Looking for Mary Bergi & Scott Holman

[wiweeyum]

Hey all, I'm attempting to set up a series of interviews with the original Digital Cafe folks. I've got the LinkedIn profiles for everyone except Scott Holman and Mary Bergi. I was wondering if any of y'all knew where they ended up. I've got my Carmen Sandiego hat on, and am ready to do some sleuthing.

[ScottH]

Hi! This is Scott. I was thinking about Chex Quest recently while putting some things together for a project which then got me looking at Chex Quest sites online.  I'm happy there is such a great Chex Quest community still thriving after all these years! 

I was really surprised to see you were looking for me!!!  Well, I'm still around.  I've been a freelance programmer since those Digital Cafe days.  I've been doing mobile apps these days, both for clients and some personal projects as "Snowy Penguin".  I've just launched my most recent personal project "Beat The Kanji" - an iOS music rhythm game for studying the kanji of the Japanese language as a Kickstarter project. It was while thinking about my programming career bio for this project that got me thinking about Chex Quest again.  I was fortunate to be able to be part of such a fun project with a great team during the start of my professional career.  The "Beat The Kanji" project is at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1783078906/beat-the-kanji
(couldn't help but put a Chex Quest reference in the project video...)

[Awesomedude249]

Holy sunflower seeds...

I JUST CANT BELEVEITAWMIGAHSDSHJIUXDHGUID8HUS98EYH
Lol.

Welcome, Scott! We are a small community of chex quest fans. I remember I used to use the cheat code "scottholman" all the time when I needed lots of ammo, weapons and the like.

What DID you do with Chex Quest in 1996?

[ScottH]

Thanks! I wish I would have jumped into the community sooner. Yeah I'm partial to that cheat code 

My title was "programmer" for the Chex Quest project. The game is of course using the DOOM engine we licensed from id Software, so when it comes to programming the game engine, it's John Carmack and John Romero's work.  It was an honor to be working with the code of legends. My job involved basically any programming or technical related things needed on top of what we had from the licensed DOOM code. Some examples are:

- I was responsible for managing the DOOM code.  Things like making modifications to adjust things, turn things off we weren't using, update text strings, change the cheat codes, etc.  And then compile the actual program builds. In retrospect it would have been great to have been able to dive into the engine code more and make more customizations, but I was busy with the immediate needs of the project along with other Digital Cafe projects I was involved with at the same time.

- I wrote the code to display the intro and ending videos.  We were using "Smacker Video Technology" by "RAD Game Tools", which was a way to encode and play back videos for games using the limited resources of PCs of the time. To make this happen you licensed the Smacker engine code and wrote a program making use of it.

- I was the go to guy for handling any technical issues the team had when using the tools for level layout, graphics, and sound, etc.  I was involved in helping the team get up to speed on the level creation tools and helped solve problems they ran into, but the actual laying out of levels was primarily done by others.

- I also programmed that Windows menu that pops up when you insert the CD-ROM along with integrating program installation and AOL installation - all the extra stuff like that.

[Awesomedude249]

Cool! I have to ask, when Digital Cafe made their zorcher sprites, WHAT program did they use to make them? Or did they do it like how they made the weapons for DooM?

[noob1234]

I'm pretty sure they didn't have models, they look drawn.
But this is exciting! This is our third (?) member of the CQ team to visit the site!

[Awesomedude249]

Oh yeah, Chukker and Andrew Benon. (No, I didn't butcher Andrew Benson's name, that is what he calls himself here on these forums.)

[ScottH]

Chuck would know better than me since he did them    but if I remember right, they were hand drawn and likely done in Photoshop.

[Awesomedude249]

Oh. I make sprites for CQ in GIMP using the gradient and pencil tools.

[darkstone]

My goodness, I just use Paint.
I'm dropping dead here...

[Boingo the Clown]

I used to use my old (18 years old) copy of Paint Shop Pro for spriting, and I probably still will use it to a large degree,  It seems especially suited to editing DooM sprites.

[MajorSlime]

I usually use Paint.NET for graphics work. But like I said, Pro Motion is very well suited for pixel art. In fact, Pro Motion uses palette'd images, so you can load up the Doom or Chex palette and have exactly the colors you need if you don't want to go Truecolor

[Replica]

Paint shop pro uses the color palette as well.

[Awesomedude249]

Yeah, I have used the doom palette before in GIMP, it can use custom palettes.