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Hank Leukart
Product Manager by day. Filmmaker by night.
Hank Leukart

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Bluesky →

my fyp just won't be the same without sydney towle's spirit, empathy, and grit. the big green lost a real one.

6 days AGOBluesky →

My film Echoes of the Escalante is officially headed to the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival! Screening dates are Oct 9 and 10. See you in Ohio!

42 days AGOBluesky →

the moment i get my delorean, i'll travel to 2011 montreal because of mile end kicks

56 days AGOBluesky →

but that’s not how domino’s is spelled

59 days AGOBluesky →

proof that great car ads can actually work: no one buys green cars except for almost every rivian owner

66 days AGOBluesky →

i just realized playing with a baby is just ucb because you just find the game and you’re good to go

The first gaming influencer
This press piece covers
The first gaming influencer
When I was 15 years old, I pioneered gaming influence by creating the iconic Doom FAQ, inspiring online modding culture.
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Article reprinted below in full

I have to tell you about the book I have been reading - The Doom Hacker's Guide by Hank Leukart.

If you are scratching your head while you read this, wondering what a Doom Hacker is and why would one need a guide, then you probably have not been around computers for very long. I bet if you ask your kids they'll know.

Doom is a game. I don't really like it very much. It is a horrible, flashy, noisy, violent game. It is also the most popular computer game of all time. Most kids and many adults love it. Many are addicted to it.

Doom has a simple story line — you are a space marine, trapped in a labyrinth of the chambers and corridors of a huge spaceship. With you are thousands of space goblins, monsters, ghosts and demons that want to kill you. To survive, you must blow them all to bloody smithereens first, using your trusty shotgun or the chain-guns, blasters, plasmarifles, rocket launchers and power gloves you will find along the way.

Part of the attraction of Doom is the beautiful, complex, three-dimensional mazes in the game. It might be violent, but it is some of the best computer programming around. This has encouraged a whole underground of Doom hackers, programmers who have patched their own graphics, weapons, monsters, and mazes into the game.

Leukart created the Official Doom FAQ (frequently asked question) file, one of the most read files on the Internet. Even id Software, the makers of Doom, sent him mail.

Now he has collected all his favorite Doom hacks into a book, and a companion compact disk that includes all the best Doom editors, patchers, and utilities — DEU, DoomCAD v4.3 and v5.1, NWT, DeHackED, EdMap, WadEd, WinDEU, DeuTex, VB DeuTex, Midi2Mus, Mus2Midi, the Official Doom FAQ v6.666, a bunch of graphics (such as President Bill Clinton's head) and add-on maps.

The book shows how to use each utility and how to add your own graphics, weapons, monsters and mazes to Doom. The prose is clear and well written. The book's illustrations, captured from the computer screen, are poor, but the blood-smear background to each page number is appropriate to the theme.

As I said before, I don't really like Doom, but I love the idea of building my own mazes and populating them with monsters. That seems a lot more fun to me than actually playing Doom. The Doom Hacker's Guide is published by MIS Press (Fitzhenry & Whiteside in Canada) and costs $29.