BahdKo's description of: Zokum
 

 
Background:

Zokum has been around the Doom scene a while, as this EFnet #doom2 log segment would indicate:
Session Start: Fri Jun 27 23:01:01 1997
*** TF: Talking in #doom2
<Zokum> www.robin.no/~hauge/domm2.htm go get the wad now, the brv dm 4 level
*** Quits: }Taurus9{ (changing servers)
<Zokum> go get it now
...
<Zokum> gotta go
*** Parts: Zokum (hauge@Stavanger51.robin.no)
Zokum currently lives in a small town a ways north of Trondheim, Norway, named Narvik, and is going to school up there. He is originally from a southern norwegian town named Tau. His name IRL is Kim Roar Foldøy Hauge, and he has been involved in a number of doom projects throughout the years, including wad authoring, texture mapping, and technical Doom stuff I'm too ignorant to describe well. He started messing with Doom pretty much the day it came out (1994), and was playing Wolfenstien before that. He also founded one of the first doom clans by date, named Brotherhood of Vengeance (BrV).

Stylistic information:

I hung out with Zokum at Andy's December, 2000 netparty in Stavanger, Norway for about a week. I seem to remember him liking Doom2 Map11. I'm sure he likes more maps than that, but we weren't playing many wads at this LAN.

Other Information:

The pictures that are circulating around the internet where he is making strange, dull facial expressions (such as the one at the top of this profile, and the one here) are as posed and artificial as a picture can possibly get. In reality, Zokum is alert, talkative, and intelligent. It is a hilarious act when he takes off his glasses and suddenly makes the braindead facial expressions shown in these pictures.

Zokum's native language is Norwegian, but he speaks English well too. He seemed displeased when I told him that his English comes off as having a mild British accent, but claims to have only been perplexed, since his other English speaking friends claim that his accent sounds American. I would have to agree that compared to actual british people, he does sound American.

At the netparty, Zokum showed me this monstrous map he was working on at the time. It was very nice looking, every single thing looked good, it had neat ways of introducing the monsters into the player's face - - but also it was unbelievably HUGE. It was huge compared with every single map I have ever seen in any wad or megawad anywhere. It seemed like all of the Doom2 maps could have fit into this map, 2 dimensionally. It was mind boggling. It was intended as one of the last maps of Hell Revealed 2, and what a twisted and evil map it was, especially to be planned for such a position in a generally hard megawad. Not to mention, the ability to do savegames with Doom2.exe had long been surpassed by this map's monster and item count.

There was a memorable scene with Zokum toward the end of the Stavanger netparty. 4 of us decided to play a game on Dynamik.wad, a wad with a set of very uncommon textures (download it and see for yourself, if you want to know). Zokum had not seen the wad before, and I knew that he was into wads and textures heavily, so before the game I asked him, "Do you want to look at these textures before we start?" He said no, and seemed uninterested. Then I continued with something like "You haven't seen textures like this before, you really might want to look first. It's crazy". He still wasn't interested, and just wanted to start the game; he said afterward that it was because he felt that seeing the textures first wouldn't be as fun. So, we started the game. He looked at the textures for a few seconds, then went out of his chair, rolling around on the floor, laughing. He stayed that way for a short bit, then got up to try to continue playing. We were recording at the time, and in the demo you can see a brief dead period in the beginning for the Red player. That was him, literally AFK during the game. I should put the demo up sometime.

Zokum is also into coding IRC bots.