Ever wonder what people will say about you after you’re dead and buried? “Can’t say as I have,” you might reply absent-mindedly. Ordinarily I would answer in kind, but tonight I got a taste of that strange feeling—knowing what people might be saying about oneself posthumously. It’s left a bit of an odd taste in my mouth. Not a bad taste, but an odd one. I suppose this is where I begin rambling, so tune out now if you’re likely to be bored by a bunch of self-serving prattle. (But don’t forget to check back a bit later when I’ll be posting some big news about a trip I’m taking later this year.)

It all started this morning when I got to work. Logging into my workstation, my systray email checker delivered me a message from my personal account. To my surprise, I saw it was from a guy who was attempting to compile the Wolfenstein source code, had experienced some problems, and was coming to me with some questions about it. What’s strange is that I deliberately removed myself from the Wolfenstein scene some, oh, five years ago and have largely not been involved since. My original website at www.wolf3dbunker.com has been taken down, the domain name lapsed (it now takes you to one of those annoying, generic, spamware search engines), and my email address changed many times over. So imagine my further surprise when I discover that the email I received this morning was addressed to my current, personal account which I originally presumed had been given out to no one anywhere close to the Wolfenstein community!

Well, unlike most of the classic people who used to write me begging for Wolfenstein assistance, this guy wrote in well-formed sentences and was very polite, so I wrote him a response and tried to help him out as best I could. At the end of my reply, I postscriped, “By the way, where’d you find out how to contact me?” In the response I received this evening, I learned that he had found my email address on a website belonging to Nate Smith, one of the original Wolfenstein TC (Total Conversion) authors from the days of old (read: 1998-2000), and author of what is probably the most infamous TC in history, Beyond Wolfenstein II Special Edition. It’s infamous because it remains the only third-party Wolfenstein TC to ever be pulled as the result of a cease-and-desist order (stemming from copyright violation) straight from Todd Hollenshead of id Software himself!

This intrigued me. I mean, I thought Nate Smith basically sank into obscurity shortly after BWIISE was yanked. At the time, Nate was the “big man on campus,” the dude who was riding the pinnacle of the source code hacking wave, implementing cool new features (like rocket launchers and landmines) in his add-ons, and was basically enjoying the hell out of his popularity. He was a bit of a nay-sayer, as I recall, of my then-up-and-coming Project Totengraeber add-on, claiming that it could never match the featureset that he had put out in BWIISE (and for that matter, according to Nate, nothing could). For this reason, I admit I got a bit of a rise out of seeing id Software pull the legal floor out from under Mr. Smith. That, and because I always thought Nate was a mediocre level designer, which at the time was my forte—after all, my second mapset, Conflict in the Fatherland, was being hailed as some of the most professional maps ever designed for Wolfenstein. To me, level design mattered most. To Nate, whiz-bang features mattered most. It was like an indie filmmaker vs. Hollywood.

But I digress. After reading that this new Wolfenstein contact had found me via some website of Nate Smith’s, I did something that I’ve been, quite honestly, scared to do for the last four years. I went to Google and started searching for sites that might mention me as I once related to the Wolfenstein community. My departure from that community was somewhat abrupt and completely unannounced, and I know for a fact that there were some hard feelings there back in 2000. People thought I had abandoned them. And in a way, I did. But then, I never signed a contract, or owed most of them anything. I was a guy having fun with an old game, just like they were, and suddenly I didn’t have time for it anymore. I was getting married, I was graduating from college and getting a job, and all of a sudden, Wolfenstein was just nowhere on the priority list. One of my earlier hobbies—creative writing—was on the rise again, I was back in regular contact with my high school friends, and I no longer had the luxury of late nights up at the computer at four in the morning, pounding away at the Borland C++ IDE. My Wolfenstein modding days were done. But I didn’t want to admit it, so I quietly disappeared. Why make a formal exit if there was a chance I might return?

But I didn’t return, and eventually I dropped off the radar. Or so I thought. Now here’s where it gets freaky. As I Googled up some results about me, I discovered what I can only describe as a “Bizarro Wolf3D Bunker.” The Wolf3D Bunker was the name of the Wolfenstein website I put up in mid-1999, and which disappeared from the web officially about a year ago. Well, the site I located had the same outline as the bunker—the tab-like interface with the page title on it, the beveled borders, the same tabular structure and iconography—but the color scheme had changed, and now it was called the “DieHard Wolfenstein Bunker.” Apparently this site is part of what remains of the Wolfenstein community. They even carried over my original site tagline, which was spawned as a result of my getting too many requests to finish people’s damn games for them:

Please, no requests for custom resources for your project. We give you the tools, but the talent must be all yours.

Of course, originally I said “I give you the tools” instead of “We”. Not that I’m pissed, mind you. The new bunker is actually a (mostly) completed site, it’s done tastefully, and it’s got some good info there (including the original map design tips file I wrote nigh on eight years ago, woo hoo, go me!!), so I wish them well.

Perusing this strange Bizarro-Bunker, this peculiar alternate-timeline version of a site I threw together in my Orlando apartment so long ago, little did I realize that things were only going to get weirder. I soon discovered that the Wolfenstein community, after suffering several civil wars and self-factioning, had recommitted itself to the game and settled upon the name “DieHard Wolfers.” They had their own message board called the DieHard Wolfers Forums, and I even recognized a few familar faces there—including Chris Chokan, author of the famous (and classic) Wolfenstein TC Chokage, a guy who doubles as the member of the Wolf continuum who manages to be both 1) the eldest surviving, in terms of expeience and 2) then as now, the guy with the best damn English skills in the entire community. Talking to him was sheer pleasure compared with the legions of morons who could come to my email box, begging me, in twisted and fractured English, for me to deliver them a custom VSWAP on a silver platter or design 30 levels in a week.

I started searching the forums. I dunno, I guess I was a glutton for punishment, given that the last time I saw mention of myself in the Wolfenstein community (an accidental web search two years ago), the only words I caught were something to the effect of “That Totengraeber guy sucks.” But as I cruised through the forum threads, I realized that this was a different Wolfenstein community than the swelled, cancerous one I left behind almost four years ago. It was filled with members who could actually speak coherently, actually had valid points that were excellently expressed, and best of all, did not have a bunch of assholes jockeying for position on the “Top TCs” charts. But this is where it gets weird. I started seeing references to myself and my custom levels, all over the boards, as if I were some kind of patriarch of Wolfenstein modders.

“Project Totengraeber is God’s own TC,” opined one forum member. Others referred to PT as a legacy, a milestone in Wolfenstein add-ons, and even a turning point for the entire community—like some kind of damned epiphany that rocked the world over, some red-letter date against which all future comparisons would be made! Given that I exited the scene shortly after tossing the hastily completed Project Totengraber onto my web server and didn’t look back, I largely missed most of the apparent praise of that add-on. Judging from the historical documents I’m reading, it apparently caused quite a stir. About that time, I was journeying to Thailand to get married to my wife. A Google-cached version of a Wolfenstein news site from that same quarter remarks, “After playing phase I I want more more more Project Totengraeber. Where the heck is B. J.? Someone told me he was in a far off country or something. Hurry back!” Whoa. I was in a far-off country. Reading other people on the web talking about what I’m doing in my life, even retroactively, is a slice of weird I’ve never before experienced.

As I perused the boards, I can say that the feeling I got would best be described as “posthumous.” As I mentioned at the start of this entry: What if I had died shortly after releasing Project Totengraeber, and five years later was given a glimpse of the Wolfenstein community—a chance to eavesdrop on, but not participate in, their discussions? Would they still be talking about me? Apparently, the answer is yes. In several threads I see my name being brought up whenever people ask simple questions about good level design or TC ideas. While PT is considered a milestone, what appears to be even more popular is my second mapset, Conflict in the Fatherland. This is especially strange to me, because I was working on those levels at the same time as I was bitching my ass off about my Honors Biology teacher in high school. I mean, that was fucking eons ago. And yet, CITF is considered one of the very best Wolfenstein mapsets of all time, considered by some to surpass the quality even of the original id Software maps.

I then discovered that several of the elder members of the DieHard Wolfers Forum were PT naysayers, claiming that the level design in Totengraeber felt rushed and not up to the standards I set with my own CITF. And so now, I realize that by some opinions, I’ve come full circle—having for the first time posted CITF on the web for all to see back in 1999, I criticized Nate Smith for focusing only on snazzy new features in his TCs. And then with Totengraeber, it was as if I became Nate Smith, somewhat forgoing that excellent gameplay-oriented level design I was known for in order to focus on “eye candy” like degrading weapons (a la System Shock 2), custom music, and a bevy of other source code changes.

After spending all evening perusing the DieHard Wolfers Forum, part of me wants to register for an account on it and make some kind of long-winded Lazarus speech about how I have returned from the afterlife. Of course, it’s not my intention to come out of retirement, as it were. Absolutely not. I doubt I will ever map for Wolfenstein again. And when I say that to myself, I realize it would be pointless to jump back into the community. Do I really want to reopen that old wound? Especially when I barely have time for the projects and hobbies I’m already in the midst of? Like this story I can’t seem to finish, or this car I can’t seem to find time to work on?

Perhaps—and this is just a wild, out-there suggestion that bears no real scrutiny—if I find myself starting work on some new Wolfenstein maps in the future, then and ONLY then would a reintroduction to the so-called “DieHard Wolfers” be appropriate. Part of the reason for my move away from Wolfenstein in recent years has been how difficult it is to actually work on the game, given modern-day operating systems that don’t like old DOS crap. But ironically, I seem to have subconsciously moved myself a bit closer toward reenabling my DOS habits—when I got my new monitor, I discovered it had two D-SUB inputs on the back, and I have already set up my old Pentium II box with its own keyboard and mouse and plugged it into the monitor. Barring my actually finding a spare AC outlet for the CPU, it’s ready to be fired up. Yes, this is the same box I designed and compiled Project Totengraeber on back in 1999. Destiny revisited or stupid pipe dream that’ll be forgotten as soon as I see my workload tomorrow morning at the office? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, this post has dragged on FAR too long and was mostly about me tooting my own horn, but in a way I felt strangely compelled to write this. I don’t know; maybe it’s because I feel like my aborted departure from the Wolfy community in 2000 was not tied up well; I left too many loose ends behind me rather than just having a formal door-closing ceremony and making it official. The other concern is, if I go back in the door now, will people boo me right back out? They say an artist’s work is worth nothing until he dies. If I come “back from the dead,” as it were, will my work be looked upon as less than it once was?

Anyway, this is something I want to ponder for a while.

A very curious evening, indeed. Thanks for listening.