FrikaC: What is your name?

Singe: Arthur, king of the Britons.

FrikaC: What is your quest?

Singe: To seek the Holy grail.

FrikaC: What is the average air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Singe: African or European?

FrikaC: What started you modding Quake?

Singe: Well I was a huge Doom fan back in high school and made a bunch of maps for it. I planned to map for Quake when it came out, but discovered OMG that I could change the entire game logic thanks to Quake-C. So I forgot about mapping for the most part and messed around with the code.

FrikaC: Out of all the mods you've done, which one was your favorite?

Singe: Artifact Quake (aka Rune Quake) has to be my favorite. It's the one that's lasted the longest and I'm surprised to find people have ported it to new engines in various forms. Coming in at a close second is Slide, since somehow it became rather popular at the time.

FrikaC: Your mod Artifact Quake (more commonly known as RuneQuake) remains wildly popular on the internet to this day. Why do you think it has endured so well?

Singe: I think this is because it keeps in the spirit of un-modded deathmatch, and some people will always like vanilla deathmatch in all new FPS games. It doesn't turn deathmatch sessions into something entirely different like most mods do these days. It's still merely regular deathmatch with some powers added. Is Superheroes still played? This always struck me as a similar kind of mod (Not derivative of course. It existed already when I was playtesting the very first Artifact Quake version). The main difference between Artifact and Superheroes is that with the latter you gotta go and choose what powers you want, and this isn't as appealing to newbs as just running around as if it were normal deathmatch and accidentally aquiring some sort of rune power.

Though to be perfectly honest, I'm really quite astonished runequake has lasted as long as it has. People still play it today! This strikes me as both flattering and bizarre. :)

FrikaC: What is your favorite rune from Artifact Quake and why?

Singe: Oh man, talk about impossible questions. The original four from CTF are of course the workhorses of all runes. It's hard to improve on them and I loved them all. Without them I'd never have made Artifact Quake in the first place.

I had no frag-skills back then so I really liked the camo rune. Death orb always pleased me too. I loved nearly all the runes. Honestly it's easier for me to tell you the runes I hated. :) Phasing rune never worked reliably so I didn't care for it. Switch was cool but would do you bad as often as it did you good if you weren't careful. Action movie ammo was there out of necessity but it never interested me much to use. I liked how firewalker looked but it wasn't terribly useful and of course before QuakeWorld it was so terribly laggy. Its laggy sister, the spiky death cloud, is far better.

I've been away from the scene a while so I don't know much about the 'newer' runes. But among what I've seen, zen monk is BRILLIANT. Seriously, it's like that tanuki suit from super mario 3. I'm jealous I didn't think of it. :>

FrikaC: Your mod Slide is also considered a classic. How did you come up with the idea for this rather unique mod?

Singe: I'm happy you asked this because it's quite a silly story. It's my only mod I didn't INTEND to make. Slide is pretty much based entirely on a single engine feature. To save on computing time in Quake, ID decided to make a "Player is touching the ground" flag, so the engine only computes phsyical motion of players when they jump off a cliff or something and are in the air. Some day long ago I was working on my QTank mod (which never caught on much ;>) and I messed around with the "player is touching ground" flag, forcing it to be off no matter what. I serendipitously discovered that forcing this flag to be off on players makes them frictionless! There was a ramp in my QTank test map, and I slid down it while I was forcing the "on ground" flag to stay off. It was useless for the QTank mod itself, but it made me think "Hey, I could make some sort of mod where you can slide down diagonal surfaces. Maybe people can race each other or something." And of course, from that, Slide was born.

FrikaC: Both Slide and ArtifactQuake were covered by international magazines (and you have scans of them on your site to prove it), what was that like to know you got international recognition for your work?

Singe: Ecstatic. Better than sex. :>

FrikaC: What's next for you?

Singe: Oh god, hell if I know. I'd like to get a job somewhere in the gaming industry, but it's proven hard so far. This past year I've gotten back into mapping fortunately. I remade all my old Doom 2 maps in HL2DM. But mapping isn't terribly impressive if you're looking for a programming job. I guess I need to port Artifact/Rune Quake into HL2DM. Maybe I can get a job that way. :>

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