In short… Someone wrote a really DUMB web scraper, and harassed me with it. —Peter Seebach —Can they really be this stupid?
Peter Seebach, who happens to host blogs.setonhill.edu, also hosts a variety of sites dealing with interactive fiction. He recently got an e-mail from the Entertainment Software Association that threatens him with legal action for hosting a pirated copy of Doom 3, the iD Software title that was leaked to the internet a few weeks ago.
The only problem is that the file “doom3.zip” is actually “Last Days of Doom,” part of a trilogy of interactive fiction games created by Peter Killworth (originally for Topologika). The third “Doom” title was released in 1999, and is about 114k in size.
(So it’s obviously not an archived version of a full-budget professional game, since those titles typically fill up a CD and often run to multiple CDs.)
Mike, part of me wonders whether this is a troll — a fake announcement, designed to stir up the predictable backlash… like telling the audience at a Star Trek convention, “Move out of your parents’ basement and get a life.”
Yes — Doom3 is actually THREE CDs in size, believe it or not. That makes this all the more outrageous. IS there an “Entertainment Software Association”? Wouldn’t ID Software be the ones to threaten to sue, anyway?
It’s interesting to think of Doom3 as an “interactive fiction” of sorts, anyway. Although the whole Doom series is the most shooter of first person shooters, this version is a retelling of the original Doom1 scenario, fleshed out with characters and highly detailed graphics. A bit too reminiscent of Half-Life. But it’s a lot of scary fun.