Signs of Life on the Planet - Cyric of PlanetDoom
Conducted by CLIMaX
____________________________________________________________________BIO

_____________________________________________________________INTERVIEW

[CLIMaX]  Many gamers know you as the PlanetDOOM guy - webmaster, orchestrator, perpetrator and ringmaster of one of the most popular Doom websites in the galaxy. Please give us some background on your career in the gaming industry and as a gamer.

[Cyric]  As a gamer wasn’t too much into PC gaming. I was a console junkie and loved the Sega line of systems. Sega Master System and Genesis is where it was at for me. Stupid Nintendo. But anyways, I started to dabble in PC gaming when I went and picked up my first computer, the Commodore Amiga 500. When high school hit I pretty much never touched a computer or console again until a few years after since I was busy doing bad teenager things. As for where my “career” started in gaming, I first started posting on the quake3world forums as soon as the game came out back in 1999. I stayed on that site to get as much info about q3a as I could and after a while I tried my hand in mapping and skinning.

It didn‘t last long but while I was there I offered my services as a moderator to one of the forums and was accepted. Soon after that I started to help out with map reviews and after that added whatever else the webmaster needed a hand with which was mostly news posting. I became co-webmaster of the site and admin of the forums and kept with that for awhile. At the start of 2001, Mplayer got bought out by GameSpy and I decided to ask if there were other sites that I could help out on since I was getting “quaked” out, as it were. Caryn “Hellchick” Law made me an offer to start a DOOM site for GameSpy and I accepted. I created The Phobos Lab which was the GameSpy DOOM 3 site from October 2001 until August 2003 when it became PlanetDOOM.

Aside from working for GameSpy and PlanetDOOM, I also help out a friend of mine named Astrocreep on his site Map-Center which is dedicated to mainly q3 engine mapping. I am also a writer for GameShark.com. I write guides and walkthroughs for all the newest Xbox and PlayStation 2 games as well as reviews and comments. I got into that side of gaming by helping out a friend and have been doing it for about a year now. I have tried over the years to start a LAN tournament here in Toronto but sadly each time I get the time to try and organize such a large event, something comes up and I am forced to put it back on the shelf. Someday I’ll get it going though.

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[CLIMaX]  Valve Software's Half-Life 2 promises to deliver great graphics, vehicles you can drive, and new characters including a female who plays a significant role in the story. Add the option for 32-slot multiplayer games and playing Half-Life 2 sounds pretty awesome. Can id Software's Doom III compete with all of that?

[Cyric]  I expect Half Life 2 to be an awesome game when it is finally released but so far the way Valve has treated its fans in my eyes is garbage. A game can have all the fancy tricks and gimmicks it wants like vehicles or the token eye grabber for guys which comes in the form of a sexy looking female, but if a company jerks it customers around the way Valve has it means nothing to me. Valve was adamant that it would be released on Sept 30th and spoke no word about it until two days earlier when their source code was stolen and that “apparently” caused the game to be delayed for another 6 months. What was stolen was a half finished scripted game that was no where near being released.

So unless Valve had a secret copy of HL2 in a safe somewhere, they were no where near releasing it on Sept 30th and they failed to mention that to anyone. It rubs my rhubarb when companies bite the hands that feed them so to speak and most gamers just accept it. They forget all about it when the game comes out and gush over how good it looks and whatnot when it is released. Maybe I just hold grudges more than some people but it’s a rule of life, treat others the way you want to be treated. Id Software on the other hand, if you have a question about a game or something that you didn’t understand, fire them off an e-mail and they reply themselves quickly and friendly and are glad to do it. One of my friends came from id Software and we met because I worked along side him on q3w and he was always there to answer any questions that the community had. Even though he has left id to work for another company we are still good friends.

That to me makes a huge difference in what games I like and what games I play. With that aside, will DOOM 3 be able to compete with Half Life 2? That’s really not even a question. Id Software is known for creating game engines that power half of the gaming world and even the first Half Life was built off of id Software’s knowledge. DOOM 3 will have the most incredible physics engine any game has seen and that’s just the beginning. Throw in an established video game writer to pen the story and throw in the grizzly creatures that only id could come up with and some other things which I cannot discuss, you have yourself a top rated game. DOOM and id Software themselves have a history that Half Life can’t compete with and any old school gamer will agree. Id knows how to make games and they have been doing it for a long time. Valve has no precedent of how good its games are. They have one under their belt and those that weren’t delayed, (Team Fortress 2 anyone?) were created from the community.

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[CLIMaX]  The forum at PlanetDoom is very active. A large group of regulars set the level of discussion a notch higher than can be found in many other forums (which won't be named in order to protect the innocent and feeble-minded) in the FPS gamer community. What are some of your favorite forum categories at PD? And, what are some of the most important discussions going on at the moment?

[Cyric]   Well right now, prior to the games release there are not that many categories to deal with. Come close to release date we have many more planned and they are pretty much all mapped out already just waiting to be implemented. I really don’t see the point of having a forum for say, editing, when there is no point of having it with out a game to edit. As of right now though we have a good selection of forums that include discussions on what you might expect when it comes to game time, technical talk with some of the most tech savvy discussions I have seen take place about hardware and video cards and what will or will not be able to handle DOOM 3. We have 2 forums dedicated to fan and visitor created media where they can post their artwork or stories they have written or drawn and have them critiqued by the public. It was a new addition in the past few months but it seems to have gotten great feedback is very popular so far.

In the past, I have been known to be a bit of a hard ass when it comes to running a website and forum but sometimes that’s what is needed. I have seen forum officials who didn’t want to deal with certain people because they wanted to be everyone’s friend. Sadly you can’t have both if you want to run an efficient forum. As for the moderators on the forum, I must say we have some of the fairest moderators compared to a lot of sites I have been to. They give controversial topics a chance to have a good debate and warn when it starts getting out of hand and unfortunately when it comes down to name calling and hair pulling and so forth then it gets taken care of. Pain was the most recent moderator addition to RosOne and h0peless who have been helping out for almost a year now. All three are very helpful and have the edge to handle the troublemakers when needed. I don’t allow illegal material or flaming on the PD forums which has gotten some great feedback from companies and magazines such as PC Gamer where we received a thank you from them for not allowing images from their magazine on our site.

There are plenty of DOOM sites out there that have allowed illegal material especially from the Leaked alpha and that was the only reason their site survived. That and the fact they started to make maps using it. From day one I did not allow any images, links or troubleshooting from the leaked alpha and I am damn proud, maybe prouder than I should be, but still proud that our site has flourished even while other sites embraced the leak as though it was the game itself. It makes me chuckle to myself that people who complain about us not allowing illegal material on PlanetDOOM, find themselves looking for a new DOOM site to post on every few months. The staff at PD do everything we can to make it the most informative DOOM site out there and people bad mouth it into the ground while at the same time take our content to better their site. It really is interesting to watch.

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[CLIMaX]  The level of technical sophistication and wider consumer appeal of video games has beckoned the entire entertainment industry to the table in search of profits. Partnerships between game developers, Hollywood, and the music industry mean a lot of investment money is flowing. What affect has this had on gameplay itself? Some critics charge that the will to innovate is being replaced with an accounting mentality whose highest goal is selling the most units, not developing the next level of video games. Have there been any truly new games developed since the original Quake in 1997 or are they all just remakes of id's original with a few new bells and whistles added?

[Cyric]  Games nowadays have become more graphically intense than any of us old Intellevision and Sega players would have imagined. As games get more extravagant with the recent trend of Hollywood actors and well known composers doing the soundtracks it is almost a guaranteed hit for many companies. As for game innovation being replaced with “gotta make more money” mentality, a game can have all the hoopla and famous people that you can throw at it, but gamers aren’t stupid. If the game sucks then the players will have no hesitation to tell their friends, websites, online forums and so forth about said crappy game and the game in turn will not be one of those higher selling units.

Games such as 007: Everything or Nothing show that games can indeed have Hollywood actors and great musical soundtracks as well as being one hell of a game. Sure there will be more losers than winners in this type of game but that’s no different than what has already been happening for years. As for has there been any innovations in FPS games since Quake? Absolutely, if there wasn’t we would all be years past bored of playing the same thing over and over. I mean sure Quake may have started to kick off the true multiplayer aspect of gaming but the single player was nothing to write home about. Saying all games are basically the same as the first batch of FPS games from id is like saying a Porsche is basically the same as a Ford Model T with a new horn.

Through the years games build on what works and use it to their advantage. Quake 2, system shock 2, half life up to Battlefield 1942 they all take what worked and made it better to make great games each with their own attributes. Now you have the next generation of games coming out such as DOOM 3 where the limits of what a computer can handle graphically is pushed and the suspense of the gameplay get pushed to the limit with new innovative techniques to handle the world in which you play as well as an incredible physics engine the likes of which has ever been seen before.

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[CLIMaX]  Where do you see yourself five years from now? Ten years from now? Is gaming your career and a long-term project with specific goals in mind?

[Cyric]  I don’t see myself anywhere to tell you the truth. No one knows where they will be, what will befall them or what can happen. One day my life changed in the blink of an eye and something like that makes you realize that you really don’t have a whole lot of control on certain aspects of your life. You may think you do, but you don’t. I prefer not to “see” where I would be in the future because I know that one unfortunate incident whether your fault or not can blow that plan to oblivion.

I, never, in a million years thought I would be playing video games for a living, with contacts at the top gaming magazines and good friends that work for game companies, especially when I used to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week on a printing press being covered in cuts and chemicals. Would I like to still be in gaming in five years? Absolutely. I would prefer to stay in the industry for sure but be more involved, work in house, deeper in a company with some experience behind me and more knowledge of the fuel and politics that continue to make a company work.

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[CLIMaX]  How's your clan Who's Your Daddy doing these days? Still playing Q3 Clan Arena on the QuakeWorld.com server?

[Cyric]  The clan is still alive and kicking. A new member or two over the past year but that’s how I like to keep it. A small close knit clan that is just a good bunch of guys and are fun to play with. It’s funny that there are people who try to bring us down and go on about how we don’t compete competitively and such but I really don’t see the point. The point is too have fun and when you start to compete it loses some of that fun that the game is about and you are too serious about what you did or what someone else did and having practices and crap like that. Games are meant to be fun and that how they will stay to me. As for the q3w server, the majority of players there are great players and people but like I said earlier about public servers, it amazing that one or two immature “kids” can turn you right off of a gaming experience. You know a lot of these server companies should figure out a way to make some servers age restricted. That would make me happy a happy gamer.

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