I think we'll pause the experiment for now, but there's a lot of headroom in these ancient scrolls. We never even got to GamePro or Nintendo Power! Someone was saying that were we to stay this course, we would eventually get to comics about how long Sin takes to load, and I like that just for the internal loop. It calls to mind Pepsi's perimeter oscillations, and if it's sufficient to buoy that storied edifice we could probably make due with the occasional mystic whorl.

That said, The Doom That Came To 32X was the most deeply fucked version if you don't count people running it on calculators or E Ink or some shit because they're avoiding work. This quote from Scot Bayless on the Doom Wiki is so incredibly harrowing:

I spent weeks working with Id Software’s John Carmack, who literally camped out at the Sega of America building in Redwood City trying to get Doom ported. That guy worked his ass off and he still had to cut a third of the levels to get it done in time.

What amazes me now is that with all that going on, nobody at Sega was willing to say "Wait a minute, what are we doing? Why don’t we just stop?" Sega should have killed the 32X in the spring of 1994, but we didn’t. We stormed the hill, and when we got to the top we realized it was the wrong damn hill.

It was clearly goof troop even at the time, you could tell just from the music - but I wasn't aware that that it didn't include all the levels, which is to say that it didn't include the BFG9000. It also didn't include multiplayer, which is to say it emphatically wasn't Doom. If you had access to a couple computers and could cobble together a rudimentary network, there was gaming before Doom and there was gaming after Doom. You sorta had to sell your friends on this shit. Most of the stuff I played was fairly esoteric and it was a tough lift to make the case that these particular Azure Bonds or whatever constituted a particular problem. Doom was almost universally legible.

I'm literally going to Mike's house to hang out and play videogames, something I haven't done for probably three years. It wasn't a common thing, even when plagues didn't reign. I'm gonna see what's going on this Ring everybody's talking about. I guess it's old?

(CW)TB out.