About Me

My name is Marco.

I create playthings and manage systems - mostly UNIX-like ones.

What do you do personally?

You may know me for having rewritten Half-Life in QuakeC, or Counter-Strike. I’ve also done countless other Quake (1996) related projects that people may know me for.

I also try to help out with FTEQW, but that is not my project - however people may know me for my contributions there.

The only other thing I am passionate about is GNUstep. I write some things for that and you may know me from IRC or the mailing lists there.

When not on the computer, I do much more important things. I also bake bread and pizza at home.

What do you do professionally?

I do programming work for Vera Visions L.L.C..

My current duty is managing and maintaining the game-logic and making long and short term technical decisions. In the past I also had done level design, skeletal animation and graphic design on The Wastes.

When did you get started with computers?

Computers helped me early on in my life. Thanks to computers and supportive family members, I was able to read and write when I was 4 years old. I grew up with computers alongside my dad getting accustomed to Windows 95, so it just happened by itself without additional reinforcement.

My earliest memories were being blown away by the rise of 3D graphics. I was fortunate to experience the switch from software rendering to 3D accelerator cards on personal computers. The first card I could call ‘my very own’ was the TNT2 by NVIDIA. This was before “GeForce” was a thing.

I tried making modifications to games and other programs. Just poking around the files and editing whatever I could (mostly with Paint and Notepad) to see what I could change.

At some point in the early to mid 2000s, I started wanting to take things more seriously and got a copy of Visual Basic 6 to mess with. That was technically the first language I got ‘good’ with.

I quickly started making things for my favorite games. Quake (1996) was obviously one of them.

How does one do that you do?

I divided my time playing outside with tinkering on computers, although an incident in the early summer of 2008 pushed me to pick up programming seriously.

From then on, it’s been a series of working on projects with people, networking, grinding, networking, crunching, networking. If you ever wonder how anyone gets anywhere? Networking.

I want to work with you on a project that I am passionate about!

I do get this a lot. I get e-mails of people offering me various sums of money to do work for them. Sometimes it amounts to building an entire game like we’ve previously done - and asking unreasonable amounts for that type of effort.

Also, I wasn’t born yesterday and had my share of experience with people not following through with payment. Many fun stories have come from these. Be direct and up front about such things or else no one can take you seriously.

If I do anything for free, I’ll have to be passionate about it too. But I just don’t have the time to do most paid work either. Feel free to ask though.

What's the deal with this website?

It should be a simple website. I hope it renders fine for you. I tried to make it work sensibly on its understanding of HTML3 from ~1999.

I figured that would allow people to read this text on new and old hardware alike.