civvie11

HELLRAISER - THE INFERNAL CARTRIDGE

Added 2021-03-30 15:07:59 +0000 UTC

HAPPY EARLY APRIL FOOL'S VIDEO.

This is a thing I've been putting together on and off for about a year. I wanted to do an April Fool's video last year too but then Doom Eternal happened. Because of that, I decided to do something a little unorthodox for this one. Y'know, get weird with it. I recreated a mythical game that never existed. One that can't actually exist since the NES version was cancelled in 1990 and Wolfenstein 3-D came out in 1992. Once I knew that, all I had to do was make up a conspiracy theory about John Carmack traveling through time to piss of Nintendo, which no one watching this channel would give a second thought.

This was a video I wanted to make since early in the channel's life. So much so that I had a folder full of supposed "Hellraiser" NES art lying around since 2017. The game itself doesn't exist which isn't a giant hurdle. Originally, I was going to throw something together in the Wolf3D engine, but I know nothing about it so I settled for replicating something in GZDoom, an engine I know slightly more than nothing about.

As far as I can tell, The Engineer, Puzzle Box, and Title Screen graphics were created by Roger Deforest of Color Dreams, found at: http://www.cenobite.com/collect/vg.htm. I decided to use them as a jumping-off point. There are few more sprite tables that were posted there. I wanted to use a few of the "leaked sprites" for authenticity and then I ended up making the vast majority of the "art" myself - the sprites, textures, and other graphics, figuring that it wouldn't really matter if they looked bad. The whole thing was going to look bad. People familiar with the leaked stuff might know what was coming next if I attempted to recreate the game "faithfully."

Sound effects were scoured from NES games and re-implemented here - probably the most recognizable one was from Zelda 2. The amazing music tracks were composed by Noelle who did a fantastic 8-bit-ish rendition of Hellraiser music that was so good that I had to say "yeah this is pretty good" in the video about a terrible game where I criticize what are design choices that I purposefully made to be terrible, starting with floating eyeballs. Capstone was kind of my "bad game spirit guide" at times. I have a ton of other stuff written down about the development of this awful thing that I want to release here someday.

There are 16 or so levels in a WAD, some of which are totally "playable." They're less fun if you look at them for as long as I did because the floor and ceiling effect in the video isn't done in-engine. All the floors and ceilings in the levels are actually fullbright green in order to key the floor and ceiling in later. It's a mess. The floor and ceiling are based off of the effect I'd seen done in Zero Tolerance on the Genesis which I found to be a little more interesting looking than what I'd originally planned which was the gradient effect in Corridor 7.

Now that this is done, I'm going to work on a Redneck Rampage video, which will cover the 3 big ones (RR, Route 66, and Rides Again) and thankfully there's a good source port, RedNukem, to play them in, but this is another video where I'm going to have to go into the DOS version to compare and make sure I'm not blindly criticizing things in a game I already hated. It's been probably a decade since I ran through all the RR games in DOSBox.

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