in an episode of gamespot’s audio logs, disco elysium’s lead designer and writer robert kurvitz was asked to discuss ZA/UM’s approach to CRPG design, in which he makes clear the title’s great tabletop roleplaying game influence, contrasts disco elysium against modern CRPGS, and elucidates the rationale behind certain UI decisions the game had made. one of the very first things kurvitz highlights, and what was apparently one of the decisions given primacy in pre-production, was the concept of placing the text box in the righthand side of the screen in contrast to the game’s contemporaries, even outside the CRPG genre, which typically slot the text boxes in the lower middle of the screen. the benefits to this alternative organization seem immediately obvious as kurvitz spells them out: increased screen real estate, far more interesting visual composition, and a modality which seemed to emulate the engrained habits of run-of-the-mill technology. peer at disco elysium’s textbox and your mind may not immediately pick up on the contours of its design, but your subconscious will instinctively understand it relates to the modern desktop experience. it innately resembles the windows toolbar, where the clock and calendar is – the screen is visually ‘weighted’ to the right, where the center of gravity is, and it reflects the placement of the players right hand on the keyboard.

the deceptive genius of this UI design is that it wasn’t enough to simply reflect a desktop, which disco elysium’s target demographic was instinctually bound to – ZA/UM wanted to snuff out any and all competitors. that means taking inspiration from unlikely sources, one of which was social media. this helps explain why the prose of disco elysium is so confrontational, sharp, abrasive, sensational; it explains why the text-box was designed to reflect an addictive scrolling experience ala twitter; and it builds upon centuries of entrenched human behaviour in its column design, which may inadvertently reflect a phone but also reflects the structure of a newspaper article. in an era where developers have now fully committed themselves towards eradicating loading screens in a veiled effort to curb the impoverished, stimulation-craving instincts of their player bases (a major hardware decision which is replete with as many pros as cons), ZA/UM subtly adapted the topography of phones that so many players were already used to for their own purposes.

kurvitz’s final salvo is illuminating. every element of this design is an amendment which reflects a critical problem in the games marketability, that disco elysium, judging by its phenomenal success, ameliorated fully: how do you sell a modern CRPG that is simultaneously defined by its lack of combat and by its verbosity? well, it’s simple. everyone says they don’t like reading and claims they don’t want to read – but reading is all we do on social media, in private messages, in news articles. we take it for granted. player retention was a big problem for ZA/UM, so the designers intelligently made what seems like a very easy observation, but then engineered everything about the game’s flow in order to manufacture a state that hopefully will allow players to immerse themselves and to truly salivate over every last written word the game has to offer.

so, reading is something we do every day. no-brainer. but the same exists for writing. both exist in a connected equilibrium. just as we read every day, we write just about every day – whether we realize it or not. some research even suggests that where the mind is allowed to wander while reading, neurons will roar to life and the brain will mimic and simulate the act of pen flowing on paper, gliding betwixt margins with grace and individualized efficacy.

it would be more accurate, however, to make the claim that we’re typing every day.

are typing and writing of the same scholarship? could one make the claim that writing is therefore impoverished by the usurpation of typing – the same way kurvitz attributed to his audience a kind of destitution of readership? reflecting on this opens the floodgates of a perennial chirographic concern. the digital epoch has not responded with kindness to the eloquence of handwriting. surveys often suggest swathes of people go more than half a year without handwriting, and countries that are at the forefront of educational theory like finland suggest that it may no longer bear the same relevance on day-to-day activities as it once used to. the practice is fading, its dominance curtailed by the dissemination of keyboarding. this is in spite of a marked increase in literature suggesting the many benefits of handwriting. among the myriad cognitive benefits there are particularly noteworthy virtues such as attention sustenance, increased capacity for memory, improved self-regulation, and the ability to plan ahead. children who learn to write by hand are known to activate adult-like pathways in their minds which aid in facilitation of improved memory.

and for many, handwriting is an exercise in aesthetic pleasures, a distinct mark of individuality, and a reiteration of a practice undertaken by even their ancestry that innately links mind and soul, body and space, the sensate and the insensate, an unwitting cooperation between all the ontological elements of lived experience that inform existence and being, a unification of self and language. there is the concern that the abstractions of writing, that once in the past were nothing more than pictographs painstakingly carved into slabs and yet was still a decidedly intellectual, tactile, expressive, and intimate practice, are lost in the mechanical era and the complex beauty of it has vanished. many continue to remind and advocate for the pursuance of ‘bilingual writing’ – education that fosters children who can handwrite as well as they type and thus don’t fail to attend to their expanding minds. on a more anecdotal level, all of this rings as true – too often does the pursuit of typing education boil it all down to a callous, impersonal drudgery that serves only to prepare children for the rampant dehumanization inherent to the workforce.

if any of this discourse seems like a relatively modern concern, don’t worry – it isn’t. let me take a quick step back. walter j. ong indicated that our history in knowledge storage can be divided into two phases: the oral-to-literate stage and the chirographic-to-print stage. in the former stage, culture began to transition into a society that relied more and more on the written word and began to leave oral tradition behind – as far back as 3500 BC, sumerians sought to preserve their history by capturing and transcribing oration. in the latter stage, the individual handwritten texts began to be mechanically produced and widely disseminated by means of the printing press. this evolution of writing technology invariably altered the way humanity came to grips with their own awareness and how this changed the epistemology of the time. in ong’s view, it was this shift from the oral tradition to a society of literacy that broke apart the old ways of tribal unity, as fostering literacy operated in tandem with greater levels of individuality. the chirographic-to-print stage of the 1500’s only further reinforced this.

it is here where i must remind that typing is the apotheosis of these differing stages of written tradition, and one that has remained in the public consciousness since the late 1800s – far from a modern invention. the first commercial typewriters were made available in 1874, and the first stenograph was invented in 1879. the history of typing predates the personal computer. but nevertheless it is the fixed rigidity of typing – when taken from its latent form and iterated upon, recontextualized in the digital epoch as an apparatus to be used with the computer – that ong sees as a synthesis of the oral and the literate. it’s a kind of folding together of space and time, one of the arguments of this viewpoint being the idea that the premise of instantaneity central to typing on a computer transforms printed word into something more akin to oration and therefore reunites our own epoch with the era of oral tradition as a result of totally reconfigured relationships between all the constituent elements of the past two stages: the writer, the text, the audience, the interfacing, the medium.

others are not so kind – any technological evolution brings trade-off, and some philosophers note that history is simply an unfolding narrative of intangible gains and omitted losses. of the many philosophers to grapple with the heady question of how the modalities of writing inform existence, heidegger is an authoritative voice and spoke often of the cultural loss typing imprinted on society. it is his view, and that of his supporters, that typing represents something perverse and impersonal, something amputational in logic. the body is diminished and conveyance is thus diminished too; the essential realm of word and hand is shattered, depriving the person of dignity and irreversibly altering our relationship with language and distances ourselves from it, changing something from beautifully abstract transmission to simple transposition. certainly, this view seems almost supported by modern empirical studies that uncannily echo some of these concerns!

and yet, type dreams seems to believe otherwise, and treats all text within as something to be given primacy, something that is profound and bold and transcendent. richard hofmeier’s second developmental outing is an anachronism-laden victorian-set game about typing. so committed to typing it is that everything about interfacing with the game involves the use of keys rather than the mouse, removing yet again any semblance of a bodily gesture that might conflate modern typing with traditional handwriting. you enter a username and password to begin the typist’s journey, and from there depressions of the spacebar cycle through menus, tapping the enter key confirms, hitting the escape key…escapes, and the very act of typing itself provides shortcuts with which to access menus.

as you play type dreams, you get a greater sense of where its priorities lie, and it’s something coincidentally shared with tetris effect, another game i recently played and appreciated: the answer is transcendence. actually, it would be far more accurate to say that what type dreams pursues is something close to ong’s vision of modern typing: complete synchronicity across boundaries of space and time. and it does so by providing an utterly unique audiovisual experience that goes far beyond the simple educational value of a typing game. in type dreams you find a wealth of categories of typing exercises: rote exercises, poetry, classical literature, even smut and songs/lyrics. and in each ‘stage’, reconfigured as a kind of desperate arcade scenario, the player, alongside their chosen imitation avatar, competes with only themselves for faster and faster words-per-minutes, for fewer errors, for unapproachable streaks of correctly placed letters. at the onset of the game you must choose between digital keyboard and typewriter and i must wholly recommend the typewriter – passages are smartly fragmented by the continual rhythm of the player sliding their fingers across function keys f1-f12 to emulate the carriage of a typewriter, a sensory experience unlike anything else that inadvertently calls to mind musicality and instrumentation, suggesting that rather than representing a kind of blasphemous automatism typing may well be a new kind of instrument. a tidbit that is particularly noteworthy and relevant to my argument: typing activates an area in your brain that is equivalent to what drumming activates in your brain.

and it is this kind of ‘music’ and kinaesthetic experience that forms the basis of what type dreams achieves so excellently, as so few games do, interrogating ideas that similarly, so few games do. in type dreams the keyboard is an instrument, a weapon, a guide, an anachronism, a representation of shared consciousness, reflecting an understanding of the infinite forms of text as well. type out these chords of text via an angry letter to a newspaper and listen to the game channeling these frustrations in the forms of aggressive grunts with each letter misspelled or each error in keystroke; explore the textual melodies of some poetry and watch as the visuals accompanying your office change, freeing the mind and allowing poet and player and avatar to be intimately linked like nothing else; type out an account of keyboard rebellion and understand that the drudgery linked between workforce and the word processor can be subverted by the daring, that there is more to text than copying or correspondence; be transported across space and time to verbose scrawlings on prison walls, to the history of stenography, to socrates on trial. it’s a thrillingly evocative experience that lessens the temporal and spatial boundaries of history and literature and that is characterized by efficiency and dexterity in a way that recalls music, so it helps that the music accompanying each stage is really solid – the bimanual and repetitive nature of typing necessitates an audiovisual layer to allow the mind to coalesce with text and wander freely.

all of this serves to strongly re-evaluate typing in the modern era and to rebut most of the concerns of heidegger with new presumptions on what it even means to type, and it allows the self to feel the keyboard as something other than a symbol of workplace productivity. it filters in expression and individuality back into typist methodology, which may explain why there is no mechanical difference between the two typewriters on offer – only an aesthetic one. you begin to pick up on the subtleties of typing’s topography, on how hands moving across keys can influence emotion and thought, on how it serves as an appropriate contrast to the unimanual nature of handwriting. handwriting allows for reflection, for contemplation, but what type dreams suggests is that typing can become a tool for embodiment. this makes sense given the increased tempo that contrasts the two modes of writing, but it’s yet another point in the game’s favour- can you still feel the significance of the game’s text in spite of that breakneck pace, or has it slipped through the permeating fog of synchronicity? type dreams works its ass off to have your answer be a resounding yes. yes, in spite of the kaleidoscopic nature of digital text, in spite of its immaterial and infinite nature, in spite of the concern for the lessened significance of text and how it may erode at our senses and reduce our attention into fragments, transcendence can still occur. meaning can still be felt. text hasn’t necessarily been impoverished – not when it’s so lived-in.

that isn’t to say the game is perfect. in fact, the game is laughably imperfect, probably the most laughably imperfect game i've given such a high rating. it’s buggy, there are some UI issues and several technical dilemmas, and the greatest kicker of all: it’s unfinished. as i tried to unlock more of the game’s levels in proto-drakengardian fashion i came to realize there was only so much available, that the game was in an adolescent state and might never see completion. yet so much of the game contains the seeds of what is such an unexpectedly ideal game for me that i cannot help but give it such high accolades – the immensity of the experience is deserving of far more attention and far more interrogation from far smarter figures than i.

richard hofmeier is a complex figure for the games media to reckon with. after the smash hit success of cart life in indie games circles, he vanished from the public eye and released cart life in open source format, citing its imperfection as a barrier to its permissibility as a for-profit release. type dreams was his second major outing, released on itch.io in an incomplete state, originally at a price so that hofmeier could make ends meet. by his own admission, he disliked the fact that he had to do so, but he had been working away at this and several other projects over the course of several years, so he had to release at least something to get past his perfectionist tendency. since then the game has received several inconsistent updates before the pipeline of developer communication shut off entirely without warning in november of last year. currently, the game is listed as cancelled on itch.io. the version of the game you can download, uploaded 81 days ago, is listed as td_final.zip. when you try to click on the game’s “story” mode (one might assume the game’s main campaign would have been papers, please-esque; reliance on electricity was a drawback for the digital keyboard made apparent to the player when they are prompted to choose their instrument of choice), you are greeted with the following message:

“These stories were boring. Consider making up new ones; new stories about [PLAYER NAME] might be worth writing.”

as it stands, i have no way of knowing if the sentiment of this message and the title’s abrupt and unquestioned ‘cancellation’ are related. but in my heart of hearts, i hope hofmeier returns to this project. there’s nothing else like it.

https://hofmeier.itch.io/type-dreams

ALRIGHT, blanket announcement: on top of the game being available on the internet archive, as was wisely pointed out by DJSCheddar, MrPixelton was kind enough to get a mega link up and running for type dreams using their copy of the game since my laptop was indisposed. so shouts out to you guys, you both rock, and all of it helps to keep this game preserved and alive. i think the internet archive solution will be the public one and ill keep the mega link open for private channels/as a backup. thanks everyone for your efforts! whenever hofmeier returns to the public eye please try to financially support him, we need this kind of creativity in the medium

be sure to reach out if you'd like the mega link!

Besides the fact that I absolutely adore this game's story and gameplay, The Last of Us Part 2 will always be special to me for another reason. I remember when this game first launched at the start of covid, my dad happened to be in the room with me. He wanted to see what this game that I had been talking about for months was like. I showed him a recap video for the first game and he sat and watched the first couple of hours of this. After, he asked me to not play any further unless he was watching. So for the next week, he would sit in the living room with all the blinds shut and just watch me play for a few hours a day until I beat the game. We were both incredibly engrossed in this game. Now that we are removed from the peak of covid and I no longer live near my dad, this is a memory I think back to often. These are the types of moments that I hope I will one day get to have with my own children. I will forever be grateful that this game exists.

I've always wanted to soak my feet into jrpgs. I've played a nice handful of RPG's, but they were always games that I was drawn to for their non-RPG mechanics or alternative design conventions. Y'know, the stuff like Kingdom Hearts, Mega Man Battle Network and Star Force, Paper Mario, Undertale and Deltarune, TWEWY - the kinds of RPG's that twitter minors always include in their 'YOU'RE one of the good ones' posts. The closest to classical, traditional RPG's I ever got into were the Shining Force series and Phantasy Star IV - both of which I only got into because of my Genesis ADHD. But hey, I loved both! Even besides the narrative and aesthetic strengths of each, I was super into the simple loop of building up your squad, then going aggro on a bunch of badass monsters. And I learned from my experiences with both that surprisingly, I kinda like grinding and a lot of the other little things that people associate negatively with the genre.

So why didn't I start getting into 'the classics' of RPG's 'til now? Cause like the entire rest of my generation, I started with all of Square's big-name games and bounced off of them HAAAAAAAAAAARD. Chrono Trigger had me hooked in the first half, but left me drained by the second half when its boss design and open-endedness went in a direction that put me off immediately. I played part of FF9 and was in love, but got slowly worn out from its sluggish, 20FPS combat. I played Super Mario RPG on Wii VC cause it had Mario in it, and while I like a lot of the things it DOES, its combat was always just a less-refined Paper Mario to me, and the rough edges, dirty color palette and bad platforming pushed me off too. The only classic Square game that I was really vibing with was FF7, which I liked for the 10-15 hours of it I played! But one thing led to another, my life got busy, I got stuck somewhere, gave it up, and never looked back. I could understand the majesty and hype behind all of these games that made them genre-defining classics, but I could never get 'deep' into them. They didn't have that basic, snappy feel that made me get saturated in Shining and Phantasy Star.

Honestly, even though JRPG haters are unreasonable bitches, I wouldn't really blame them for saying stuff like Paper Mario and Persona 'got it right' when the whole internet screams to start with the big Squaresoft names - which again, aren't bad, but understandably don't appeal to everyone. Active Time Battles fucking suck dude, I get why it's a fresh change of pace for people who are FF junkies but goddamn this shit is rancid.

So instead of picking up and dropping more FF, I pivoted the other way and tried Dragon Quest for the time being. And Dragon Quest kicks ass! The leveling feels great! The feeling of branching out and surviving through each patch of the kingdom while scraping to get back to an inn or the castle before expiring is handled extremely well! And when you start getting magic that lets you minimize the busywork of items, you feel awesome! Toriyama, for as much of an asshole as he is, breathed a ton of life into the monster designs and lets them speak to the world in a way the microscopic overworld sprites couldn't. I really appreciate how the first enemies you fight are wildlife like roaming bugs and shit, but as you progress, you take on more and more of Dragonlord's direct henchmen - they're not just random encounters, these dudes are on patrol and you got on their TURF. When you finally grind up to beat the Green Dragon, and then you get to the final dungeon and TWO more variants of it appear as COMMON ENEMIES?? That's top tier kino.

Anyway this game's great, all of its design choices are laser-focused around that thrill of adventuring in a lived-in world and slowly building yourself up. Antiquated in some spots, but it gets the gameplay loop down pat and must've been even crazier back then. This was the 'hit buttons' JRPG thrill I needed to get my feet warm into the genre and rinse the taste of ATB out of my mouth.

Mobile/Switch version is ugly as shit tho, fuckin' Minecraft mod vibes.

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.


------------------------------------

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.