Post Number VII - Doomworld mystery solved for sure this time!

I woke up this morning to find a single very interesting email in my inbox that solves the doom world mystery once and for all. It also makes my last blog entry only a fraction correct in the sense that the maps, all of them, are someone else’s work.

The email was from a young lady who informed me her elder brother found the topic on doom world, a website he checks now and again as he is a doom fan himself and checks there mostly for new wads and information on the upcoming doom 4.

To make this as short and to the point as possible, here’s the whole gaggle of sharks.

Her first name is Gabrielle. Her real last name isn’t Bélanger.

She lives in Oregon and is a few years older than 11. She did start mapping for doom at 11 and told me she would send me her first ever-horrible map if I were interested.

The real name of the original file called Demon Laden is actually Evil Laden.

She started working on it on September 26^th.

She says she and her brother looked at the version Little Temple uploaded and found the following differences.

He snapped her bonus items, ammo and barrels to the grid.

He removed the berserk pack in level 1 and replaced it with a health kit.

He moved a chainsaw where a box of ammo was and put the box of ammo in the chainsaw’s original position in the level.

He removed some shadows in level 1 perhaps to make it look more amateur.

He switched a trigger in level 2 for a lift and changed which doors needed a red key along with the door textures.

He replaced her original demo files as they wouldn’t work right with the changes he made to her maps.

He took the damage effect out of some areas in level 3.

She says it looks like he removed and re-added and fixed purposely made mistakes to make it seem like work was actually being done to the levels.

He replaced her title and exit screens along with her level names to make it look more amateur. Some of the level names were slightly modified.

All the levels in the current Projekt Xero file are ones Gabrielle and her brother worked on together to try using Zdoom, same with the Dimensions levels, which are the oldest of the bunch.

She says her brother had been sharing the levels with a kid in school named Brandon. He only gave the first name. He said he had probably started sharing the levels around October or November last year, which fits Little Temples posting timelines, pretty well I think.

Gabrielle says she didn’t think people would like her levels too much and thought most people were into fancier more modern levels and that she just made them for her and her brother and his friends to play coop and death match on. But, she said since people at Doom World did like them, she’d be happy to share them.

So for the rundown.

Apparently Gabrielle’s brother is a doom fan and got her into mapping when she was 11. She’s a few years older than what little temple said. She isn’t French and the only thing French about her is her first name.

Her brother shared the levels with Brandon, as he is also a doom fan. Some of the levels were by Gabrielle alone (evil laden, I think) and others by both her and her brother.

Brandon (Little Temple) decided to change some names around and pass the levels off as his own creation or him and his group of fabricated mates.

The reason I believe this to be true is because another friend of mine (whom I do consider a friend) says he believes the perpetrator to be someone with the first name Brandon.

So there you have it Doom world! Mystery solved!

Post Number VI

I found something out about myself in the last few hours. I love solving mysteries! Especially if they involve at least someone I consider a friend! Well readers, I have solved Doom World’s “Gabrielle Bélanger” mystery.

Grab yourself some ale and prepare to be mentally buggered.

I had my loyal friend do a little more nosing around and we found many missing pieces in Doom world’s story of the girl from france who makes doom levels.

Call it a stroke of luck on our part, or sheer dumb luck, whatever suits it best for you. There is a little well-known chat room out there I frequent now and again in the music section called ICQ. If you hadn’t heard of it before, you have now! It started as a mistake on my part. I had the chat room bookmarked but I was on the boggled side of the thinking train and clicked regional chats by mistake. I see French in the list so out of curiosity I click it. I had just read the doom world forums thread where Little Temple Group supposedly had met this French girl so perhaps I was just thinking about French. Or chips, those things Americans call fries… French fries to be exact.

So I go into this chat room and I see some bloke named Marcus there. His French looks quite a bit different than everyone else. By which I’m trying to say it was bad and he’s obviously still learning. Curious, right?

Wait, it gets better! Because I don’t use my usual name in chats as I do my blog postings, I tried asking him some things in English. He replied, we got to talking in private and I slowly but surely shifted the conversation to computer games. Just so this post isn’t overly long in the tooth. I have found reason to believe that this Marcus is the same Marcus as Little Temple Group. This either makes him dumb to use the nick Marcus in a French chat room after such controversies or it makes me very smart and very lucky!

He admitted that he plays levels made by French people. Yes, the doom games included. I inspected the thread at doom world once more and the others under the Little Temple name and found one thing glaringly odd.

The very first level posted by Little Temple was of very poor quality. I don’t even play the game much and I think it looks like sheep shite. I still have that level on my backup hard drive. I also have the second level posted by Little Temple.

The quality? Much better. You might be thinking yeah well so what. My question is, can someone really improve in skills at anything in a matter of one or two days or however short time it was that Little Temple appeared to improve with the second posting of the first level of his projekt xero file? Hmm, that’s what I thought!

Let me tell you what I think. I think that Little Temple not only plays maps for games made by French people. He steals them. I know, it sounds crazy! It’s the only thing I got.

I have some friends whose names shall remain anonymous look deeper into my theory.

Little Temple has used two file-hosting services. Free file-hosting, and DRD.

Free file hosting was used for some time to post Projekt Xero and somehow one of my friends found traces of a file titled Demon Laden having been uploaded along with a separate French instruction file on how to play it as far back as December 2^nd Pacific time.

Curious, considering Gabrielle Bélanger started working on that sometime on the 3^rd of January the following year according to Little Temple.

My point? I believe every map posted by Little Temple after the failure of their original level 1 for Projekt Xero has actually been plagiarized. I believe there is someone out there named Gabrielle Bélanger who did make those maps but she has no idea who Little Temple is.

You might be thinking how did I come to this conclusion.

Well, here’s some things for us to rattle round our heads for a moment.

Has anyone at Doom World found it odd how Little Temple always seems to cancel a project after only a few levels?

Projekt Xero was cancelled at three, Dimensions at four and Demon Laden hasn’t seen updates from Little Temple beyond level five.

Here is my theory and I’ve given it a lot of brain time. It still sounds crazy but, in the crazy world of the Internet, anything is possible, yeah?

My theory is this. Little Temple shared interest in whatever levels were floating around French chat rooms as people demoed them out to folks they have known for a while in the web space.  I believe Little Temple nabbed whatever he could and decided to pass them off as his or her own. I also have come to believe that Gabrielle Bélanger is truly a child and it made an interesting story for Little Temple to tell.

For whatever reason, he waited months at a time and had to modify said story and decided to go all amazing on everyone. He probably thought why not make it interesting. So he makes up a bizarre story how someone went to France and brought back Bélanger and he taught her how to map, just to better himself.

However, he also wanted the amazing to seem more amazing and modified the dates of his story upon whichever events took place to more recent dates so to make it seem like Gabrielle made five levels in 5 days.

You might now be thinking… yeah, but he updated them little by little.

Yes, of course he did. I’m no gaming nerd but even I know you can pull a game apart and piece it back together!

I think Gabrielle Bélanger is actually out there somewhere but not in America. I think she’s still in France. I also think Little Temple had no problem being honest about one thing, her name. I looked it up on one of those name info sites. The whole thing is already in French. He would have no trouble because he wouldn’t have to worry about spelling it wrong; it’s all copy and paste with your brain!

Why French people’s maps? Well, he is learning French. That much I can tell. If he’s going to steal maps from someone, he wouldn’t steal from an American or someone good enough with English to go snooping on varies doom websites and find said stolen work.

It is just a theory and this post may be so jumbled people might not want to even attempt to read it. It is a crazy theory but I honestly can’t think of anything else.

I think Demon Laden is much further along than five levels by now because I think it’s at least a few months older than Little Temple said. However I do admit I’m stumped by one thing. If he planned to use the Gabrielle Bélanger thing, would he have made something up about her deciding to stop after level 5? I cannot figure out how he would get the rest. Maybe he knew for certain how to get her to share more of it?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe I should take my own advice and stop reading so deep into the wee stuff.

Do you think it’s possible? Or am I just thinking too hard?

I can’t decide. The fact that a guy named Marcus, who’s learning French was in a French chat room and told me he plays levels by French people, including doom ones… is a bit curious. I can’t forget too that his first submitted map is so bad that the next one posted not more than probably a week after is of much better quality.

I do know one thing though. I’m done doing music for games for now. If people like this are out there it’s scary.

This concludes my personal venture into this matter. I gave the go ahead to my friends I talked about earlier to keep digging if they really wished to do so.

If anyone from the doom community should stumble upon this post, feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think. I’ve had my own trouble on the Internet by way of some game we all know by as World of Warcraft as you can see in my second post.

It makes me wonder deep down inside my thinker if that also wasn’t Little Temple.

I may not have solved the mystery but I think I got pretty close! Everyone has theories though, right?

Post Number V - For the people at Doom World

This blog entry is here to discuss some things I found out by googling my own name. I’ve heard a lot of it has been going on for all the wrong reasons so I decided to give it a go.

A bit pointless to say, I found what I was looking for within the first page of search results.

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/62428-q-a-abiageal-omeara/

I am going to just come out and say this very honestly. This post is fabricated. I won’t pretend to know what’s going on here but I do know this. I do not give interviews under any circumstances what so ever. If I had given an interview, it would’ve appeared in a blog post here first after being correctly edited by me and me alone.

Why would I give an interview? That’s just the point, I wouldn’t. I’m not famous and I’d take a guess that maybe only four people on the World Wide Web have an inkling of who I am.

I searched through the forums quite a lot in the last half hour since I’ve been up and about and my findings are disturbing to put it ever so lightly.

1.    I was never paid anything for my works.

2.    I never had Little Temple Group, whoever they truly are, post anything regarding work being completed on the soundtrack for their Dimensions project. As I said yesterday morning, I felt that soundtrack incomplete and I have no desire to work with anyone I haven’t know for more than four months at least. Especially after this disaster.

3.    I never received any electronic letters or mailings from someone posing as Little Temple Group. This is a fabrication. Nothing more, nothing less.

The only things I could find that were not fabrications regarding my personality in Little Temple’s postings were little bits directly copied and pasted from my blog entries and possibly a detail or two from our many email conversations prior to the controversy over at doom world.

Furthermore, I have seen a lot of overreacting in the thread where said controversy occurred. I have also seen people reading a little too deep into trivial things which could in effect cause problems for people who simply were too kind to the wrong people and were unaware of the possible outcomes.

I have nothing to say on the matter of one particular member calling my work “shitty”. I do find it extremely harsh but given the current circumstances, I cannot honestly say that I blame any member of the doom world website for being uptight.

Post Number IV

Post Number IV

The worst week of my online life has just come to its end as of this morning at 9PM.

As I’ve mentioned in my other posts, back in 2012 I got an offer from someone to do songs for maps involving a game called Doom 2. The first bout of the original project was fun, no rush; they had given me six months to work on it. More than enough time.

I should’ve known by then that things would only get worse after they unexpectedly cancelled the first project title “Projekt Xero” and announced a different one called Dimensions. But, in my try to be professional state, I took it with a grain of salt and inquired what they wanted this time.

I admit, I was intrigued by Dimensions as they only wanted 12 tracks instead of 36. What they didn’t tell me until halfway through is that I only had one month to work on it. One single solitary month.

That isn’t all, to make matters worse, the project leader got pushy, controlling and demanding. Not only did I have a month, he requested I leave the master tracks alone with only a spot of mixing here and there, no timing, nothing. Apparently he wanted a different “sound” and that left me less than enthusiastic about the finished product. Still, I finished it, I did my job.

A few weeks later, I find out that they’ve canceled this project too and gotten into some trouble. They wouldn’t tell me what so I had a friend who is technologically inclined to nose around a bit. Apparently the “people” I had been working for in these last three or four months is just one person. Not sure how I feel about it. I don’t care about the money though they, or he/she, did say I would get some kind of money. I know one thing, I’m done working with large mapping teams for games AND project leaders that are in a “group”.

I don’t need someone who draws blueprints for game level design acting like he knows anything about a synthesizer or telling me how to do my job. Tell me what kind of sound you want and I’ll do my best to deliver it. But don’t tell me when a track is finished, only I know that. In my humble opinion, Dimensions is nowhere near finished!

Still, I’ve already run into some luck. Apparently this guy had his “alter ego” post on another DOOM related forum and when the project got abandoned, a single person requested I do some tracks for another Doom-like game. The best part? I can take all the time I need. I don’t know who or what Little Temple Group was up to and what they thought they would accomplish by going mad but it wasn’t funny and I feel like any energy I put into a single one of the 27 tracks throughout the last three or so months have been a waste of my time.

So, thank you very much!

Post Number III

I can’t believe it’s been so long since I updated my blog!

Well, it’s 2013 now, the world didn’t end just like I knew it wouldn’t. I’m working on a new soundtrack for a DOOM II Project titled “Dimensions” and the ting I like this time around is, the people I’m working for don’t want 38 tracks. They asked for 10 or 12 and I decided to do 12.

It’s going well so far and it’s taking me in a more dark and mysterious direction. I think it helps that I’m finally understanding what a game soundtrack is all about. It isn’t like a movie soundtrack or a regular album, it’s got it’s own… soul. I can’t really explain it but people that collect and listen to game soundtracks know what I’m trying to say ( I hope ).

So, this is just a small update but, an updated nonetheless.

I plan to upload both my albums “Souls & Secrets” and “The Stage” somewhere so people can download them.

Abiageal O’Meara