You Have Died of Dysentery

There's a great history of video game designers taunting their players. The above subject line is from a mixed text/graphics video game called The Oregon Trail. My earliest memories of video game taunts go back to the arcades of the 1980s. The games Berserk and Sinistar immediately come to mind. In an arcade setting, you can see the psychology at work = pump more quarters into the machine!

When playing deathmatch Doom online with ZDaemon in the early 2000s, there were all kinds of taunts a player would hear upon their death or "frag". I'm not sure of the origin of all of them and suspected that many were lifted from other FPS online games like Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. Recently, I decided to look this up and found that in Quake, they were called either kill insults or death insults. There were some in particular which were quite memorable to me like a female voice saying, "Next time, don't get up." as well as several crazy taunts in Ultimate Simpson's Doom. I feel that, from my past playing experience, death taunts are a very important part of making wads for Doom.

Pretty early on in my Doom mapping career, I looked up where these lumps were kept in Doom. There are two three of them which deal with player death; DSPLDETH, DSPLIEHI and DSSLOP, the latter one is used when you really get your ass kicked. I usually have some sample from a movie which I plug into these entries in a wad file. My most recent work, at the time of this writing, is Mo'Tanky Enemeesh. I really like playing this map as I've made it a map where I don't require other players to join my server to have fun as I've supplied plenty of Doom enemy monsters to kick my ass. But the one thing I found playing this is that with only two available death taunts, I've grown tired of the two taunts I'd chosen. Other than that, the map still brings me great joy. See, in this particular wad file, I chose a pair of samples from A Fish Called Wanda and both of them are Jamie Lee Curtis' character, Wanda.

Audacity is your friend...

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to have more sounds? Well, after a bit of research, I found there is through the customization of one's SNDINFO lump. In my work-in-progress In Imaginate, my latest map, this lump reads like so:

  $random pl_death
  {
    player/death1 player/death2 player/death3
    player/death4 player/death5 player/death6
    player/death7 player/death8 player/death9
    player/death10 player/death11 player/death12
    player/death13 player/death14 player/death15
    player/death16 player/death17 player/death18
    player/death19 player/death20 player/death21  
    player/death22  
  }

  player/death1 answerto
  player/death2 betwanna
  player/death3 breakcon
  player/death4 burnanex
  player/death5 doilook 
  player/death6 dointher
  player/death7 dspldeth
  player/death8 frshvict
  player/death9 hardly
  player/death10 insult
  player/death11 justgone 
  player/death12 lafwucan 
  player/death13 lvmealon 
  player/death14 mabfedup 
  player/death15 makmelaf
  player/death16 nexttime
  player/death17 pussyout
  player/death18 shuttle 
  player/death19 standup 
  player/death20 themoney 
  player/death21 yormothr 
  player/death22 yourlife

  $playeralias player male *death pl_death 

Hopefully, with such a weapon at my disposal, I'll not get bored with the death taunts in my future works as you can see above, there are now 22 of them for an eleven-fold increase in taunts. My thanks to Jeff Minter of Llamasoft for reminding me "your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries!"