Dave Taylor, co-author of the popular 3D-shooter games Doom and Quake, died in a McClelland Hall computer lab sometime around 9 p.m. Wednesday night.
A few minutes later, he died again.
"I killed him a lot," said Wharton senior Patrick Ferreri-Hanberr, who led the pack in a series of multiplayer Doom games, in which Taylor took part.
Around 20 people showed up to try to best Taylor at the game he helped design one night before he discussed his experiences in the computer gaming industry in Levine Hall.
"It's strange," Taylor said of playing his own game, comparing the experience to that of eating food that you've cooked yourself. "It doesn't taste quite the same as if somebody else had made it, because you saw it all in ingredients form and you sort of tasted some of the ingredients and you're overly critical of it."
"You're really nervous about everybody else eating it and what they're thinking," he added, joking that writing a computer game is "just a much longer meal to prepare."
If playing Doom was strange for Taylor, it was also an experience for the Penn students that showed up.
"It's just the idea that you're playing with the guy that actually wrote the game," Engineering sophomore Nikhil Haldar Sinha said.
Back on campus one day later, Taylor left behind the knitted Doom sweater he wore to the gaming party, instead opting for a white T-shirt with the Doom logo on the front and the words "Wrote it" on the back.
Before an audience of about 100 in Levine Hall, Taylor shared stories from his days of working for id Software.
His stint at the company started right after he graduated from the University of Texas.
At the time, he was working for a magazine called Game Bytes, reviewing computer games.
Eventually, Taylor said he turned the magazine job into "an excuse to interview the game developers who I worship."
One of those interviews, with the development team of id Software, ended up landing him a job on the Doom project.
He recalled 72-hour periods without sleep while writing code for Doom.
By the time the game shipped, Taylor had coded the chat system, status bar, auto map and cheat codes, among other things.
Of course, the job was not all about staring at computer screens and furiously writing code.
He shared an incident when developer "John Romero was locked in his office," and lead programmer John Carmack took "this battleaxe off his wall and [tore] the doorknob off."
Dancing across the stage, Taylor reached up to grab an imaginary weapon out of thin air; lunging forward with it, arms outstretched, he re-enacted the incident to the great amusement of the audience.
In addition to talking about his time at id Software, Taylor also had some tips for aspiring game designers in the crowd.
Taylor encouraged students to start small, trying first to write a simple game in no longer than a week.
"If [that game] is tic tac toe, make it tic tac toe," he said, explaining that starting with a large project can lead to frustration.
Many enjoyed Taylor's talk, having grown up playing the games he wrote.
"He was very entertaining," College and Engineering senior Scott Graham said.
School of Design staffer Nathan Schreiber added that "it was a very practical talk, which is kind of unusual."
Both the talk and the game session were sponsored by the Dining Philosophers, the Science and Technology Wing, Digital Media Design and the Special Interest Group in Computer Graphics of the Association of Computing Machinery.
