A Deep Sense of Doom

Picks & Pans: The Doom Hacker’s Guide

From People Magazine, May 29, 1995

Doom fiends can start salivating. Thanks to The Doom Hacker’s Guide (MIS:Press, $21.95) everyone from novices to fanatics can now edit and customize the labyrinthine worlds of Doom and Doom II. The game sends players on perilous interplanetary missions in a duel to the death against otherworldly forces. The Guide includes a CD-ROM with utilities to create add-on levels with torture chambers and secret passages and to edit in new graphics and sounds. With the help of this book, if you can boot up a computer you can make fodder of Barney or the Energizer Bunny. Or you can substitute the Baron of Hell’s cry with, say, the bleating of your neighbor’s car alarm. For those who crave virtual carnage, author Hank Leukart offers the opportunity to personalize the horrors of Doom and test the limits of your macabre imagination. — ERIK A. MEERS

Talking With… Hank Leukart

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD HANK LEUKART now has a lot more to celebrate than his new driver’s license. The recent publication of his first book, The Doom Hacker’s Guide, stunned his high school friends in Hudson, Ohio. “I didn’t tell anyone about the book until a month ago,” he says. “A lot of people were extremely impressed, others were jealous.” At the keyboard since age 2, Leukart went online four years ago and got his first glimpse of Doom‘s spectacular graphics when id Software previewed it on the Net. “In the past you had games like Mario [Brothers] where you have a guy jumping around on the screen killing mushrooms,” Leukart says. “This was totally different.” He rapidly became Doom‘s Net authority, replying to players’ bulletin-board queries and composing a FAQ (answers to Frequently Asked Questions) for the game. Last fall two publishers vied to get Leukart to write a book on Doom editing: it took him just three months. And how does the young author feel about Doom‘s much criticized violence? “I have lots of friends who play the game, and no one has tried to kill me yet… except in the game of course.” — E.A.M.