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?