Sit back and watch two decades of video game graphics flash before your eyes. YouTube user drloser333 has uploaded a video from French site NoFrag that unfurls the graphics of more than a dozen first-person shooters, from 1992's Wolfenstein 3 to 2011's Battlefield 3.

Did the FPS get better-looking? They have at least become way more realistic, But maybe you're more of a fan of older, more abstract styles?

Graphic evolution of First Person Shooters: 1992-2012 [YouTube, uploaded by drloser333; more details (in French) at NoFrag.com]

I didn't think that Matt Wagner played video games. The veteran creator best known for psychological power fantasy epic Grendel and the down-to-earth hero's-journey narrative of Mage never really mentioned games as a pastime in the interviews I read with him. But when I spoke to him last week, Wagner owned up to losing himself inside the worlds of Doom and Quake.

You can see a bit of the aggro machismo of those classic FPSes in his latest work, a series of graphic novels called The Tower Chronicles. Drawn by Simon Bisley and due out this month from Legendary Comics— the imprint from movie production firm Legendary Pictures—the stories focus on bounty hunter John Tower, who tracks down supernatural creatures. Bisley brings his usual jacked-up, shadow-laden hyperviolence to the proceedings and Wagner says he's having a great time crafting a story for an all-new character. I talked to Wagner about the beginnings of The Tower Chronicles, what's going on with volume III of Mage.

Kotaku: I read the preview of Tower Chronicles and it strikes me as very different from work you've done before. Maybe it's because Simon Bisley is doing the art , but it seems more violent, and a little bit more visceral.

Wagner: Well, I hate repeating myself. On one level, it certainly swims in the world that I like: fantasy mixed with horror. I always tell people I'm kind of a genre masher. This has got horror, fantasy and costumed adventuring, and I squish them those elements together into a cohesive whole. But yeah, it's very visceral. As we keep going, it gets more and more so, because I get better at writing for Simon and he gets better at translating my writing. This is, in the long run, a pretty epic story storyline. It will ultimately be three books, and each book is four 68-page editions.

Kotaku: So let's talk about the origins of the project. It's coming out from Legendary, who have been known mostly as financial backers of movies, right? They've helped produce the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight movies. I think they had involvement with Brian Singer Superman movie. Very closely tied to Warner. I know Bob Shreck [who did long tenures at Dark Horse and DC Comics] is editing over there. Is he the reason you're doing this project?

Wagner: Yes, absolutely. The project originated via Thomas Tull, the owner of Legendary Entertainment. The comic book division is trying to do really great comics and develop new properties that obviously they can do something with eventually. They realized from the get-go that if you don't have a great story to begin with, you're not going to go anywhere with it. None of us are looking at this as a movie or video game pitch. We're looking at it as a comic book.

But at the same time, Thomas had an idea for a character, and he said to Bob, Find me a writer who can handle this. And he specifically said, I want somebody that's not going to be a ‘yes man.' I want somebody that's going to come in and tell me when my ideas suck.

He threw some ideas on the table. I threw some ideas on the table. And as the ideas began to pile up...he originally wanted to do this as an original graphic novel, what in the biz we call OGN. And I said, Thom, this is too big. The story we have going on here, we could tell it short, but it wouldn't have the cool resonance. And this character has the potential for so many adventures, that I want to see more of his adventures. He's a supernatural bounty hunter. So let's see him confront a whole lot of monsters, not just a couple.

So that's when we decided to do it as a trilogy. And I will say the best part about the story is the face that all is not as it appears. The main character, John Tower, is a very mysterious character. In the first volume, specifically he's really aloof. He's generally aloof overall, but he's very aloof in the first volume. I would say you're not really sure you even like him that well. But as we continue to read, and as the adventures are exposed to us, more and more of the layers of his mystery peel back, and we get to see his actual humanity and what spurred him on.

Kotaku: You said Bob brought you in on the basis that you were going to be somebody that wasn't going to be a yes man, someone who was going to say which part of this sucked. So which part sucked?

Wagner: There wasn't too much stuff that sucked, but I did say, "Narratively that's not going to work." And there was another part where I said, "OK, well that's too close to elements of things that were in Garth Ennis's Preacher." Really, my big contribution was, "Well he has to have a reason for why he does all this stuff." The more we dug into it, the more we were able to come up with a very, very driving motivation.

Kotaku: Do you have the urge to be drawing this yourself? It seems like your writing output has far outstripped your artistic output lately.

Wagner: I will get back to drawing. Most likely the next thing I'll draw will be the third volume of Mage. You know it's funny, the last several years I've mainly been writing. That was not by design. But I've still been doing a lot of cover work. I did all the covers for 30 some-odd issues of Zorro and Green Hornet: Year One. So I'm still drawing, I'm just not drawing sequentially.

For Tower Chronicles, I can't imagine anybody but Simon drawing it. This will be the longest sustained narrative he has done in years. Maybe ever.

Kotaku: I want to touch on the idea of Legendary Comics as an entity. It's easy to be cynical about a movie production company all of a sudden deciding to make their own comics, for the sake of growing their own intellectual property. How would you answer some of this cynicism that swirls around an outfit like that?

Wagner: The only way we can answer that cynicism is by delivering really hot shit product. And I think we're doing that. I can't determine what the Internet buzz is going to be. Personally, I don't give a shit. My job is to deliver the best story I can. I know I'm delivering a good story when I'm having a great time doing it. And I'm having a great time doing this.

Kotaku: You mentioned the idea isn't necessarily that this is ultimately going to become a game or a movie. But are you interfacing much with video games nowadays? I generally think I can tell which comics creators are gamers or not, and I feel like you're in the not category.

Wagner: Well, not anymore. [Laughs] I have been a video game player and I find them perfectly engaging when I'm in that sort of mood. Generally, I just find these days I'm so busy telling my own narratives that I don't have much time to get involved in the narrative of a video game. It's certainly not like a novel or a movie. You get into a video game, it can take you weeks to get through the damn thing.

Kotaku: When you were at your heaviest consumption, what were you digging especially?

Wagner: I typically like the first person shooters like Doom and Quake. Those kinds of games are informing to some degree what I'm doing in Tower. Because he's confronting monsters. Certainly it's not the same sort of experience because the delivery system is different. Going from page to page is nowhere near progressing from level to level. But, still, I tend to like the first person shooters that have a point and a narrative. I think the last one I really liked was Doom 3.

Kotaku: Any other games that you remember fondly?

Wagner: A couple of the Star Wars Jedi games were pretty good in the narrative department as well. Yeah, the Jedi Knight games and Jedi Academy I thought were pretty good. They're a big adventure that come to a big final moment.

Kotaku: Would you ever want to see Grendel or Mage turned into a video game?

Wagner: I think Grendel lends itself more to a video game than Mage does. But unlike some of my contemporaries, I'm not really a purist. If somebody wants to adapt my stuff, I'm perfectly happy to see the pitch. If it intrigues me enough, I'm good to go

Kotaku: What would you say about John Tower in terms of comparing him to the other characters you've worked on? Because one thing I think people respond to in your work is that you manage to tackle this intersection of the personal and the iconic really, really well. In Grendel, it's this kind of demonic, psychological obsession that takes hold of people and, with Mage and lead character Kevin Matchstick, it's the idea of the reluctant hero and destiny kind of destroying all of his personal life.

Wagner: I'd say the same is true here. If you have the strength of mind, well I'm doing it again. It's what I said to Thomas in our first meeting, "We can have all this great shit, and Tower can confront all these great monsters, but we have to give a damn."

In every one of Clint Eastwood's movies there's always an element of humanity that runs through his aloof, tough-as-nails characters. In Tower, that gets exposed little by little as the story goes along. I'm a big one for not spilling your guts right away and there it is. I want to be teased all the way through a narrative until a really good payoff.

Kotaku: You mentioned the third volume of Mage. Dare I ask what's going on with that?

Wagner: Honestly, John Tower knocked it off schedule. I thought I would have been working on Mage at this point, and then Tower came up. I'm always looking for a challenge. I have never worked with somebody like I'm working with Thomas on this. It just seemed a good creative opportunity, a good professional opportunity. And Mage is always there for me.

Unlike anything else I ever worked on, I try not to think of that too much. I don't write anything down. I don't do any thumbnails. I don't do any script. I sit down with blank pages and I let the story take me where it's going to go. And that's not to say that I don't have notes and ideas about what I'd like to do. But it's very much kind of a Zen journey for me, unlike everything else I do where it's more premeditated, it's more structured. Mage is very much an experience of discovery. So I know when I get there it's gonna be just as fresh it's always been for me.

Kotaku: Do you feel like you've said everything you've had to say with Grendel as well?

Wagner: We'll get back to Grendel. Right now, what's happening with Grendel is we're publishing a collection at Dark Horse. They're big, fat omnibus editions. So, for the first time, the entire saga is collected in chronological order. Back in the ‘80s when I was first doing Grendel and recreating the character all the time, we were always changing the format a lot. That seemed like a strength at the time, but now that the market is so saturated, that's not a strength, it's a weakness.

People look at it and they figure, "Oh, this is too much shit scattered all over the place. I don't know where to start." So now we're offering it up in again, a chronological format that is very regularized. That's going to take two years of publication for all of that to come out.

Kotaku: In terms of digital stuff, are you going to be moving towards that format? What are your thoughts on digital comics and the way that's changed the landscape?

Wagner: It's just technology. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other. It's still just visual storytelling. I still draw in pens and inks. Whether it's published in an iPad or published in a book doesn't really matter to me at all.

Paul Steed, an artist whose video game career spanned design, publishing and even console development, died unexpectedly, according to The Jace Hall Show. Steed was perhaps best known for work on Wing Commander and Quake and also for controversies arising in his time ad id Software.

Steed was most recently the executive creative director of Exigent, a 3D art company he founded. Prior to that, he had worked for publishers such as Atari and Electronic Arts, with Microsoft on the Xbox 360, and at id. He got his start at Origin Systems as an illustrator for the Wing Commander series and had credits on other games such as Privateer and Strike Commander.

At id, he worked on Quake and Quake II. According to John Carmack, id's co-founder, in 2000 Steed was fired (over Carmack's objection) in retaliation for his insistence on working on what would become Doom 3, a project then opposed by two of the firm's co-owners. Steed also was notorious for releasing the "Crackwhore" player skin for Quake II, a model apparently intended as a tribute to a clan by that name but controversial for its name and appearance. Steed also was noteworthy for giving the keynote speech of Game Developers Conference 2008.

Jace Hall called Steed "a close friend" and "simply one of the first cutting edge low-poly 3D modelers to ever exist in the industry." The circumstances of Steed's passing are unknown. Steed is survived by his wife and children.

Goodbye Paul Steed [Wing Commander Combat Information Center]

Quake, Video Game Industry Legend Paul Steed has Passed Away [The Jace Hall Show]

Image via Wing Commander Combat Information Center

Say the word "railgun" around a PC gamer and they'll instantly start telling you stories about the Quake series, and how it's such an awesome weapon in a make-believe future universe.

They're right on the former, but on the latter, not so much, because railguns are real, and the US Navy has one. Here it is undergoing testing.

The project, which is being overseen by the Office of Naval Research, has been running for a few years now (indeed, experimental railguns have existed as crude prototypes for decades), but this is the first time it's been filmed looking like an actual gun.

Railguns don't work like normal firearms or cannons; they use rails and electricity to propel projectiles at speeds vastly greater than those possible with conventional explosive technology (modern weapons still use the centuries-old principle of an explosion to propel rounds).

Which is why the Naval Officer in the video loads not a shell but just a simple piece of metal into the weapon.

It's amazing footage. Next stop, handheld versions.

Kim Dotcom, the imprisoned mastermind behind busted file-sharing site Megaupload and, bizarrely, also the top-scoring killer on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, wasn't always a showboating millionaire. He also ran a competitive video game league in the late-90s. And was by all accounts a rather sore loser.

How sore? Like, banning from his league everyone who beat him at a game of first-person shooter Quake 2. That kind of sore loser.

After our original report on Dotcom went up over the weekend, we heard from old-time Quake 2 players who had encountered the billionaire when he was known online as "Kimble". Using that handle, Dotcom - formerly Kim Schmitz - had become a relatively well-known personality among online PC gamers at the time, in part because he ran a Quake league called Liga.net.

In September 1998, PlanetQuake reported that Kimble, after losing a game against Immortal (at the time one of the world's top players), became so upset he banned his opponent from the league, accusing him of using bots, a form of automated cheating. There are then reports from gamers complaining about Immortal's banning were kicked to the curb right alongside him.

Those booted from Dotcom's Liga.net of course claimed it was Kimble himself that had been cheating, because the other thing he was well-known for, regardless of whether it was true or not, was being a high-profile and notorious users of bots.

Going into more detail was this commenter in the original Modern Warfare 3 story from the weekend:

Back in the days of Quake 2 and the Barrysworld free server network, Dotcom used to troll the Rocket Arena 2 duel arenas as 'www.kimble.org' with an aimbot on his 6ms T1 line, raging people to the point that the entire server would clear, rather than put up with him. Then one day he was faced down and beaten by a girl-gamer on a shitty BT ISDN line - one on one, rail only. He raged so hard that he then dc'ed, looked up the player's name up on Quake.net irc and DDoSed the b0rk.co.uk irc bouncer that she used offline. Having realised he'd accomplished nothing, he then proceeded to DDoS the entire Barrysworld server array for a week, out of petty vengeance for being made to look like a twat. He was a cheating shit now, so I'd very surprised if that #1 position is legit now, either. Take a browse through the PlanetQuake archives if you wanna see the other shit he pulled, like banning the people that beat him in the leagues he admined for liga.net. 100% twat material.

Then there's this gem from a forum thread where a bunch of old Quake 2 players are reminiscing:

I remember him. I played him once on barrysworld (Yeh I'm that old :<). Just about the most blatant cheater you'd ever play. .

I got so pissed off at one point that I focused all my attention and managed to kill him once. Which felt pretty good.

His actual nick was www.kimble.org. Which was some sort of huge ego website of him traveling around the world in luxury cars/jets etc squandering money he scammed of some idiots during the dot.com boom.

Needless to say he was arrested for fraud some time later.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that the personality in game isn't all that different outside the game.

While that "huge ego website" is long gone, if you're curious, it featured pictures like this.

A final note: with this stuff taking place over a decade ago, and Dotcom currently cooling in a cell, we can't get his side of the story.

Kim Dotcom, the imprisoned mastermind behind busted file-sharing site Megaupload and, bizarrely, also the top-scoring killer on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, wasn't always a showboating millionaire. He also ran a competitive video game league in the late-90s. And was by all accounts a rather sore loser.

How sore? Like, banning from his league everyone who beat him at a game of first-person shooter Quake 2. That kind of sore loser.

After our original report on Dotcom went up over the weekend, we heard from old-time Quake 2 players who had encountered the billionaire when he was known online as "Kimble". Using that handle, Dotcom - formerly Kim Schmitz - had become a relatively well-known personality among online PC gamers at the time, in part because he ran a Quake league called Liga.net.

In September 1998, PlanetQuake reported that Kimble, after losing a game against Immortal (at the time one of the world's top players), became so upset he banned his opponent from the league, accusing him of using bots, a form of automated cheating. There are then reports from gamers complaining about Immortal's banning were kicked to the curb right alongside him.

Those booted from Dotcom's Liga.net of course claimed it was Kimble himself that had been cheating, because the other thing he was well-known for, regardless of whether it was true or not, was being a high-profile and notorious users of bots.

Going into more detail was this commenter in the original Modern Warfare 3 story from the weekend:

Back in the days of Quake 2 and the Barrysworld free server network, Dotcom used to troll the Rocket Arena 2 duel arenas as 'www.kimble.org' with an aimbot on his 6ms T1 line, raging people to the point that the entire server would clear, rather than put up with him. Then one day he was faced down and beaten by a girl-gamer on a shitty BT ISDN line - one on one, rail only. He raged so hard that he then dc'ed, looked up the player's name up on Quake.net irc and DDoSed the b0rk.co.uk irc bouncer that she used offline. Having realised he'd accomplished nothing, he then proceeded to DDoS the entire Barrysworld server array for a week, out of petty vengeance for being made to look like a twat. He was a cheating shit now, so I'd very surprised if that #1 position is legit now, either. Take a browse through the PlanetQuake archives if you wanna see the other shit he pulled, like banning the people that beat him in the leagues he admined for liga.net. 100% twat material.

Then there's this gem from a forum thread where a bunch of old Quake 2 players are reminiscing:

I remember him. I played him once on barrysworld (Yeh I'm that old :<). Just about the most blatant cheater you'd ever play. .

I got so pissed off at one point that I focused all my attention and managed to kill him once. Which felt pretty good.

His actual nick was www.kimble.org. Which was some sort of huge ego website of him traveling around the world in luxury cars/jets etc squandering money he scammed of some idiots during the dot.com boom.

Needless to say he was arrested for fraud some time later.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that the personality in game isn't all that different outside the game.

While that "huge ego website" is long gone, if you're curious, it featured pictures like this.

A final note: with this stuff taking place over a decade ago, and Dotcom currently cooling in a cell, we can't get his side of the story. And we haven't heard of him cheating to get his world's best Modern Warfare 3 ranking, so he must have some skills.

Quake mod Nexuiz (pronounced "nexus") is so heavily modified that it's practically it's own game. It has been for years, since 2005, with a modified Quake Engine, completely overhauled weapons, but the same fast-paced gameplay. Someone at THQ must have been fond of the PC mod, because not only is it making a big comeback, it's coming back stacked.

Nexuiz, the new one that is, is a multiplayer-only XBLA title that looks and feels completely different from the original. It's not quite as fast, due mostly to the slower speed of its CryEngine 3 tech (more delicious screenshots here), but several key improvements have been made to overhaul the previously simplistic gameplay and give it more life.

The major change is mutators. The new Nexuiz includes exactly 100 mutators such as jetpacks, triple-armor, double ammo-pickups, instakills, pogo sticks (where all players bounce repeatedly), inverted controls, etc. There are three basic types of mutators: Individual, team, and game-wide. Individual mutators may be special weapons not available on pickup or increased abilities. Team mutators can either boost the entire team with larger ammo drops or increased speed, or can cripple the other team, say, by inverting the controls.

All of Nexuiz's nine included levels have also been either completely remade or are brand new. I played two, Tension and Refinery, and the gameplay varied wildly between them. Tension is a larger, more angular map with skinny hallways and narrow paths while Refinery is a giant room that is tall yet circular; it's essentially one big space with a few closed-off halls.

Nexuiz is a 6-8 player game only, so if you have four players or want a bigger party, the game won't support it. Individuals can play alone with bots, but online play does not support using bots. The smaller size is conducive to fast-paced gaming, though even six players feels like too few. On Refinery I played a six-player game, and because of the size of the map it was sometimes more than a minute before I found someone to shoot.

What's most noticeable about gameplay isn't how it feels like Quake, but rather getting into that hardcore zen that pro-gamers talk about when they make those famous comebacks. Nexuiz gives all players the opportunity to level the playing field even if all hope appears lost—all it takes is a good mutator and a steady trigger finger. So many recent multiplayer games try to keep gameplay as even as possible, with everyone having access to roughly the same tools and weapons. Nexiuz works on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you get to the mutator respawn first, you get the bonus.

Stat hounds can rejoice, because Nexuiz features around 180 different stats. They include everything from kill/death ratios to pogo jumps per match. Scrolling through the long list in the postgame lobby is a bit ludicrous, and says a lot about the games statistical depth.

Microsoft hasn't officially announced Nexiuz's price. The game is set to release sometime during the Xbox Live House Party, which occurs from February 15 to March 14.

When he isn't writing about games, James Pikover plays with new cellphones and uses them as theft deterrent. You can follow him on twitter at @jamezrp.

Just imagine Quake with Achievements, hand-holding and other elements of modern games. Watch this video made by YouTube user kmoosmann and prepare to sigh.

If Quake was done today [YouTube, via Twitter]

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Among amateur rocket-launching circles, there's a bounty called "The Carmack Prize". It's named for id boss, Doom co-creator and budding rocket scientist John Carmack, and will reward anyone who can get a home-made rocket 100,000 feet into space and capture some GPS data from it.

The first people to claim the prize will pick up $10,000 from Carmack. Nobody has managed the feat yet, but late last month a team got awful close.

On September 30, Derek Deville made a rocket, named it Qu8k (pronounced "Quake", and using the classic id shooter's logo), stuck a camera and some GPS gear to it and shot it off a launch pad in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

Sadly, he wasn't able to get a GPS reading from the rocket, but as you'll see from the footage above, he at least got the 100,000 feet part under his belt. While the beginning of the clip focuses on Qu8k's launch, eventually you'll get to some amazing scenes from a camera attached to the rocket's casing, which shows...well, what the Earth looks like to a home-made rocket that's just been shot 121,000 feet into space.

If you're wondering why Carmack has his name attached to the prize, he's a budding rocketeer himself, with one of the leading entries in a NASA competition to build a home-made lunar lander.

Glorious 121,000′ Amateur Rocket Flight [MAKE]

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There are plenty of Doom coffee mugs laying around in the world of Rage. But that's not the little bit of Doom I'm talking about, I'm talking about some retro gameplay.

We've shown you how you can find Wolfenstein in Rage and how you can find Quake in the game, this tutorial on how to find the Doom Easter egg completes id's trifecta.

I love this sorta thing.

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