicious jokes, and extremely poor information as people shared files with the wrong artist and title names.  Jobs proposed an alternative: iTunes could be more than a music player and CD ripper;  it could become a storefront, allowing the record companies a way to adapt to the  demand for digital music and maintain an income stream, while giving consumers a safe and legal alternative to obtaining music at a fairly good price -- $0.99 a song. 

Levy is a tech enthusiast, an it's therefore not surprising that he completely dismisses all who look askance at the takeover of people by their little devices.  Are people retreating from one another and reality by losing themselves in their music whenever they feel like it? Sure, and why not? Although there is truth in Levy's statement that moral panics always erupt  around new technologies,  it doesn't follow that there aren't legitimate causes for concern when people put themselves into danger or ignore their family and friends (in their very company) by dropping out.

Digital Filmmaking for Kids

Digital Filmmaking for Kids
© 2015 Nick Willoughby
304 pages

I am not, readers may spot, a kid.  However, when I WAS a kid, I was one given to wandering around the woods with a massive camcorder in my shoulders, attempting to make nature documentaries -- or endlessly playing around with home audio equipment to make "radio shows"  or Calvin and Hobbes audiobooks.  (None of these tapes survived the nineties to my knowledge.)     Computers renewed that old interest in  mucking around with audio and video, hence my reading this.   The title is well organized and generously illustrated, but approximately a third of the content is useful only to Apple users. These are the chapters on digital editing, which only utilize iMovie. The only obvious indicator of this book being written for kids is the fact that all of the actors in the example stills are children; there's no overt "Boys and girls, today we'll be learning about 3-point lighting! Isn't that COOOOL?" tone.   Most of the content covers the basic concepts of filmmaking, a review of equipment from a basic cameraphone to more elaborate setups including mic booms, mobile camera tripods,  and lighting systems, and film production organization, and techniques.  I think a book like this would have definitely fed my imagination as a kid and helped me an even more pretentious little David Attenborough imitator.

Related:
Making YouTube Videos, Nick Willoughby.

Centauri Dawn

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Centauri Dawn
© 2000 Michael Ely
292 pages

Earth was a sad memory for the crew and colonists of the good ship Unity, who fled its radioactive remains in hopes of building a new society near a not-too distant star, Alpha Centauri.  But an unexpected assassination brings the fears of the past alive once again, and when Unity arrives at her target, she no longer lives up to the name. Instead, the people of the dying colony-ship  cling to like-minded ideologues, and the sorry spectacle of human history begans to unfold again, this time on a planet covered in mysterious xenofungus and populated only by mind-destroying worms.

Such is the premise of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a turn-based strategy game that compels a player to pick a faction and see them through to victory. The sequel to  Civilization II, SMAC remains one of the best-critically received PC games of all time -- holding, for instance, the PC Gamer record with a score of 98%.  It was a logical successor to Civ 2, which allowed players a 'peaceful' victory if they built a colonyship and sent it to Alpha Centauri.   While the traditional Civ games have players choose a civ to play as -- the Persians, the Japanese,  the Aztecs, etc --   SMAC's factions were sorted among ideological lines, championing religion, science, capitalism,  miltarism, etc.   Unusually for an open-ended "4X" game like this (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), SMAC  had a plot which would develop as the player played, learning about the planet "Chiron" -- specifically, learning that the planet is alive, with a collective consciousness,  and  that the constant attacks on human outpost by mindworms were a response to the constant terraforming.  The story of Alpha Centauri -- the human in-fighting amid the alien world's exploration -- is presumably the setup for the trilogy of novels written about them. 

This first novel, Centauri Dawn, only covers the ship breaking up into factions, and the first decade of life on the planet as a few of the colony pods find one another and try to maintain some semblance of unity despite tensions over resources.  Not all of the factions feature here, as the first novel focuses on the conflict between the UN Peacekeepers -- the alleged 'government' of all the settlements -- and the Spartans, who are militarists.  The Gaians, who are...tech-hippies, feature, and  the capitalists and religious fundamentalists also make an appearance. Mysteriously absent is the Human Hive,   which  is a totalitarian society with obvious Chinese influences. (They're supposedly based on the Chinese philosophy of Legalism.)   The Hive does appear in the second novel, however.

If you are interested in a storied playthrough of the game, I found a good one on the Let's Play Archive. The player chose the Gaians, who are supposedly the easiest faction.  Also,  just for flavor, I've inserted the Spaceship victory cinematic from Civ 3 below, as well as the intro video for SMAC. Also,  in the last few years another SF 4X game called Beyond Earth was intended as a spiritual successor to SMAC. It wasn't anywhere near as critically acclaimed, but it does have some interesting elements.  Here's a review if you're interested!

Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema
© 2012 Cory Doctorow
384 pages

All Cecil B. DeVille wanted to do was make movies. He didn't mean to ruin his family's lives or start a revolution. In the not-too-distant future,  consumer electronics have concealed chips which monitor and report web activity, and when that involves streaming or downloading copyrighted material,  the reprisal is extreme: three-time offenders have their household internet connection terminated for a year.  When Cecil's hobby of downloading movies and remixing their scenes to make new stories  catches the attention of the authorities and his home loses connection, the results are devastating:  Cecil's father loses his job and his sister begins sliding into academic failure. Horrified by the repercussions, Cecil flees to the streets, there to befriend eccentrics who have dropped out of society.  Raiding dumpsters for food and living in an abandoned bar,  Cecil finds the knowledge, the tools,  the will, and the friends that he needs to fight back.

At the heart of this teen political thriller is the debate over intellectual property. This is a recurring theme in Doctorow's work, but the center of everything here. In the book's world, the American entertainment/recording industry has essentially captured Parliament:  both of the major party-alliances pass whatever bill it urges.  While attending an illicit screening of remix films,  Cecil learns that a bill is heading toward Parliament which will allow for the incarceration of anyone -- even minors -- who breach very broadly-defined copyright laws.  Even excerpting scenes for use in a YouTube movie review could land a kid in serious jail time.   Armed with a self-built laptop sans corporate spyware, Cecil and friends launch an agitation campaign to spread the word and hopefully force an upset.   As with Little Brother,  Doctorow uses the novel to debate an issue.  Doctorow's publication history indicates that while he's  a proponent of looser copyright laws,  there are limits to how far that can be taken.  Here,  the moments of nuance as  other characters challenge Cecil's  presumptions are overshadowed by the flagrant bullying of the entertainment industry, who divide their time between creating garbage films and  bankrupting or jailing kids.

I found Pirate Cinema interesting from every angle;  from  Cecil's  obsessive interest in producing films by creatively remixing scenes from one particular actor's vast corpus of works, to his exploration of an illicit society --  living in abandoned buildings, exploring underground London and looking for places to host film screenings,   finding technological workarounds to counter technological surveillance, and  of course the debate itself.  Because his story is set in London, Doctorow also unleashes the full power of British English.   Doctorow's other novels set in America were written or edited so well to match an American voice that the hurricane of British lingo took me by surprise. I'd be really curious about a Brit's perspective, whether his use of slang flows well or if its just a little much.  (Imagine a narrator who sounds like Eggsy from Kingsman: The Secret Service, prior to  wearing suits and speaking RP.)  My used copy of the book is  a discard from a Canadian library, though, so there may be an American edition out there that refers to dumpsters and drugs instead of skips and sugar.

Although part of the novel are unrealistic -- the lack of dangerous and seriously disturbed people among the homeless who Cecil meets, for instance,  and the over-the-top villainy --  I found Pirate Cinema both clever and fun. Intellectual property and copyright issues are an on-going issue as we find ourselves more and more immersed in an ocean of content.  What makes this novel especially interesting is that people really do edit films the way Doctorow describes; I've seen trailers made for movies that don't exist (Titanic 2: Jack's Back) ,witnessed the crew of Deep Space Nine react to Star Trek 2009, (they disapproved), and watched 'movies' that used footage from video-games, sometimes edited or framed to make it more cinematic.  Improvisation with already-existing materials is the basis of culture and innovation: even  at a professional level. I can't help but think of John Carmack of ID Software  creating a way to have side-scrolling PC games by using the first level of Mario as his subject.   Cecil's is a case that's more troublesome: while he IS using footage in original ways, the film itself is someone else's product, and it cost them to produce it. 

Armada

Armada
© 2015 Ernest Cline
368 pages

“Where are you going?” Cruz said over the comm. “Protect the Icebreaker, dumb ass!” 
“Sorry, Cruz!” I said, pushing my throttle forward. “But you’ll never guess who just showed up. Leeeeeeroyyy—”
 “Oh, Lightman, don’t you even dare!” 
“—mmm-Jenkinsss!”***

Zack Lightman thought he was going crazy. Not only was there an alien spacecraft hovering above his school, but it was a spacecraft from a video game. If he was going crazy, it was a special kind of crazy -- the kind of crazy that his long-dead father had gone, he being the man who built elaborate conspiracy theories that involved Men in Black creating Star Wars and raiding video arcades.   But Lightman wasn't going crazy.  Earth really was being invaded, and the aliens from his video games weren't fictional.

Armada is another fun SF novel from Ernest Cline, one with lots of science fiction and video game references, but not the sustained geekery, of Ready Player One. Lightman (and I went the entire novel before picking up on the Wargames reference in his name)'s first response to seeing the not-so-fictional alien spaceship is to swear off playing  Armada, the SF flight simulator he and his friends play together as they defend Earth from drones sent by squid-like aliens. But Armada turns out to have been a government-funded project to train unwitting civilians for a war they knew was coming.  While the truth is hard to believe, the voice of Carl Sagan -- who recorded the first announcement that  other life in the universe had been discovered,  who also warned that first contact had gone aly and Earth itself might be danger -- sways him over. With a little help from his friends, Lightman goes to war, playing his favorite game but for real this time. But...if it's real, why does it continue to feel....orchestrated? 

Take Ender's Game, mix evenly with Contact, with  a splash of Redshirts and you have a novel that definitely kept me entertained.  Armada is much lighter in its subject than Ready Player One, since no one really believes Earth will be destroyed by aliens. Imperiled, sure. At the end we may safely expect death and damage, particularly to landmarks and symbolic government buildings, but it's a rare author who actually destroys all life as we know it.  Ready Player One featured a real-world threat, that of a person losing themselves in fantasy to the expense of everything else, and it was one that wasn't resolved by the novel wrapping up. Armada is a much more straightforward adventure, with its own Ender's Game-like twist.



*** I hit the floor laughing at this scene. For the uninitiated,  in May 2005 a video was posted from World of Warcraft in which an elaborate multiplayer plan  was hilariously ruined by one player -- "LEEEEEEROOYYY JENKINS!" going rogue action hero on everyone.

Replay

Replay: The History of Video Games
© 2010 Tristian Donovan
501 pages

Video games emerged in the late 20th century as a completely novel form of entertainment.  Replay recounts the history of how programming experiments and text-based adventures were transformed first into a new hobby with widespread juvenile appeal, then a serious platform for storytelling, and then ..became ubiquitous.

This Replay is comprehensive, covering consoles, arcade machines, and home computers; it is also international, examining games/platform developments in Japan, Korea, Russia, France, and England. Donovan moves chronologically through the development of early computers and game programs associated with them,  their spinoff invention of gaming consoles, and the establishment of video games as art and entertainment. By the early nineties, video games encompassed such a wide variety of genres that the author examines the development of different genres -- role-playing games, first-person shooters,  simulations, etc --  as they emerged and grew popular. He pays special attention to particular machines and games that transformed the industry --   Ultima and GTA3,  the Atari and the Wii, and also includes information on business rivalries (Nintendo v Sega) and the drama of software firms falling out with one another. It culminates with the arrival of games on smartphones, though that era -- the current one -- is only introduced, not delved into itself. Many more games and platforms are addressed in the book, of course, and it is appended with an extensive list of influential titles.

While Replay is a straightforward history of how the software and hardware developed,  it also steps back and looks at the larger picture, pointing out how the games grew with their users: successive platforms advertised themselves to teenagers and adults, trying to shed the image of videogames as merely for kids.  Gaming in general has gone back and forth on plot vs action:   while one might dismiss DOOM and Wolfstenstein 3D as primitive shoot-em-ups  that were later surpassed by shooters with more developed plots, like Half-Life,  in reality DOOM's designers  were rejecting a tendency in earlier games to take themselves too seriously by returning to sheer, unbridled action. DOOM guy  didn't have a personality: he existed to mow down demons from hell. Users also grew with their games: part of the interest for game designers was that they could rewire players brains by putting them into positions and confronting them with choices that they would never encounter in their real lives.  Will Wright, for instance, co-founded a company whose original intent was educational games -- but he did so through "software toys", games that were fun, but also taught players how intricate systems like an antbed or a city functioned.  Wright's company promoted a feature of PC games that made them especially popular: customization.   DOOM allowed players to create their own maps, but even before The Sims had shipped, Maxis had already made tools available for people to create their own clothing, wallpaper, and floors in the game. Later the game was opened to custom objects (for the homeowner who wants a decorative cannon, say), and both the original game and all of its successors have promoted user-created content through their Sims Exchanges. Customization isn't merely about expanding the game:  as a teen, I marveled at the stories of people who became interested 3D modeling because of their tinkering with The Sims mods or crafting Civilization III units.  Donovan mentions that games have also become the stuff of independent creative ventures: people use video taken from gameplay to create stories, and function as "actors" in the game to get the shots they need.

While its subject is games, Replay is fairly serious about the subject -- it's not a "fun" read like Masters of Doom, but those who have a real interest in games as an industry and hobby will appreciate its heft. I noticed minor errors sprinkled in (a reference to "Richard" Heinlein as a prominent SF author, say), but nothing too substantial.

Related:
Masters of Doom, David Kushner

Ready Player One

Ready Player One
© 2011 Ernest Cline
354 pages
Audible presentation read by Wil Wheaton,
runtime 15 hr 46 min

Who knew that School House Rock could save the world?  When an eccentric genius dies and leaves a will laden with eighties pop culture references, the entire world is called to an epic adventure. The mission: to find an Easter Egg within his creation, the world's most popular massively multiplayer experience, the Oasis. Completing the quest -- deciphering clues to find keys that will lead to other clues and finally to the prize itself -- will earn the winner half a trillion dollars as well as control over the game itself.   The premise is intriguing; the execution is a glorious triumph of geek culture starring a poor orphan who unwittingly becomes a global hero.

We enter a future where the 'real world' is increasingly dismal, decaying under  a Great Recession that has lasted decades, largely fueled by...the lack of fuel, because the oil age is over. Poverty and overpopulation are both extreme,  forcing people to live in cobbled-together skyscrapers made of stacks of trailers. That's where our main character Wade Watts is from.  But there is an escape -- the Oasis, a kind of communal holodeck in which different planets allow people to have adventures in different kinds of worlds: there are fantasy environments for swords-and-potions questing as well as science fiction ones in which players might do their adventures from the Starship Enterprise. Wade, for instance,  goes by the Oasis name of Parzival and does his questing in either an X-Wing or Serenity. There are user-created worlds, too: imagine the Oasis not only as a mass gameworld, but one like the internet which is constantly being expanded by its users.  People lose themselves in it utterly through haptic suits that allow them to 'experience' what they're seeing in-game; one character doesn't leave his real-world apartment for over six months, because he doesn't have to. He can order real-world food delivery through the Oasis.

Although there is appeal in seeing the technological developments of this world, Ready Player One's attractive genius lays in the sheer abundance of geekery. It's incredible that so many references to various classic video games, eighties movies and music, and science fiction can be worked into to so small a book without becoming distracting, but it somehow works. One minute players are dancing to eighties music, the next they're being assaulted by a hit squad with laser weapons and then rescued by a wizard named Og the Great and Powerful. This book isn't just fun: if you're a gamer who also shares some of the creator's interests (and they are many), it's a ball.   The quest's actual demands and latent demands are both incredible:  not only does a player have spend years watching eighties movies, listening to music, and playing games like Zork , but in the actual quest they might be called on to  navigate through a TRS-180, then jump through a movie poster and play the lead role in Wargames, reciting every line perfectly.  And the author isn't just dealing with the top-heavy cream of geekery,  Star Trek geeks and LOTR readers:  his references are obscure. At one point a character searches a house for boxes of Captain Crunch to blow the toy whistle buried inside at the exact pitch used by John Draper to fool AT&T's phone system into doing his bidding. There's even a School House Rock moment, in which singing the opening bars of the song is crucial. (If you're unfamiliar with SHR, check Youtube. It's basically the series that taught me the Preamble and what a preposition is.)

Beyond this, Ready Player One is also a tightly plotted adventure novel. The main character is not alone with his friends in seeking the Egg: a powerfully evil corporation is also in the hunt, using all of its resources to bribe and threaten players into helping them, and their malicious will isn't just effected in-game. The main character spends half the novel in hiding after an attempt on his life,  at its darkest point -- when the corporation is seemingly at the threshold of winning -- he has to execute a real-world plan to stop them from taking over.  Throughout the book, Klein subtly plays with the fact that the Oasis is both attractive and insidious: it offers players unlimited experiences at the cost of their real-world lives, a fact not lost on the characters. Doubtless many readers of the novel will share that experience, in part, having spent hours in virtual environments with friends, so much so that the game map seems to be a physical place in our minds. (Andy Weir, author of The Martian, wrote a short story called "Lacero" based on RPO's Oasis, and wells more on the insidious aspect.)

Although I'm admittedly an ideal audience for this book --  the only references that went by me were the anime/manga/Transformer ones --   I've rarely been as enthralled by a novel as I have been with this one. This is definitely one to buy so I can re-read!

A note on the audiobook:  you get to hear Wil Wheaton refer to himself as "an old geezer".  Wheaton is as usual a solid voice actor, and his presence adds geek appeal to a novel already brimming over with it. The only hitch is that some things don't lend themselves well to being read, like chatlogs or a scoreboard.

Related:
Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin Anderson.
Redshirts,  John Scalzi. Read by Wil Wheaton.
Masters of Doom, David Kushner.  Read by Wil Wheaton.

Masters of Doom

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
© 2004 David Kushner,
Audible presentation read by Wil Wheaton, runtime 12 hours & 43 minutes
334 pages

I wasn’t playing PC games  in the early nineties when Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake revolutionized both the industry and the hobby, but  they were legends I never stopped hearing about after I subscribed to PC Gamer in 2000.  I was conscious of playing in their shadow:  one of my favorite games,  Star Trek Elite Force, used the Quake III engine.  When I learned that Wil Wheaton, a geek gamer’s gaming geek,  narrated an audiobook about  the formation of id software, I couldn’t pass it by.  Masters of Doom chronicles the coming-together of two programming geniuses – John Carmack and John Romero, their overnight transformation from pizza cooks into millionaires, and the pressures that broke their team apart.

This book’s main lure for me was the voice of Wil Wheaton, and I’m happy to say he delivered. Wheaton’s acting experience  serves him well here; his reading is flawless and even,   giving slightly difference voices to different people.   On several occasions he uses an accent, or gives a ‘dramatic reading’, as he does when he imitates one game developer announcing his game in the imitative style of Walter Winchell. The effect is utterly hilarious --  and ditto when he does a reading of Bill Clinton’s accusations against Doom in the wake of the Columbine bombing attempt.

I’d previously heard id described as innovative, but never appreciated how far back their innovations went. John Carmack, for instance, introduced side-scrolling to the PC at a time when it  was regarded as impossible given the hardware limitations of computers themselves. His test project inserted an id character, Commander Keene, into the first level of Mario.  Several other major breakthroughs are mentioned here; dynamic lighting, for instance, and tweaks that forced the Apple II to create colors  beyond its original pallet.   At this time, id was creating relatively innocent games like Commander Keene, which set a young boy against an alien invasion.  Elements that would become id hallmarks (the retention of slain enemies), were already present.  More importantly,  multiplayer itself was an id creation, at least as far as LAN connections went. The software that allowed multiple computers to dial a remote server – creating gamerooms to meet other gamers and play matches against them in – was created by a fan, but quickly purchased and integrated into the core gaming experience. From Doom and Quake came  gaming clans, still a staple of gaming competitions.

Throughout the book, id grows from two guys doing all of the work – designing, programming, art-crafting – into a team of men with different ideas and different directions. Although their success  -- and their garages of Ferraris – had been made by working together, their wealth also enabled the two senior owners the resources to go their own way once their personal differences had become too much to bear. Carmack, for instance, is seen here as deeply serious coder who likes the challenge of it more than anything else.  Romero,  initially no less dedicated a programmer (and initially the engineering strength of the two-man team), later grew to relish the attention and moolah id’s success had given him.    The last quarter of the book details Romero’s departure from id,  the creation of his Ion Storm design firm, and the projects both men pursued throughout the 2000s. As of the book's publication, and the audiobook's presentation, both were still involved in gaming -- Romero was then branching out into the un-exploited terrain of pocket pc/smartphone games, and  Carmack was still finishing Doom 3 despite nursing another hobby in rocketry.  (According to Wikipedia, he's now involved in some VR project that Facebook bought out.)

Masters of Doom proved a fun bit of computer and gaming history, and my first look inside the gaming industry. My favorite designers are guys like Sid Meier (Civilization)  and Will Wright (SimCity /The Sims), both Carmack and Romero were fun guys to get to 'know' through these thirteen hours spent listening to Wil Wheaton.  There's more than a little nostalgic appeal here,  too.

Related:
Doom 2 Easter Egg:  John Romero's Head hidden inside final boss
IGN Plays Doom with John Romero