GetMirked
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Ape Escape
1999
chimpcaptor sakura
Ape Escape
1999
I could, and did (on an episode of Retronauts), speak at length about Ape Escape and each aspect of its being but I want to focus on controls here.
Much ink has been spilled in reverie of Super Mario 64's influence on 3D gaming. It rests on a pedestal so as to always invite comparison, hailed as "the new gold standard in video games" since its release.¹ The notion that Super Mario 64 was "the first [game] to get the control scheme right" in the 3D platformer space is evident by that separation of player movement and camera movement across the gaming landscape today.² With how infrequently - which is to say, not all of the time - the player moves the camera in Super Mario 64, the relegation of the camera to a quartet of readily accessible buttons is puzzling but forgivable for such an early True 3D Platformer.
The most critical part of Super Mario 64's legacy is its insistence on player control in a 3D space being simple and streamlined; push forward to go forward, press A to jump, no faffing about. As seen with early 2010s titles like Octodad or Surgeon Simulator, requiring players to engage in more direct, less conventional control schemes is a 'meme,' some source of comedy in large part because those controls are in direct defiance of reiterated means of control in gaming. While neither title nor their contemporaries illustrate with clarity the benefit of these subversive control methods, Ape Escape did over a decade earlier.
As the first PlayStation game to necessitate use of the DualShock controller, Japan Studio sought to use its features maximally from the ground up due to its potential as a dual analog device.³ The use of the second dog-nose textured stick for gameplay and direct character action was one of the only marked control innovations in the 3D platformer space since Super Mario 64. Demo discs espoused the DualShock and its implementation in Ape Escape as a tool one needed to master alongside the gameplay itself. Contemporary reviews corroborated these claims in large part because Ape Escape's controls refused the immediacy of Mario, Spyro, Banjo-Kazooie, and Crash. Jumping could happen with the tap of a button but gadgets were not so simple, yet they were even more intuitive because of the DualShock's second analog stick.
The Stun Club and Time Net are swung by moving the right analog stick towards your target, or spun through a full rotation. The Monkey Radar similarly is aimed in any direction to highlight the location of monkeys. This trio of tools is served to the player first because their input and action are direct -- you point the stick where you want the thing to happen, just as you do with the left stick for movement.
The Slingback Shooter presents the first deviation from what one might expect - rather than move the stick towards the target the player instead moves it away from the target as if operating an actual slingshot, releasing to fire. This movement is tactile thanks to the re-centring of the stick, snapping back with speed like taut elastic released. The Dash Hoop and Sky Flyer both require full, repeated rotations of the stick to simulate the movement, the latter mimicking a propeller around an axle, the former acting not as the hula hoop itself moving around the player but the player's hips working to get the hoop up to speed.
The final gadget (not including the post-game Magic Punch), the R.C. Car, is the most abstracted from convention as the second analog stick directly moves the vehicle separate from the player, likened by Tim Rogers to the dual arrows of Namco's 1983 game Libble Rabble.⁴ The comparison is apt on a surface level but while Libble Rabble requires simultaneous movement of Libble and Rabble to achieve the player goal of harvesting Mushlins, Ape Escape's R.C. Car is primarily maneuvered independently of the player in short bursts while the player adjusts their view or, more likely, stands still to focus solely on the R.C. Car. The player can, of course, move all they want while using the R.C. Car but this is not required because of Ape Escape's focus on oneness of control instead of separation of function and movement.
The Monkey Radar and R.C. Car notwithstanding, every gadget in Ape Escape complements movement in a similar manner to Mario's moveset in any of his 3D romps but with an added layer of immersion and intent. Chasing a monkey is not just a matter of platforming one's way toward an object through movement. The player needs to use the gadgets for their approach and for the act of catching the monkey, be it by hitting it with the Stun Club or Slingback Shooter, or just through aiming the Time Net towards an often moving target. The evasive maneuvers used by the monkeys heightens the pursuit further. If a monkey dives away from the Time Net the player can flick the stick towards its new location or perhaps keep the analog stick tilted and rotate it to catch the monkey in a spin. If a monkey is airborne the player can get near and shoot them down with the Slingback Shooter, or use the Sky Flyer to ascend to their level then quickly swap to the Time Net and catch them while you fall. Some monkeys require silver bullet solutions but player freedom is abundant across Ape Escape.
One of the greatest challenges of Ape Escape and enjoying it is that one has to meet it on its own terms. Just like one can't go into Gunstar Heroes expecting it to be like Contra, the prospective player cannot go into Ape Escape with the expectation it will control like or even resemble Super Mario 64. Just like the aforementioned piece of Treasure developed software, Ape Escape defies a reading which compares it to that which it is aesthetically associated with.
A few years back I came across an article which lambasted Ape Escape's controls following an authorial statement "to assess [old] games as if they were released today, not as products of the times in which they were created."⁵ Merits and flaws of such an approach aside, this umbrage with Ape Escape's convention-eschewing control scheme suggests that breaking from the Super Mario 64 style of platforming is itself heretical. Mention is made of the difficulty of rapidly adjusting the camera which were moved to the D-Pad and L1, something allegedly taken for granted presently whereas in 1999 there was "no well of experience to draw on" for this predicament.⁶ Ignoring the fact that 3D platformers had already contended with camera movement through the N64's C Buttons, effectively an analog to the DualShock's right analog stick, this perspective ignores Ape Escape's own camera concessions and means of manipulation. Ape Escape's levels are generally large enough to not require camera movement, and when the camera does need adjusting the L1 button immediately snaps the camera behind Spike, just as the R button did in Banjo-Kazooie. More direct control of the camera via the D-Pad is indeed more tedious and cumbersome but it is also in effect unnecessary by virtue of those expansive spaces. The article similarly raises qualms with the use of gadgets, considering the use of gadgets while moving to be analogous to patting one's head and rubbing one's tummy. This anapodoton that Ape Escape's controls equate to being poor is by no means unique to the article, and as a punchline it seems willfully ignorant of what Ape Escape expects of the player and their ability to adopt its way of thinking about control.⁷ Ultimately the article stands as the apex of decades of whinging about Ape Escape's perceived awkwardness, and the claims from those scant few who consider a suitable alternative to be pushing a button to engage in an action, akin to Mario punching. This is especially curious as Ape Escape got a port which 'remedied' this exact problem with 2005's Ape Escape: On the Loose.
The absence of a second analog nubbin on the PlayStation Portable saw gadgets being used through buttons, snatching from the player the degree of freedom in action the original release had. More critically, however, this digital interpretation of once analog intentions widens the gap between the player's actions and the actions of the character. The aforementioned oneness of Ape Escape is fundamental to the play experience because the title was developed for the DualShock, not around it or in spite of it. The placelessness of Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie or Spyro or any other 3D platformer which sees them effortlessly ported to new hardware with vastly different methods of control when compared to their original hardware is of value for those games, but it also demonstrates with crystal clarity that their universality opposes innovation vis-a-vis interaction with a game in a physical way. Contrastingly, Ape Escape occupies a position unique to and necessitated by the DualShock, evoking a sort of critical regionalism for games. In a similar vein to Alvar Aalto or Luis Barragán, both of whom have seen their architectonics (re)iterated outside of Finland and Mexico so as to suggest their forms exist and flourish outside their specific constraints and qualities of space and place, Ape Escape's ability to be placed outside of the PlayStation, with controllers that are not the DualShock (but resemble its form through four shoulder buttons and two analog sticks) should not be construed as it being separate from the DualShock.
In less grandiose terms, Ape Escape is the DualShock. Ape Escape deliberately avoided grafting camera controls to the second analog stick in favour of something more nuanced yet more natural and intuitive. Super Mario 64, the supposed pinnacle of 3D platforming and 'perfect' camera controls, is not the Nintendo 64 controller -- Miyamoto himself allegedly did not even like the C Buttons, and the game was designed using modified Sega gamepads for much of its development.⁸ Yet both can be and are played on newer hardware with controllers not of their era without being worse for the wear, if only because the DualShock and its dual analog sticks became the norm, the second stick functioning as a decent simulacrum for the solution of C Button cameras. And when Super Mario 64 got its portable port on the Nintendo DS, it was no worse for wear because the lack of C Buttons did not equate to a drastic change in gameplay. What is seen as awkward to some is precisely what makes Ape Escape work, and what made it so captivating to players in its own time, and still is today. That perfect implementation of a novel control scheme demonstrates to us a world of gaming that could have been; perhaps what should have been.
____________________
¹ "The Fun Machine: An Exclusive World Tour of the First Nintendo 64 Games," Nintendo Power 85, June 1996, 16.
² "Countdown to 200: The 10 Most Important Games," Electronic Gaming Monthly 187, January 2005.
³ "Ape Escape," PlayStation Underground 3, 1999.
⁴ Tim Rogers, "ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS PAC-MAN," YouTube video, 2:55:58, November 22, 2020.
⁵ Patrick Arthur, "Ape Escape and the Things We Take for Granted," Retro Spectives Podcast, March 31, 2019, https://www.rspodcast.net/articles/ape-escape-and-the-things-we-take-for-granted.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ https://www.twitch.tv/protonjon/clip/LitigiousExcitedWrenDendiFace-uWmxCn2TR-f5klsO?filter=clips&range=7d&sort=time
⁸ "The Making of Mario 64: Giles Goddard Interview," NGC Magazine 61, December 2001.
Much ink has been spilled in reverie of Super Mario 64's influence on 3D gaming. It rests on a pedestal so as to always invite comparison, hailed as "the new gold standard in video games" since its release.¹ The notion that Super Mario 64 was "the first [game] to get the control scheme right" in the 3D platformer space is evident by that separation of player movement and camera movement across the gaming landscape today.² With how infrequently - which is to say, not all of the time - the player moves the camera in Super Mario 64, the relegation of the camera to a quartet of readily accessible buttons is puzzling but forgivable for such an early True 3D Platformer.
The most critical part of Super Mario 64's legacy is its insistence on player control in a 3D space being simple and streamlined; push forward to go forward, press A to jump, no faffing about. As seen with early 2010s titles like Octodad or Surgeon Simulator, requiring players to engage in more direct, less conventional control schemes is a 'meme,' some source of comedy in large part because those controls are in direct defiance of reiterated means of control in gaming. While neither title nor their contemporaries illustrate with clarity the benefit of these subversive control methods, Ape Escape did over a decade earlier.
As the first PlayStation game to necessitate use of the DualShock controller, Japan Studio sought to use its features maximally from the ground up due to its potential as a dual analog device.³ The use of the second dog-nose textured stick for gameplay and direct character action was one of the only marked control innovations in the 3D platformer space since Super Mario 64. Demo discs espoused the DualShock and its implementation in Ape Escape as a tool one needed to master alongside the gameplay itself. Contemporary reviews corroborated these claims in large part because Ape Escape's controls refused the immediacy of Mario, Spyro, Banjo-Kazooie, and Crash. Jumping could happen with the tap of a button but gadgets were not so simple, yet they were even more intuitive because of the DualShock's second analog stick.
The Stun Club and Time Net are swung by moving the right analog stick towards your target, or spun through a full rotation. The Monkey Radar similarly is aimed in any direction to highlight the location of monkeys. This trio of tools is served to the player first because their input and action are direct -- you point the stick where you want the thing to happen, just as you do with the left stick for movement.
The Slingback Shooter presents the first deviation from what one might expect - rather than move the stick towards the target the player instead moves it away from the target as if operating an actual slingshot, releasing to fire. This movement is tactile thanks to the re-centring of the stick, snapping back with speed like taut elastic released. The Dash Hoop and Sky Flyer both require full, repeated rotations of the stick to simulate the movement, the latter mimicking a propeller around an axle, the former acting not as the hula hoop itself moving around the player but the player's hips working to get the hoop up to speed.
The final gadget (not including the post-game Magic Punch), the R.C. Car, is the most abstracted from convention as the second analog stick directly moves the vehicle separate from the player, likened by Tim Rogers to the dual arrows of Namco's 1983 game Libble Rabble.⁴ The comparison is apt on a surface level but while Libble Rabble requires simultaneous movement of Libble and Rabble to achieve the player goal of harvesting Mushlins, Ape Escape's R.C. Car is primarily maneuvered independently of the player in short bursts while the player adjusts their view or, more likely, stands still to focus solely on the R.C. Car. The player can, of course, move all they want while using the R.C. Car but this is not required because of Ape Escape's focus on oneness of control instead of separation of function and movement.
The Monkey Radar and R.C. Car notwithstanding, every gadget in Ape Escape complements movement in a similar manner to Mario's moveset in any of his 3D romps but with an added layer of immersion and intent. Chasing a monkey is not just a matter of platforming one's way toward an object through movement. The player needs to use the gadgets for their approach and for the act of catching the monkey, be it by hitting it with the Stun Club or Slingback Shooter, or just through aiming the Time Net towards an often moving target. The evasive maneuvers used by the monkeys heightens the pursuit further. If a monkey dives away from the Time Net the player can flick the stick towards its new location or perhaps keep the analog stick tilted and rotate it to catch the monkey in a spin. If a monkey is airborne the player can get near and shoot them down with the Slingback Shooter, or use the Sky Flyer to ascend to their level then quickly swap to the Time Net and catch them while you fall. Some monkeys require silver bullet solutions but player freedom is abundant across Ape Escape.
One of the greatest challenges of Ape Escape and enjoying it is that one has to meet it on its own terms. Just like one can't go into Gunstar Heroes expecting it to be like Contra, the prospective player cannot go into Ape Escape with the expectation it will control like or even resemble Super Mario 64. Just like the aforementioned piece of Treasure developed software, Ape Escape defies a reading which compares it to that which it is aesthetically associated with.
A few years back I came across an article which lambasted Ape Escape's controls following an authorial statement "to assess [old] games as if they were released today, not as products of the times in which they were created."⁵ Merits and flaws of such an approach aside, this umbrage with Ape Escape's convention-eschewing control scheme suggests that breaking from the Super Mario 64 style of platforming is itself heretical. Mention is made of the difficulty of rapidly adjusting the camera which were moved to the D-Pad and L1, something allegedly taken for granted presently whereas in 1999 there was "no well of experience to draw on" for this predicament.⁶ Ignoring the fact that 3D platformers had already contended with camera movement through the N64's C Buttons, effectively an analog to the DualShock's right analog stick, this perspective ignores Ape Escape's own camera concessions and means of manipulation. Ape Escape's levels are generally large enough to not require camera movement, and when the camera does need adjusting the L1 button immediately snaps the camera behind Spike, just as the R button did in Banjo-Kazooie. More direct control of the camera via the D-Pad is indeed more tedious and cumbersome but it is also in effect unnecessary by virtue of those expansive spaces. The article similarly raises qualms with the use of gadgets, considering the use of gadgets while moving to be analogous to patting one's head and rubbing one's tummy. This anapodoton that Ape Escape's controls equate to being poor is by no means unique to the article, and as a punchline it seems willfully ignorant of what Ape Escape expects of the player and their ability to adopt its way of thinking about control.⁷ Ultimately the article stands as the apex of decades of whinging about Ape Escape's perceived awkwardness, and the claims from those scant few who consider a suitable alternative to be pushing a button to engage in an action, akin to Mario punching. This is especially curious as Ape Escape got a port which 'remedied' this exact problem with 2005's Ape Escape: On the Loose.
The absence of a second analog nubbin on the PlayStation Portable saw gadgets being used through buttons, snatching from the player the degree of freedom in action the original release had. More critically, however, this digital interpretation of once analog intentions widens the gap between the player's actions and the actions of the character. The aforementioned oneness of Ape Escape is fundamental to the play experience because the title was developed for the DualShock, not around it or in spite of it. The placelessness of Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie or Spyro or any other 3D platformer which sees them effortlessly ported to new hardware with vastly different methods of control when compared to their original hardware is of value for those games, but it also demonstrates with crystal clarity that their universality opposes innovation vis-a-vis interaction with a game in a physical way. Contrastingly, Ape Escape occupies a position unique to and necessitated by the DualShock, evoking a sort of critical regionalism for games. In a similar vein to Alvar Aalto or Luis Barragán, both of whom have seen their architectonics (re)iterated outside of Finland and Mexico so as to suggest their forms exist and flourish outside their specific constraints and qualities of space and place, Ape Escape's ability to be placed outside of the PlayStation, with controllers that are not the DualShock (but resemble its form through four shoulder buttons and two analog sticks) should not be construed as it being separate from the DualShock.
In less grandiose terms, Ape Escape is the DualShock. Ape Escape deliberately avoided grafting camera controls to the second analog stick in favour of something more nuanced yet more natural and intuitive. Super Mario 64, the supposed pinnacle of 3D platforming and 'perfect' camera controls, is not the Nintendo 64 controller -- Miyamoto himself allegedly did not even like the C Buttons, and the game was designed using modified Sega gamepads for much of its development.⁸ Yet both can be and are played on newer hardware with controllers not of their era without being worse for the wear, if only because the DualShock and its dual analog sticks became the norm, the second stick functioning as a decent simulacrum for the solution of C Button cameras. And when Super Mario 64 got its portable port on the Nintendo DS, it was no worse for wear because the lack of C Buttons did not equate to a drastic change in gameplay. What is seen as awkward to some is precisely what makes Ape Escape work, and what made it so captivating to players in its own time, and still is today. That perfect implementation of a novel control scheme demonstrates to us a world of gaming that could have been; perhaps what should have been.
____________________
¹ "The Fun Machine: An Exclusive World Tour of the First Nintendo 64 Games," Nintendo Power 85, June 1996, 16.
² "Countdown to 200: The 10 Most Important Games," Electronic Gaming Monthly 187, January 2005.
³ "Ape Escape," PlayStation Underground 3, 1999.
⁴ Tim Rogers, "ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS PAC-MAN," YouTube video, 2:55:58, November 22, 2020.
⁵ Patrick Arthur, "Ape Escape and the Things We Take for Granted," Retro Spectives Podcast, March 31, 2019, https://www.rspodcast.net/articles/ape-escape-and-the-things-we-take-for-granted.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ https://www.twitch.tv/protonjon/clip/LitigiousExcitedWrenDendiFace-uWmxCn2TR-f5klsO?filter=clips&range=7d&sort=time
⁸ "The Making of Mario 64: Giles Goddard Interview," NGC Magazine 61, December 2001.
Thatcher's Techbase
2021
March 4th, 2020: I start a new job as software developer at a bank.
March 6th, 2020: Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, reassures the British public that the rise in SARS-CoV-2 cases is "nothing to be concerned about".
March 9th, 2020: Due to the rapid rise in SARS-CoV-2 ("coronavirus") cases in Asia and the European continent, financial markets go into free-fall. Billions of pounds of value are wiped away from companies around the world, in an event later dubbed as "The First Black Friday of 2020". My second-ever meeting at my new bank job is interrupted by financial traders screaming at each other and their phones in the corridor outside the conference room. Boris Johnson once again reassures the people of Britain that coronavirus will not be a problem in the UK.
March 10th, 2020: In the interests of personal and public safety, a number of software teams at my workplace decide to implement a joint 2-week work from home policy. An immediate evacuation of personnel, laptops and coffee mugs begins.
March 16th, 2020: A ban on non-essential travel comes into effect in the United Kingdom and citizens are advised to stay at home to curb the spread of coronavirus. The UK government claims that coronavirus "will be beaten in 12 weeks".
March 20th, 2020: Highly-anticipated video games Animal Crossing and DOOM: Eternal release around the world. Gamers who pre-ordered DOOM Eternal also receive a remastered port of DOOM 64, a 1997 first-person shooter game developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64. This port of DOOM 64 also goes on general sale at the same time.
March 23rd, 2020: My grandfather dies from complications related to the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2).
March 26th, 2020: Due to UK government health policy that strongly encourages hospitals to release elderly patients who test positive for coronavirus into the care of residential care homes, my 60 year old mother is forced to give up her role as an events co-ordinator and take up full-time nursing duties.
April 1st, 2020: Six people are allowed to attend my grandfather's burial, which is carried out by the local council's hazardous waste department. There is no funeral ceremony.
April 3rd, 2020: Looking for something cheap to distract me, I purchase DOOM 64 for £1.50 on the Nintendo Switch, mistakenly believing it to be a Nintendo 64 port of the original DOOM (1993).
April 6th, 2020: While playing map 16 of DOOM 64 - "Burnt Offerings" - I begin to realise that DOOM 64 (and DOOM in general) is something quite special.
April 30th, 2020: Boris Johnson assures the public that the UK is now "past the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.
May 2nd, 2020: Gradually beginning to enjoy the newfound freedoms of home-working, I download GZDoom and begin playing through "DOOM", "DOOM II" and their expansions whenever my code is compiling or I'm stuck waiting for a reply to an email.
May 9th, 2020: I celebrate my 30th birthday. Between other housebound festivities, I play a wee bit of DOOM II’s MAP04: The Focus to celebrate. It’s my favourite DOOM map.
June 15th, 2020: My flatmate and I host a Streets of Rage 4 charity stream on Twitch, and attempt to clear the game's Arcade Mode on Mania difficulty in one sitting. After five attempts, we manage to make it two thirds of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. The stream raises £600 for Glasgow asylum seeker funds and social housing charities.
July 23rd, 2020: Noticing my increasingly-obsessional interest in the DOOM series, my flatmate buys me a copy of Masters of DOOM, a book that tells an oral history of John Carmack and John Romero's creation of the original 1993 game and its sequel.
July 31st, 2020: A BAFTA award for investigative journalism is awarded to the BBC for a 2019 television interview with Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged involvement in child sex trafficking.
August 2nd, 2020: I order a replica of John Romero's infamous "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest in anticipation of my upcoming summer holiday.
August 11th, 2020: John Romero favs a picture of me wearing my "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest.
August 21st, 2020: Twitter user @spewlieandrews makes a tweet about how he'd spend his eternity in Hell searching for Margaret Thatcher so that he could kill her again. I laugh at it and retweet it.
September 13th, 2020: Tim Rogers releases ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM, an exhaustive 3-and-a-half hour review of DOOM (1993). During his review, Tim suggests that no one can honestly claim to be a true fan of DOOM until they have tried designing their own map for the game.
September 22nd, 2020: Some "minor" lockdown restrictions are re-introduced across the United Kingdom in response to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and ICU admisssions. The government stops offering restaurant patrons its financial incentive programme for eating out.
September 24th, 2020: My girlfriend, a few weeks into her first year as a trainee doctor, is re-assigned to a new infectious diseases unit created in response to a severe rise in coronavirus cases across the city of Glasgow.
September 26th, 2020: I receive a stern warning from my employer's infosec administrator for attempting to install WINE and Ultimate Doom Builder on my workplace laptop. I promise not to do it again and remain grateful that he didn't see the GZDoom launcher on my desktop while inspecting the laptop.
September 27th, 2020: After successfully reformatting my old 2007 Lenovo laptop and installing Windows 10 on it, I begin the process of making a DOOM map.
September 29th, 2020: After a few evenings spent learning how to make working doors and windows, I create a file called MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad and decide to make a standard DOOM (1993) techbase to test if I understand what the DOOM experts on YouTube have taught me so far.
September 30th, 2020: To make the learning process funny (which is very important to me), I decide to use @spewlieandrews’s August 21st, 2020 tweet about fighting through Hell to find Thatcher as a model for MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad. Making a techbase map about Margaret Thatcher naturally leads to MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad becoming THATCHERS-TECHBASE.wad later that day.
October 8th, 2020: While in a pub on Islay, my girlfriend and I find out that the Scottish Government is restricting hospitality opening times to 6am-6pm indoors. The sale of alcohol will not be permitted at any time. News of this announcement causes the entire pub to descend into Tennent's-fuelled chaos. After securing my final pint, I go back to drawing DOOM map layouts on my phone.
October 21st, 2020: Construction begins on THATCHER’S BATTLE COLISEUM, one of the game’s main boss arenas. At this point in development, I still don’t know what a Margaret Thatcher-based boss battle in the idTech1 engine would look like.
October 27th, 2020: Struggling with mapper’s block, I decide to recreate the main lobby of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64 in DOOM. With a bit of texture-bashing, this later becomes one of the game’s main lobbies. The iconic castle corridor where Peach’s portrait morphs into Bowser’s - one of my most precious gaming memories ever - is easily repurposed into a Thatcher joke.
October 31st, 2020: Submitting to widespread pressure from the media, general public and his own government officials, Boris Johnson finally announces a second coronavirus lockdown in order to prevent "a medical and moral disaster".
November 1st, 2020: I finish playing through Going Down - perhaps the greatest DOOM wad of all time - and am reassured to discover that DOOM is a fantastic vehicle for comedy.
November 4th, 2020: My flatmate buys me a copy of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, a 1995 book about DOOM mapping. The book comes with a CD-ROM that has a few hundred wads on it, but after 26 years on a bookshelf, the glue has fused the CD’s envelope shut and I can’t get it open.
November 5th, 2020: While reading Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, I come across a chapter that describes “The Best DOOM WADs Ever”. Among mods dedicated to The Simpsons and Beavis & Butthead, I find an entry for a wad called Return to Phobos. The author of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus describes the wad’s E1M4 replacement as “one of the all-time great DOOM maps”. I’ve never heard of it.
November 6th, 2020: Still curious about Return to Phobos and unable to get the glue off my CD-ROM, I spend some time searching the internet for the wad file. After downloading and playing two other DOOM wads called Return to Phobos that aren’t the particular 1995 Return to Phobos wad that I was looking for, I eventually locate the all-time great E1M4 replacement. It’s a giant factory with a balcony at the rear that lets you look out at a stunning 128x128 industrial skybox. I like it. Some of the doors don’t work and the textures are out of alignment, but I like it.
November 7th, 2020: E1M4 of Return to Phobos is resurrected and thoroughly repurposed as a mining facility for THATCHER’S TECHBASE. While retexturing a big slime pit, I find out Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. I return to retexturing my slime pit.
December 14th, 2020: I submit a fake article to my friend’s zine in the style of a 90s video games magazine article. To fill the page out, I stick some wigs on cyberdemon, imp and pinkie sprites to make them look like infamous politicians. The image of a cyberdemon rocking Thatcher’s iconic blow-dry job really makes me laugh.
December 19th, 2020: Due to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and critical demand on healthcare services, the British and Scottish governments announce a ban on household mixing over the Christmas period. "Tier four" lockdown restrictions now apply indefinitely.
December 25th, 2020: I have an instant curry with my brother and girlfriend before they head off to work on emergency infectious diseases wards at the local hospital because people are being ventilated in corridors and are having to sleep on beds placed in storage rooms. I watch Home Alone 2 then do a bit of work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
January 1st, 2021: Waking up to an empty house again, I decide to spend my first hours of the first day of 2021 fucking about with THATCHER'S TECHBASE again. I am severely hung over and vomit into the bin next to my computer within minutes of trying to play the big lobby fight. Maybe tomorrow.
January 22nd, 2021: With the majority of the map's layout, scripting and enemy placement done, I decide to take a short sabbatical from map-making to do some research on the Margaret Thatcher premiership period, which lasted from 1979 - 1990. I watch a number of documentaries, fiction films andYouTube videos that are related, directly or indirectly, to the Thatcher government and its influence on British society in the 1980s. Examples include Pride, The Fully Monty, Brassed Off, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pink Floyd's The Wall.
February 17th, 2021: After spending a lot of time reading very snobby, snooty and sanctimonious guides on how to do pixel art for DOOM, I begin adding my points of reference to the game as in-game textures and sprites. I find the pipeline of identifying images, tailoring them to the specifications of the DOOM engine and adding my own artistic flourishes to be one of the most satisfying parts of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE design process so far.
March 16th, 2021: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is photographed leaving hospital following a heart transplant at age 99. His incredibly sullen features and sickly demeanour prompt a number of internet memes and satirical artworks that I enjoy very much.
March 19th, 2021: While watching a decino video about the inner workings of the DOOM engine, I learn that Commander Keen objects (as seen in DOOM II’s MAP32) have a special property that causes them to open doors tagged “666” on a map when they are shot at.
March 21st, 2021: While doing a biweekly watch of my favourite One Piece scenes, I realise that the Commander Keen object in DOOM could be repurposed to resemble a shootable flag. I animate a burning Union Jack sprite and replace the Keen frames with it.
March 24th, 2021: New guidance mandates that all government buildings in the United Kingdom will fly the Union flag at all times.
April 4th, 2021: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99.
April 6th, 2021: After a number of unsuccessful attempts to convincingly put a Thatcher wig on a Cyberdemon, I decide to ask someone with actual talent to do it for me and commission a pixel artist from Brazil. When he asks me to do a sketch explaining what the hell I’m talking about, I realise it would also be pretty funny to give her a ripped jacket and handbag. https://ibb.co/HpLpkFP
April 7th, 2021: After a nervous 24 hour wait spent wondering if I am certifiably insane, I receive an enthusiastic reply from the artist, who agrees to create the necessary sprites for a Cyberdemon sprite replacement. The enemy has now been creatively dubbed “CyberThatcher”.
April 10th, 2021: CyberThatcher’s handbag is dropped due to logistical issues.
April 12th, 2021: Non-essential retail reopens in England and Wales.
April 17th, 2021: The CyberThatcher sprite sheet is completed and inserted into the game.
April 20th, 2021: I get a haircut for the first time in over a year.
April 26th, 2021: A leaked recording from inside 10 Downing Street reveals that in the autumn of 2020, Boris Johnson said that he would rather "let bodies pile high in their thousands" than take the country into another coronavirus lockdown. Once again, I feel regret that I don't have the time or resources available to put a Boris Johnson wig on that pinkie sprite.
May 12th, 2021: After four months spent playing my wad while listening to a MIDI version of LMAO’s Party Rock Anthem on repeat, I decide that the main map of THATCHER’S TECHBASE probably deserves a more fitting soundtrack. I contact my friend Barry Topping with a tongue-in-cheek job offer, suggesting he compose a “man on a mission”-styled metal track in the vein of the original DOOM games. As an avowed metalhead, he graciously accepts the offer of a lifetime.
May 13th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher1.mp3”, an awesome minute-long sample of the song he’s written. Much to Barry’s dismay, I inform him that the map takes between 40 minutes and an hour to beat in its present state. I have inadvertently tasked him with the horrendous job of coming up with a tune that someone would be happy to listen to upwards of 60 times in a row.
May 16th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher2.mp3”, an incredible six-minute long sample of the song he’s written. Much to my delight, the song is now 6 minutes long and could comfortably be listened to on repeat upwards of 120 times in a row. In honour of our new-found creative partnership and a long-standing ironic catchphrase related to the failures of the 2014 Scottish Referendum on Independence, the track is dubbed "L2VN" - "Love 2 Vote No".
June 16th, 2021: After seeing more of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, Barry very kindly offers to compose more music for the game.
June 18th, 2021: Barry produces the opening theme of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, to be used with the main menu.
June 21st, 2021: All coronavirus restrictions are lifted across the United Kingdom.
June 25th, 2021: I build a quick test area in THATCHER'S TECHBASE in order to work on some new Doomcute objects. While bashing together a few chairs, cigarettes and cans of Tennent's Lager, I realise that the test area is actually pretty fun to hang out in and decide to keep it in.
June 26th, 2021: After a few hours spent quickly map-bashing some assets from iconic 90s DOOM wad STAR WARS DOOM 2, I turn my quick test area into a UAC headquarters building and move everything out into a new MAP01 slot in the wad. This map becomes The Beginning of THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
June 28th, 2021: THATCHER’S TECHBASE is awarded an E3 best of THIS 2021 Award by MechaGamezilla.
July 8th, 2021: I share a pre-release build of THATCHER'S TECHBASE with some DOOM wad enthusiasts.
July 9th, 2021: A DOOM player and wadding/modding enthusiast with 25 years of experience laments that I didn't share THATCHER'S TECHBASE sooner - not because it's amazing, but because it's gotten wildly out of hand and he thinks it needs to get under control. He shares some very harsh but fair advice with me.
July 10th, 2021: I cut a number of sections from THATCHER'S TECHBASE in the interests of not making players go mad with confusion/stress/boredom. Approximately 2,500 sectors are deleted in one hour. With far less map to maintain, I feel much better about the project.
July 11th, 2021: An amateur DOOM player struggles to realise that a wall in front of them at the start of MAP02 is a door. I start to feel much worse about the project and wonder if anyone will be able to understand me. I begin to fear that if THATCHER'S TECHBASE was a £60 game you could buy in a shop, people would be looking for their receipts in the first ten minutes.
July 22nd, 2021: While watching footage of The Beginning, Barry notices similarities between the wad's Express Elevator to Hell and the opening of Paradise Killer. WHITEHELL, MAP01's track, is extended to include one of his signature funky interludes.
August 4th, 2021: In the middle of a rare Scottish heatwave, I play through some of Flower, Sun and Rain's most infamously obtuse and player-adversarial chapters and begin to understand the value in placing priority on my own game world over the game world that a player might expect.
August 20th, 2021: I play through the infamous toilet maze puzzle in Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. After months of feeling guilty about forcing potential THATCHER’S TECHBASE players through harshly indistinct mazes, I suddenly feel much better about myself and the game and begin to see the humour in making gamers suffer.
August 23rd, 2021: Realising that I could probably spend months (if not years) refining the map to no end, I decide to do the one thing I never wanted to do since the moment the project began - I set myself an arbitrary deadline of September 24th, 2021 for the release of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and decide to get the wad into a playable state by that date.
August 25th, 2021: Realising that the content of THATCHER'S TECHBASE makes it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the idgames wad archive, I make a website to host the wad instead. Inspired by my prior success raising money for charity with Streets of Rage 4, I include a donations link for organisations suggested by Hope Not Hate, a group set up in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death to encourage people to support communities affected by the decisions of her government.
August 28th, 2021: Hoping I can find a way for the game to played by more people than just by immediate friends and appreciator's of Barry "Epoch" Topping's music, I enlist my friend Richie Morgan to make a tongue-in-cheek trailer for the game to help get the word out.
September 1st, 2021: The trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE is completed, but I feel like it's missing something - namely, the voice of Margaret Thatcher herself. I approach a guy on Twitter who is really good at imitating Duke Nukem and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life and ask him if he knows anyone who could do a good Thatcher impersonation.
September 2nd, 2021: Gianni, the Duke in question, responds quickly and recommends Laila Berzins - the voice of Demeter in Hades and a bunch of anime boys in Sword Art Online. Despite my reservations about how much a professional voice actor would cost, Gianni strongly recommends that I ask her anyway. In the space of an hour, Laila sends me six voice lines and waives the majority of her fee upon learning that it's a free game about killing Margaret Thatcher that intends to raise money for charity.
September 13th, 2021: I get a cat.
September 14th, 2021: After being condemned by the UK's chief medical officer for spreading coronavirus misinformation, Nicki Minaj releases a Twitter voice note that claims she was an Oxford classmate of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
September 15th, 2021: The THATCHER’S TECHBASE trailer launches. In its first day on Twitter, it somehow gets 3000 retweets and 8000 favourites. A lot of gaming websites turn the tweet thread about the trailer into low-effort content for their blogs. People with small brains send me a fair few messages with insinuations of sacrilege, treason and other acts of digital terrorism. I am generally shitting myself.
September 16th, 2021: Articles about THATCHER’S TECHBASE are published in The Independent and NME. A pal from 15 years ago phones me up to tell me how excited he is to play the game. John Romero retweets a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the game and declares that he's going to play the wad. I am now really shitting myself.
September 19th, 2021: Gillian Anderson wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After the awards show, Anderson is asked if she consulted the Iron Lady about the role. She claims she has not spoken to Margaret Thatcher recently.
September 20th, 2021: UK bottling plants and farm suppliers report that there is only enough C02 supply to last the nation "one or two more weeks" - this prompts mass panic buying of Coca-Cola, Irn Bru and other carbonated drinks. The price of Irn Bru immediately rises by £1.50, and multipacks are auctioned on eBay.
September 23rd, 2021: Shortages of diesel and petrol are reported across the United Kingdom, prompting a wave of panic buying nation-wide. Ambulances at the hospital my girlfriend works at are forced to suspend service, as local petrol stations have been selling their emergency reserve supplies to desperate bidders.
September 24th, 2021: About an hour before I am due to publish THATCHER'S TECHBASE on the web, my daily post arrives. A firm of lawyers representing Tennent's Lager order me to remove any copyrighted branding and images related to Tennent's Lager from THATCHER'S TECHBASE - in exchange, Tennent's Lager will make charitable donations to the organisations suggested by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital's website. I comply, replacing the T cans with legally-distinct F cans with only 30 minutes to spare.
At 12pm BST, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is released to the public.
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Still with me? Great. Thank you.
So - that's how I got here. As you can see above, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a piss-take the just kept gaining more and more piss-taking momentum until it reached a critical mass of taken piss. A silly distraction in a hopeless situation that was ultimately powered by the twin engines of my love of a good joke and my hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, birthed to a Global Britain that is imploding ever-inward.
When I first opened Ultimate Doom Builder on September 27th, 2020, I never intended for my finished product to become something that would have me taking interviews from magazines and newspapers. I never imagined that folk from Brazil and Argentina would message me about how much they loved the design of The Icon of Thatcher. I couldn't possibly conceive of Scotland's most beloved lager company giving their money to social justice causes so that they didn't have to be associated with my work. I just wanted to have a good time making a game and let others have a good time playing a game. Fortunately, I think I still managed to achieve that too.
A week out from release, it does feel like THATCHER'S TECHBASE was yet another victim of the classic video game hype pathology that we've all known about since the first time Nintendo Official Magazine promised us Dinosaur Planet was going to revolutionise the games industry as we knew it forever. When the trailer dropped, people were proclaiming it Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Game of the Century - and in a way, it kinda hurt to see people pin their Thatcher-bashing hopes on something that only I seemed to know was an amateur production. I knew people were probably joking, but I also knew people were probably going to be let down by THATCHER'S TECHBASE - and there was no realistic means of telling them that without sounding like a moron or a fraud.
After a chaotic launch day filled with technical hitches and streamers angrily messaging me with disapproval over the game's more "extreme" content, I've shied away from reading too much opinion on the wad. Some people get it; some people really don't. While Barry, Richie and my other friends did their best to elevate THATCHER'S TECHBASE into something spectacular, it is still ultimately a quick and dirty little amateur DOOM wad with some Margaret Thatcher paint coating its non-orthogonal walls. Is that sort of thing really worth writing about in a newspaper? Is that sort of thing really worth streaming to your audience of thousands? Is that sort of thing really worth five stars on Backloggd? Or even four stars? Debatable! But it's my work, and I'm proud of it. If I don't give it five stars, how could I expect anyone else to? THATCHER'S TECHBASE is what it is, and aside from a few more minor tweaks and improvements I plan to make in the near future, I guess people will just have to deal with that. (Lemme tell ya - I never imagined someone would DM me to complain that the Thatcher's Grave section wasn't "optimised for co-op play" lmao)
In many ways, I'm relieved that my criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE are other people's criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, too. I haven't yet been blindsided by any huge oversights in design or presentation, which was a perpetual worry while creating the wad. Aside from occasional DOOM-building tutorials and design guides, I tried to make as much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE as I could by myself - pretentious or not, I wanted it to be my work, my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings, untainted by outsiders as much as possible - something inside me just told me that this had to be my vision of Hell. Arguably a very naive decision, but I was worried that opening the game up to too much of the internet's collective-constructive consciousness early on in the process would derail me from the goals that were formed in my mind from day one. I wanted THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be fun to play and nice to look at, but ultimately the project was a therapeutic outlet for me in an era where everything outside of DOOM's space brought so much pain and anger... Something about Margaret Thatcher and DOOM just felt like such a natural fit in every single way. The overlap in time period, the rage, the pain, the suffering, the helplessness, the despair, the manic, desperate energy of it all - at no point in the process did I doubt that Thatcher deserved to be the subject of her own DOOM wad. It's more that the technical process of creating said wad was a huge hurdle for a first-time wadder to clear.
Obviously, my introverted development process backfired in many ways - as we read in the July 9th, 2021 entry of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: OFFICIAL TIMELINE, I found out way too late in the development process that I'd made something over-complex and under-designed, a map drawn on a pub napkin that was crushing itself under technical and practical weights that I didn't even know existed for a long time because I was only talking to myself about it. I let my mind run wild while my body was stuck in the same physical space for months on end, and it didn't always lead to great things. Would people enjoy THATCHER'S TECHBASE more if it was shorter, more direct? If the puzzles weren't so fucking esoteric? If I'd leaned the dial of difficulty closer to the original DOOM than The Plutonia Experiment? Probably! The wad's Hurt Me Plenty difficulty was designed to be enjoyed by people who've played their fair share of classic DOOM, but I don't think I ever considered that a) the wad would find a fanbase beyond hardcore gamers or b) that most DOOM source ports automatically drop their cursor on that pseudo-Hard difficulty at load time. I've seen more than one streamer ram their head against the first two sections of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and then throw in the towel when they really didn't need to - I'm Too Young To Die and Not Too Rough difficulty are probably the right difficulty levels for most people - but given the technical limitations of the original DOOM, it's nigh-on impossible to communicate that to people that not all hope is lost; that they can still make it to the juicy CyberThatcher MK1/MK2 content if they just dial back difficulty a little. But by the same token - shouldn't a game about otherthrowing Margaret Thatcher and the systems of decaying power she represents be difficult? Like, really fucking difficult? Did you really think you could waltz into a British Hell and sort things out in an afternoon? C'mon now. The longer THATCHER'S TECHBASE exists in the ether, the less of an issue the challenges of the game should become, hopefully. I've yet to hear about anyone beating it on AUSTERITY difficulty, though, and in a weird, perverse way, that kinda makes me happy. It's not remotely fair!
One thing that has been validating about the game, in a weird way, is that the two "puzzles" I put the most time into - the "Three Thatchers" lobby and the desecration of Union Jack flag - are the two things that have provoked the most remarks, questions and frustrations. While I'm not going to wash my hands of any criticisms those parts of the game have provoked, they really were meant to tease and terrorise you until you arrived at the same conclusions I did while making the wad - that images of Margaret Thatcher and the United Kingdom have to be destroyed with a double-barrelled shotgun if you want to break free and move forward.
When you make a point of intentionally creating something in a vacuum, there can be an overbearing sense of dread regarding everyone else who's standing inside the airlock - will this silly little puzzle make sense to them? Is this fight too hard if you don't know where the health packs are? Is this bit of artwork going too far into a realm that should stay inside me? Will people be annoyed by this? All of this? That was probably the scariest thing about making something like THATCHER'S TECHBASE. Every time I approached an outsider about a sprite, a sound effect or a voice line, I expected nothing but disgust, despair or abject laughter. Maybe even a referral to a psychiatric unit. But not once did I receive anything but the greatest of care from others. Every request was met with kindness - much more kind than it deserved. People seemed more than willing to help me. And that felt fucking great.
I made THATCHER'S TECHBASE more or less by myself in a physical and mental isolation, but THATCHER'S TECHBASE wouldn't exist without everyone else. Everyone who suffered directly as a consequence of Margret Thatcher's decisions as a politician, everyone who stood up and was counted by her, everyone who tried to take count of her in kind; everyone who worked on the original DOOM games, everyone who contributed to DOOM's legacy in some way, everyone who played DOOM at some point in their life; everyone who said that the wad was a good idea, everyone who gave me a stupid idea to throw into the game, everyone who wrote a song for it, everyone who recorded a voice line for it, everyone who drew a picture of a Cyberdemon in a pearl necklace; every single person helped create this stupid little DOOM wad in their own way - and I'm really glad that they did. Because it wouldn't be anything without them.
This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.
March 6th, 2020: Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, reassures the British public that the rise in SARS-CoV-2 cases is "nothing to be concerned about".
March 9th, 2020: Due to the rapid rise in SARS-CoV-2 ("coronavirus") cases in Asia and the European continent, financial markets go into free-fall. Billions of pounds of value are wiped away from companies around the world, in an event later dubbed as "The First Black Friday of 2020". My second-ever meeting at my new bank job is interrupted by financial traders screaming at each other and their phones in the corridor outside the conference room. Boris Johnson once again reassures the people of Britain that coronavirus will not be a problem in the UK.
March 10th, 2020: In the interests of personal and public safety, a number of software teams at my workplace decide to implement a joint 2-week work from home policy. An immediate evacuation of personnel, laptops and coffee mugs begins.
March 16th, 2020: A ban on non-essential travel comes into effect in the United Kingdom and citizens are advised to stay at home to curb the spread of coronavirus. The UK government claims that coronavirus "will be beaten in 12 weeks".
March 20th, 2020: Highly-anticipated video games Animal Crossing and DOOM: Eternal release around the world. Gamers who pre-ordered DOOM Eternal also receive a remastered port of DOOM 64, a 1997 first-person shooter game developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64. This port of DOOM 64 also goes on general sale at the same time.
March 23rd, 2020: My grandfather dies from complications related to the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2).
March 26th, 2020: Due to UK government health policy that strongly encourages hospitals to release elderly patients who test positive for coronavirus into the care of residential care homes, my 60 year old mother is forced to give up her role as an events co-ordinator and take up full-time nursing duties.
April 1st, 2020: Six people are allowed to attend my grandfather's burial, which is carried out by the local council's hazardous waste department. There is no funeral ceremony.
April 3rd, 2020: Looking for something cheap to distract me, I purchase DOOM 64 for £1.50 on the Nintendo Switch, mistakenly believing it to be a Nintendo 64 port of the original DOOM (1993).
April 6th, 2020: While playing map 16 of DOOM 64 - "Burnt Offerings" - I begin to realise that DOOM 64 (and DOOM in general) is something quite special.
April 30th, 2020: Boris Johnson assures the public that the UK is now "past the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.
May 2nd, 2020: Gradually beginning to enjoy the newfound freedoms of home-working, I download GZDoom and begin playing through "DOOM", "DOOM II" and their expansions whenever my code is compiling or I'm stuck waiting for a reply to an email.
May 9th, 2020: I celebrate my 30th birthday. Between other housebound festivities, I play a wee bit of DOOM II’s MAP04: The Focus to celebrate. It’s my favourite DOOM map.
June 15th, 2020: My flatmate and I host a Streets of Rage 4 charity stream on Twitch, and attempt to clear the game's Arcade Mode on Mania difficulty in one sitting. After five attempts, we manage to make it two thirds of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. The stream raises £600 for Glasgow asylum seeker funds and social housing charities.
July 23rd, 2020: Noticing my increasingly-obsessional interest in the DOOM series, my flatmate buys me a copy of Masters of DOOM, a book that tells an oral history of John Carmack and John Romero's creation of the original 1993 game and its sequel.
July 31st, 2020: A BAFTA award for investigative journalism is awarded to the BBC for a 2019 television interview with Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged involvement in child sex trafficking.
August 2nd, 2020: I order a replica of John Romero's infamous "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest in anticipation of my upcoming summer holiday.
August 11th, 2020: John Romero favs a picture of me wearing my "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest.
August 21st, 2020: Twitter user @spewlieandrews makes a tweet about how he'd spend his eternity in Hell searching for Margaret Thatcher so that he could kill her again. I laugh at it and retweet it.
September 13th, 2020: Tim Rogers releases ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM, an exhaustive 3-and-a-half hour review of DOOM (1993). During his review, Tim suggests that no one can honestly claim to be a true fan of DOOM until they have tried designing their own map for the game.
September 22nd, 2020: Some "minor" lockdown restrictions are re-introduced across the United Kingdom in response to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and ICU admisssions. The government stops offering restaurant patrons its financial incentive programme for eating out.
September 24th, 2020: My girlfriend, a few weeks into her first year as a trainee doctor, is re-assigned to a new infectious diseases unit created in response to a severe rise in coronavirus cases across the city of Glasgow.
September 26th, 2020: I receive a stern warning from my employer's infosec administrator for attempting to install WINE and Ultimate Doom Builder on my workplace laptop. I promise not to do it again and remain grateful that he didn't see the GZDoom launcher on my desktop while inspecting the laptop.
September 27th, 2020: After successfully reformatting my old 2007 Lenovo laptop and installing Windows 10 on it, I begin the process of making a DOOM map.
September 29th, 2020: After a few evenings spent learning how to make working doors and windows, I create a file called MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad and decide to make a standard DOOM (1993) techbase to test if I understand what the DOOM experts on YouTube have taught me so far.
September 30th, 2020: To make the learning process funny (which is very important to me), I decide to use @spewlieandrews’s August 21st, 2020 tweet about fighting through Hell to find Thatcher as a model for MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad. Making a techbase map about Margaret Thatcher naturally leads to MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad becoming THATCHERS-TECHBASE.wad later that day.
October 8th, 2020: While in a pub on Islay, my girlfriend and I find out that the Scottish Government is restricting hospitality opening times to 6am-6pm indoors. The sale of alcohol will not be permitted at any time. News of this announcement causes the entire pub to descend into Tennent's-fuelled chaos. After securing my final pint, I go back to drawing DOOM map layouts on my phone.
October 21st, 2020: Construction begins on THATCHER’S BATTLE COLISEUM, one of the game’s main boss arenas. At this point in development, I still don’t know what a Margaret Thatcher-based boss battle in the idTech1 engine would look like.
October 27th, 2020: Struggling with mapper’s block, I decide to recreate the main lobby of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64 in DOOM. With a bit of texture-bashing, this later becomes one of the game’s main lobbies. The iconic castle corridor where Peach’s portrait morphs into Bowser’s - one of my most precious gaming memories ever - is easily repurposed into a Thatcher joke.
October 31st, 2020: Submitting to widespread pressure from the media, general public and his own government officials, Boris Johnson finally announces a second coronavirus lockdown in order to prevent "a medical and moral disaster".
November 1st, 2020: I finish playing through Going Down - perhaps the greatest DOOM wad of all time - and am reassured to discover that DOOM is a fantastic vehicle for comedy.
November 4th, 2020: My flatmate buys me a copy of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, a 1995 book about DOOM mapping. The book comes with a CD-ROM that has a few hundred wads on it, but after 26 years on a bookshelf, the glue has fused the CD’s envelope shut and I can’t get it open.
November 5th, 2020: While reading Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, I come across a chapter that describes “The Best DOOM WADs Ever”. Among mods dedicated to The Simpsons and Beavis & Butthead, I find an entry for a wad called Return to Phobos. The author of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus describes the wad’s E1M4 replacement as “one of the all-time great DOOM maps”. I’ve never heard of it.
November 6th, 2020: Still curious about Return to Phobos and unable to get the glue off my CD-ROM, I spend some time searching the internet for the wad file. After downloading and playing two other DOOM wads called Return to Phobos that aren’t the particular 1995 Return to Phobos wad that I was looking for, I eventually locate the all-time great E1M4 replacement. It’s a giant factory with a balcony at the rear that lets you look out at a stunning 128x128 industrial skybox. I like it. Some of the doors don’t work and the textures are out of alignment, but I like it.
November 7th, 2020: E1M4 of Return to Phobos is resurrected and thoroughly repurposed as a mining facility for THATCHER’S TECHBASE. While retexturing a big slime pit, I find out Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. I return to retexturing my slime pit.
December 14th, 2020: I submit a fake article to my friend’s zine in the style of a 90s video games magazine article. To fill the page out, I stick some wigs on cyberdemon, imp and pinkie sprites to make them look like infamous politicians. The image of a cyberdemon rocking Thatcher’s iconic blow-dry job really makes me laugh.
December 19th, 2020: Due to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and critical demand on healthcare services, the British and Scottish governments announce a ban on household mixing over the Christmas period. "Tier four" lockdown restrictions now apply indefinitely.
December 25th, 2020: I have an instant curry with my brother and girlfriend before they head off to work on emergency infectious diseases wards at the local hospital because people are being ventilated in corridors and are having to sleep on beds placed in storage rooms. I watch Home Alone 2 then do a bit of work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
January 1st, 2021: Waking up to an empty house again, I decide to spend my first hours of the first day of 2021 fucking about with THATCHER'S TECHBASE again. I am severely hung over and vomit into the bin next to my computer within minutes of trying to play the big lobby fight. Maybe tomorrow.
January 22nd, 2021: With the majority of the map's layout, scripting and enemy placement done, I decide to take a short sabbatical from map-making to do some research on the Margaret Thatcher premiership period, which lasted from 1979 - 1990. I watch a number of documentaries, fiction films andYouTube videos that are related, directly or indirectly, to the Thatcher government and its influence on British society in the 1980s. Examples include Pride, The Fully Monty, Brassed Off, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pink Floyd's The Wall.
February 17th, 2021: After spending a lot of time reading very snobby, snooty and sanctimonious guides on how to do pixel art for DOOM, I begin adding my points of reference to the game as in-game textures and sprites. I find the pipeline of identifying images, tailoring them to the specifications of the DOOM engine and adding my own artistic flourishes to be one of the most satisfying parts of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE design process so far.
March 16th, 2021: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is photographed leaving hospital following a heart transplant at age 99. His incredibly sullen features and sickly demeanour prompt a number of internet memes and satirical artworks that I enjoy very much.
March 19th, 2021: While watching a decino video about the inner workings of the DOOM engine, I learn that Commander Keen objects (as seen in DOOM II’s MAP32) have a special property that causes them to open doors tagged “666” on a map when they are shot at.
March 21st, 2021: While doing a biweekly watch of my favourite One Piece scenes, I realise that the Commander Keen object in DOOM could be repurposed to resemble a shootable flag. I animate a burning Union Jack sprite and replace the Keen frames with it.
March 24th, 2021: New guidance mandates that all government buildings in the United Kingdom will fly the Union flag at all times.
April 4th, 2021: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99.
April 6th, 2021: After a number of unsuccessful attempts to convincingly put a Thatcher wig on a Cyberdemon, I decide to ask someone with actual talent to do it for me and commission a pixel artist from Brazil. When he asks me to do a sketch explaining what the hell I’m talking about, I realise it would also be pretty funny to give her a ripped jacket and handbag. https://ibb.co/HpLpkFP
April 7th, 2021: After a nervous 24 hour wait spent wondering if I am certifiably insane, I receive an enthusiastic reply from the artist, who agrees to create the necessary sprites for a Cyberdemon sprite replacement. The enemy has now been creatively dubbed “CyberThatcher”.
April 10th, 2021: CyberThatcher’s handbag is dropped due to logistical issues.
April 12th, 2021: Non-essential retail reopens in England and Wales.
April 17th, 2021: The CyberThatcher sprite sheet is completed and inserted into the game.
April 20th, 2021: I get a haircut for the first time in over a year.
April 26th, 2021: A leaked recording from inside 10 Downing Street reveals that in the autumn of 2020, Boris Johnson said that he would rather "let bodies pile high in their thousands" than take the country into another coronavirus lockdown. Once again, I feel regret that I don't have the time or resources available to put a Boris Johnson wig on that pinkie sprite.
May 12th, 2021: After four months spent playing my wad while listening to a MIDI version of LMAO’s Party Rock Anthem on repeat, I decide that the main map of THATCHER’S TECHBASE probably deserves a more fitting soundtrack. I contact my friend Barry Topping with a tongue-in-cheek job offer, suggesting he compose a “man on a mission”-styled metal track in the vein of the original DOOM games. As an avowed metalhead, he graciously accepts the offer of a lifetime.
May 13th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher1.mp3”, an awesome minute-long sample of the song he’s written. Much to Barry’s dismay, I inform him that the map takes between 40 minutes and an hour to beat in its present state. I have inadvertently tasked him with the horrendous job of coming up with a tune that someone would be happy to listen to upwards of 60 times in a row.
May 16th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher2.mp3”, an incredible six-minute long sample of the song he’s written. Much to my delight, the song is now 6 minutes long and could comfortably be listened to on repeat upwards of 120 times in a row. In honour of our new-found creative partnership and a long-standing ironic catchphrase related to the failures of the 2014 Scottish Referendum on Independence, the track is dubbed "L2VN" - "Love 2 Vote No".
June 16th, 2021: After seeing more of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, Barry very kindly offers to compose more music for the game.
June 18th, 2021: Barry produces the opening theme of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, to be used with the main menu.
June 21st, 2021: All coronavirus restrictions are lifted across the United Kingdom.
June 25th, 2021: I build a quick test area in THATCHER'S TECHBASE in order to work on some new Doomcute objects. While bashing together a few chairs, cigarettes and cans of Tennent's Lager, I realise that the test area is actually pretty fun to hang out in and decide to keep it in.
June 26th, 2021: After a few hours spent quickly map-bashing some assets from iconic 90s DOOM wad STAR WARS DOOM 2, I turn my quick test area into a UAC headquarters building and move everything out into a new MAP01 slot in the wad. This map becomes The Beginning of THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
June 28th, 2021: THATCHER’S TECHBASE is awarded an E3 best of THIS 2021 Award by MechaGamezilla.
July 8th, 2021: I share a pre-release build of THATCHER'S TECHBASE with some DOOM wad enthusiasts.
July 9th, 2021: A DOOM player and wadding/modding enthusiast with 25 years of experience laments that I didn't share THATCHER'S TECHBASE sooner - not because it's amazing, but because it's gotten wildly out of hand and he thinks it needs to get under control. He shares some very harsh but fair advice with me.
July 10th, 2021: I cut a number of sections from THATCHER'S TECHBASE in the interests of not making players go mad with confusion/stress/boredom. Approximately 2,500 sectors are deleted in one hour. With far less map to maintain, I feel much better about the project.
July 11th, 2021: An amateur DOOM player struggles to realise that a wall in front of them at the start of MAP02 is a door. I start to feel much worse about the project and wonder if anyone will be able to understand me. I begin to fear that if THATCHER'S TECHBASE was a £60 game you could buy in a shop, people would be looking for their receipts in the first ten minutes.
July 22nd, 2021: While watching footage of The Beginning, Barry notices similarities between the wad's Express Elevator to Hell and the opening of Paradise Killer. WHITEHELL, MAP01's track, is extended to include one of his signature funky interludes.
August 4th, 2021: In the middle of a rare Scottish heatwave, I play through some of Flower, Sun and Rain's most infamously obtuse and player-adversarial chapters and begin to understand the value in placing priority on my own game world over the game world that a player might expect.
August 20th, 2021: I play through the infamous toilet maze puzzle in Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. After months of feeling guilty about forcing potential THATCHER’S TECHBASE players through harshly indistinct mazes, I suddenly feel much better about myself and the game and begin to see the humour in making gamers suffer.
August 23rd, 2021: Realising that I could probably spend months (if not years) refining the map to no end, I decide to do the one thing I never wanted to do since the moment the project began - I set myself an arbitrary deadline of September 24th, 2021 for the release of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and decide to get the wad into a playable state by that date.
August 25th, 2021: Realising that the content of THATCHER'S TECHBASE makes it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the idgames wad archive, I make a website to host the wad instead. Inspired by my prior success raising money for charity with Streets of Rage 4, I include a donations link for organisations suggested by Hope Not Hate, a group set up in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death to encourage people to support communities affected by the decisions of her government.
August 28th, 2021: Hoping I can find a way for the game to played by more people than just by immediate friends and appreciator's of Barry "Epoch" Topping's music, I enlist my friend Richie Morgan to make a tongue-in-cheek trailer for the game to help get the word out.
September 1st, 2021: The trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE is completed, but I feel like it's missing something - namely, the voice of Margaret Thatcher herself. I approach a guy on Twitter who is really good at imitating Duke Nukem and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life and ask him if he knows anyone who could do a good Thatcher impersonation.
September 2nd, 2021: Gianni, the Duke in question, responds quickly and recommends Laila Berzins - the voice of Demeter in Hades and a bunch of anime boys in Sword Art Online. Despite my reservations about how much a professional voice actor would cost, Gianni strongly recommends that I ask her anyway. In the space of an hour, Laila sends me six voice lines and waives the majority of her fee upon learning that it's a free game about killing Margaret Thatcher that intends to raise money for charity.
September 13th, 2021: I get a cat.
September 14th, 2021: After being condemned by the UK's chief medical officer for spreading coronavirus misinformation, Nicki Minaj releases a Twitter voice note that claims she was an Oxford classmate of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
September 15th, 2021: The THATCHER’S TECHBASE trailer launches. In its first day on Twitter, it somehow gets 3000 retweets and 8000 favourites. A lot of gaming websites turn the tweet thread about the trailer into low-effort content for their blogs. People with small brains send me a fair few messages with insinuations of sacrilege, treason and other acts of digital terrorism. I am generally shitting myself.
September 16th, 2021: Articles about THATCHER’S TECHBASE are published in The Independent and NME. A pal from 15 years ago phones me up to tell me how excited he is to play the game. John Romero retweets a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the game and declares that he's going to play the wad. I am now really shitting myself.
September 19th, 2021: Gillian Anderson wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After the awards show, Anderson is asked if she consulted the Iron Lady about the role. She claims she has not spoken to Margaret Thatcher recently.
September 20th, 2021: UK bottling plants and farm suppliers report that there is only enough C02 supply to last the nation "one or two more weeks" - this prompts mass panic buying of Coca-Cola, Irn Bru and other carbonated drinks. The price of Irn Bru immediately rises by £1.50, and multipacks are auctioned on eBay.
September 23rd, 2021: Shortages of diesel and petrol are reported across the United Kingdom, prompting a wave of panic buying nation-wide. Ambulances at the hospital my girlfriend works at are forced to suspend service, as local petrol stations have been selling their emergency reserve supplies to desperate bidders.
September 24th, 2021: About an hour before I am due to publish THATCHER'S TECHBASE on the web, my daily post arrives. A firm of lawyers representing Tennent's Lager order me to remove any copyrighted branding and images related to Tennent's Lager from THATCHER'S TECHBASE - in exchange, Tennent's Lager will make charitable donations to the organisations suggested by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital's website. I comply, replacing the T cans with legally-distinct F cans with only 30 minutes to spare.
At 12pm BST, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is released to the public.
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Still with me? Great. Thank you.
So - that's how I got here. As you can see above, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a piss-take the just kept gaining more and more piss-taking momentum until it reached a critical mass of taken piss. A silly distraction in a hopeless situation that was ultimately powered by the twin engines of my love of a good joke and my hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, birthed to a Global Britain that is imploding ever-inward.
When I first opened Ultimate Doom Builder on September 27th, 2020, I never intended for my finished product to become something that would have me taking interviews from magazines and newspapers. I never imagined that folk from Brazil and Argentina would message me about how much they loved the design of The Icon of Thatcher. I couldn't possibly conceive of Scotland's most beloved lager company giving their money to social justice causes so that they didn't have to be associated with my work. I just wanted to have a good time making a game and let others have a good time playing a game. Fortunately, I think I still managed to achieve that too.
A week out from release, it does feel like THATCHER'S TECHBASE was yet another victim of the classic video game hype pathology that we've all known about since the first time Nintendo Official Magazine promised us Dinosaur Planet was going to revolutionise the games industry as we knew it forever. When the trailer dropped, people were proclaiming it Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Game of the Century - and in a way, it kinda hurt to see people pin their Thatcher-bashing hopes on something that only I seemed to know was an amateur production. I knew people were probably joking, but I also knew people were probably going to be let down by THATCHER'S TECHBASE - and there was no realistic means of telling them that without sounding like a moron or a fraud.
After a chaotic launch day filled with technical hitches and streamers angrily messaging me with disapproval over the game's more "extreme" content, I've shied away from reading too much opinion on the wad. Some people get it; some people really don't. While Barry, Richie and my other friends did their best to elevate THATCHER'S TECHBASE into something spectacular, it is still ultimately a quick and dirty little amateur DOOM wad with some Margaret Thatcher paint coating its non-orthogonal walls. Is that sort of thing really worth writing about in a newspaper? Is that sort of thing really worth streaming to your audience of thousands? Is that sort of thing really worth five stars on Backloggd? Or even four stars? Debatable! But it's my work, and I'm proud of it. If I don't give it five stars, how could I expect anyone else to? THATCHER'S TECHBASE is what it is, and aside from a few more minor tweaks and improvements I plan to make in the near future, I guess people will just have to deal with that. (Lemme tell ya - I never imagined someone would DM me to complain that the Thatcher's Grave section wasn't "optimised for co-op play" lmao)
In many ways, I'm relieved that my criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE are other people's criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, too. I haven't yet been blindsided by any huge oversights in design or presentation, which was a perpetual worry while creating the wad. Aside from occasional DOOM-building tutorials and design guides, I tried to make as much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE as I could by myself - pretentious or not, I wanted it to be my work, my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings, untainted by outsiders as much as possible - something inside me just told me that this had to be my vision of Hell. Arguably a very naive decision, but I was worried that opening the game up to too much of the internet's collective-constructive consciousness early on in the process would derail me from the goals that were formed in my mind from day one. I wanted THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be fun to play and nice to look at, but ultimately the project was a therapeutic outlet for me in an era where everything outside of DOOM's space brought so much pain and anger... Something about Margaret Thatcher and DOOM just felt like such a natural fit in every single way. The overlap in time period, the rage, the pain, the suffering, the helplessness, the despair, the manic, desperate energy of it all - at no point in the process did I doubt that Thatcher deserved to be the subject of her own DOOM wad. It's more that the technical process of creating said wad was a huge hurdle for a first-time wadder to clear.
Obviously, my introverted development process backfired in many ways - as we read in the July 9th, 2021 entry of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: OFFICIAL TIMELINE, I found out way too late in the development process that I'd made something over-complex and under-designed, a map drawn on a pub napkin that was crushing itself under technical and practical weights that I didn't even know existed for a long time because I was only talking to myself about it. I let my mind run wild while my body was stuck in the same physical space for months on end, and it didn't always lead to great things. Would people enjoy THATCHER'S TECHBASE more if it was shorter, more direct? If the puzzles weren't so fucking esoteric? If I'd leaned the dial of difficulty closer to the original DOOM than The Plutonia Experiment? Probably! The wad's Hurt Me Plenty difficulty was designed to be enjoyed by people who've played their fair share of classic DOOM, but I don't think I ever considered that a) the wad would find a fanbase beyond hardcore gamers or b) that most DOOM source ports automatically drop their cursor on that pseudo-Hard difficulty at load time. I've seen more than one streamer ram their head against the first two sections of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and then throw in the towel when they really didn't need to - I'm Too Young To Die and Not Too Rough difficulty are probably the right difficulty levels for most people - but given the technical limitations of the original DOOM, it's nigh-on impossible to communicate that to people that not all hope is lost; that they can still make it to the juicy CyberThatcher MK1/MK2 content if they just dial back difficulty a little. But by the same token - shouldn't a game about otherthrowing Margaret Thatcher and the systems of decaying power she represents be difficult? Like, really fucking difficult? Did you really think you could waltz into a British Hell and sort things out in an afternoon? C'mon now. The longer THATCHER'S TECHBASE exists in the ether, the less of an issue the challenges of the game should become, hopefully. I've yet to hear about anyone beating it on AUSTERITY difficulty, though, and in a weird, perverse way, that kinda makes me happy. It's not remotely fair!
One thing that has been validating about the game, in a weird way, is that the two "puzzles" I put the most time into - the "Three Thatchers" lobby and the desecration of Union Jack flag - are the two things that have provoked the most remarks, questions and frustrations. While I'm not going to wash my hands of any criticisms those parts of the game have provoked, they really were meant to tease and terrorise you until you arrived at the same conclusions I did while making the wad - that images of Margaret Thatcher and the United Kingdom have to be destroyed with a double-barrelled shotgun if you want to break free and move forward.
When you make a point of intentionally creating something in a vacuum, there can be an overbearing sense of dread regarding everyone else who's standing inside the airlock - will this silly little puzzle make sense to them? Is this fight too hard if you don't know where the health packs are? Is this bit of artwork going too far into a realm that should stay inside me? Will people be annoyed by this? All of this? That was probably the scariest thing about making something like THATCHER'S TECHBASE. Every time I approached an outsider about a sprite, a sound effect or a voice line, I expected nothing but disgust, despair or abject laughter. Maybe even a referral to a psychiatric unit. But not once did I receive anything but the greatest of care from others. Every request was met with kindness - much more kind than it deserved. People seemed more than willing to help me. And that felt fucking great.
I made THATCHER'S TECHBASE more or less by myself in a physical and mental isolation, but THATCHER'S TECHBASE wouldn't exist without everyone else. Everyone who suffered directly as a consequence of Margret Thatcher's decisions as a politician, everyone who stood up and was counted by her, everyone who tried to take count of her in kind; everyone who worked on the original DOOM games, everyone who contributed to DOOM's legacy in some way, everyone who played DOOM at some point in their life; everyone who said that the wad was a good idea, everyone who gave me a stupid idea to throw into the game, everyone who wrote a song for it, everyone who recorded a voice line for it, everyone who drew a picture of a Cyberdemon in a pearl necklace; every single person helped create this stupid little DOOM wad in their own way - and I'm really glad that they did. Because it wouldn't be anything without them.
This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.