I started working with Doom editing in May 1999 right after picking up Hank Leukart's, The Doom Hackers Guide for $3.99 at a Staples store. The book was in one of those bargain bins full of crappy books nobody buys and on the way out of the store I just happened to spot it sitting there. I had never edited any game before and had an interest in making maps for Quake, Quake II and also Doom of course, but I had no way of doing so. With no internet access at the time I was left with designing levels on graph paper until The Doom Hackers Guide came along which included a CD full of utilities and I soon discovered DoomCad 5.1... So I started to map for Doom II without any idea of where it was heading. The first map I worked on became the first level in Vilecore. I had no idea at this time what a megawad was or that I was going to make 32 levels. I had no pre-planned idea about what I was making and didn't even have a name for my project. Initially I was just making a bunch of maps for myself and I didn't even know if I was going to release it when it was done.. At this point the only user made levels I played came off of PC Gamer Cd's and a crappy compilation CD full of 90% crap levels. The best user made Doom map I had played at the time was Dr Sleep's Crossing Acheron of which I thought was pretty cool and seemed to be a pretty rare thing.

In early 2000 I found a free internet service CD in the newspaper. I figured it was dodgy. I talked to my sister in law and she knew of somebody who had used it and so I decided to try it. I joined Upath.com on dialup and got on the net. I hung around Planet Half-Life a lot and got into editing for the game. I joined a half-life editing resource forum that lasted a few months. They took the forum down for repairs and never put it back up. I got bored of Half-Life. Rumors about a new Doom game started flying around so I hit google and did a search. I found newdoom.com in July 2000 and the site wasn't anymore than a month old, if that. A few people were posting, mainly in the section dedicated to the New Doom game so I joined in. Those days were a blast and it was pretty cool being a part of the early speculation on the mysterious and unamed Doom 3.

On August 16, 2000 this site, The Megawad came online. It was after I had shown my megawad on the Newdoom forums that Stphrz mentioned I should have a site for my Doom stuff. Guess that got me thinking he was right. I knew nothing about website design so it was quite a challenge to get something half decent made. The reason for the sites name came from the fact that I didn't have a name for my project and I knew I was definitely making a megawad.. I liked the idea of calling the site The Megawad and I figured that anybody putting the word megawad in a search engine would get my site right away.

Not long after, on August 31, 2000 I named my megawad project Vilecore. I even put the title into a google search and came up with nothing... nobody had the name or used it anywheres...yay! Then on December 25, 2000 I finished Vilecore and released it. Man was I ever glad to have that finished..... and no I'm not on the free ISP anymore.. I moved on to cable. heh.

To make a long story short. I started a new megawad back in 2001 called Monstrosity but I dropped it after a month or so. I decided to take maps from Monstrosity plus some others and started Vilecore II. I canned that idea as well. I then upgraded the original Vilecore to 1.0 fixing some bugs. I later started to remake Vilecore completely from scratch and it was going ok for awhile. The remake version got split in two because I wanted to do a regular version and a Legacy version. This ended up being too much work so I decided not to do that either. Due to the upgrade to the original Vilecore to 1.0 I decided more needed to be done as I was unhappy with the state of the original maps. I started to work on what I called Vilecore 2.0 and that was going to be a nice upgrade. I did so much work on 2.0 that it was no longer just an upgrade and it felt like the project deserved to be called Vilecore II and so I changed the name. I also ran a poll on my forum and people voted for Vilecore II so it seemed the right thing to do.

So what I'm doing now is taking the original Vilecore megawad and turning it into Vilecore II by super-tweaking the entire thing. The maps will be familiar to anybody who's played the original but greatly enhanced...

There will be new areas to explore, many new secrets, a change in the layout of the monsters, weapons and powerups amongst the maps, more monsters and more of the tougher monsters, better coop play, harder UV play, new traps, 850+ new textures and flats, some sprite changes (mostly to the torches and lamps), thousands of architectural changes, tweaks and additions. Some areas of the original were deleted and or changed to the point they no longer look like they once did.

Now the original Vilecore looks like an empty shell compared to this new jobby. I could go on and on with all the changes but this has been long-winded enough. The project isn't finished yet and will be done when it's completed. I don't want to rush it. The final stages of the original Vilecore was rushed and I don't ever want to do that again.

If for some reason you want to contact me you can do so here: vilecore_megawad$yahoo.com .... just changed the $ to a @. Make sure to put either Vilecore or Doom in the subject otherwise your email may get lost in amongst the spam.