Back in the Lava Again with American McGee of Id Software

I’m about to tell you how to learn not to fear death. Back in the 20th century, actually early in 1994, Claude Needham, Ph.D. and I were under contract to Id Software to produce music for Quake and to help with certain gaming issues that we’d already worked out on the GODD Engine, and my friend John Carmack, who is a proponent of Open Source and has released all his games as Open Source. John had sent his lead programmer, American McGee to my home for ten days. McGee brought the Secret Software for Quake on his own desktop gaming computer, which we kept in a locked area on a “safe” desk, used only for game development computers. Remember, this was Back in The Day, so we didn’t have more than a few megs of memory and slowwwww chips, and internet gameplay was just brand-new and slow at that time, with an average “ping” of well over 10,000, no kidding.

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Repeat As Necessary

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It’s probably a good time to re-introduce the Primal Commands once again. A Primal Command goes with the current game (a little electron joke). The game you know best right now is called “Life on Earth”. The real name translates more or less as “Urthgame”, and that’s what you’re into quite deeply right now, due to what is called “angular momentum”. Angular momentum is what gets you into the most trouble, and we’ll be looking at that aspect of travel pretty soon in the Master Builder’s Course. It’s part of the MoveAct Code, and you’ll need to learn its mysteries before you move on to the next level.

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