John Van Essen

John Van Essen is an organizer, programmer, and system administrator who was an early anchor of the Doom community from its inception in 1993 up to 1999.

Community activities
John organized the process to get the Usenet hierarchy of newsgroups created, and was the leader of the RGCD Support Team. He authored the documents spelling out policies and conventions governing the groups' usage, organized their periodic informational postings (PIPs), and performed other administrative duties as well as user support.

He continued the list of DOOM FTP and WWW Sites from Mike Newton in April 1994 and maintained it until April 1999, and also documented how to obtain DOOM-related Downloads via E-mail in an age when FTP and WWW access was not yet common.

John was a programmer and system administrator on gamers.org. In December 1996 he launched one of the first finger (.plan) to WWW gateways, called FingerGate. He also created the first graphical representation of the idgames archive in December 1995.

Other notable activities
John was a co-founder and the lead programmer of the now defunct 3dgamers.com site which, amongst other titles, had significant coverage of Doom- and Quake-engine games.