John Van Essen

Revision as of 05:28, 13 February 2021 by Xymph (talk | contribs) (use https gamers.org)


Revision as of 05:28, 13 February 2021 by Xymph (talk | contribs) (use https gamers.org)


John wearing his Doom II T-shirt.

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 rec.games.computer.doom 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.

External links