Whatever Happened... 

... to DoomEd? Well, here's the whole soap opera story:

In 1993, I had just turned 30. I had a relatively successful business, a house, a nice car, and things were going pretty good. When Doom came out, I was hooked - just like millions of others. Rather than simply playing the game, however, I wanted to be able to make my own maps. I spent several weeks developing version 1.0 of DoomEd in Professional Basic, which didn't do a whole lot. I realized that I would have to learn C to do this right, and began version 2 as my learning tool.

By the time March 1994 rolled around, I had a reasonably useful Doom editor, but was unable to figure out what the BSP-tree things were all about. After cruising around the net, I found a program called "DEU", which had the BSP builder stuff. I read in the source that I was allowed to use any portions that I wanted, so I modified the BSP builder to work with DoomEd. Finally, for the first time, I could actually create maps from scratch and play them. Certain individuals who fancied themselves the "software police" claimed that I had stolen and copied from DEU, which is just not the case. If you've ever used both, you know that they aren't similar in any way, and the DEU source did plainly state that I was allowed to use that portion for whatever I wanted to.

DoomEd was an immediate success. There were tens of thousands of downloads, and I began to get amazing amounts of e-mail and paper mail, and even phone calls. DoomEd was published on the cover disk of a few gaming magazines and received favorable reviews (PC-Gamer, Vol 1 No 5 October 94, page 87). All told, almost 1000 people registered their copy. I actually got to the point where it was difficult to package up all the copies. I sent out one mailing with a current version.

In summer of 1994, I was contacted by three different companies that were interested in distributing DoomEd commercially. I really needed some help getting the shareware copies out, and this seemed to be the best way. Two of these companies were US based, and still in business. The third was here in Calgary, and I made the mistake of signing a contract with them. This contract gave them exclusive rights to market and distribute DoomEd.

Unfortunately, they didn't. They did absolutely nothing. I never received a single cent from them, they never did any marketing, never contacted anyone about it, they simply did nothing. The whole time that they were doing nothing, they were telling me all these wonderful stories about how the marketing and manufacturing were proceeding. Later on, when I went to sue them, I discovered that they already had tens of thousands of dollars in judgments against them, and there was absolutely no way I could get anything out of the deal. Meanwhile, I had spent the shareware money received on things like bills, food, etc.

As a result of having no income for all of this time, I lost my house. I lost my nice car (although I got my car back in late 97). I got a serious amount of hate mail (my favorite is from a town in Europe, where apparently my name is used as a swear word now), and was "investigated" by the US Postal Service 5 times for "mail fraud" (Since I live in Canada, this is just stupid.) There are still people who insist that I "return" their money, and that simply is NOT going to happen... there IS no money.

I want nothing more to do with DoomEd, or Doom. Now that id has released the source for Doom, I have poked through it to see if there was any way that having it could have helped produce a better editor, but the whole thing has left a very bitter taste.

If you want to learn anything from my mistakes (and please do!), NEVER choose a distribution company based on where they are. Choose them based on what they have done. NEVER sign any distribution contract that doesn't pay money up front. If they won't pay up front, they don't have the money to do the distribution either. NEVER have your family lawyer go through a contract, find a contract specialist to do this task. ALWAYS leave an "out"... if the distributor is doing nothing, make sure you have the legal ability to go to another distributor.

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*** NEW INFORMATION *** (May 2003)

The following article was in the Calgary Sun, May 3, 2003. It describes the fate of the individual who refused to distribute DoomEd (Bill Dever) in spite of the fact that I had a signed contract with him:

Tax fraud results in jail time

By MICHAEL WOOD
Calgary Sun

Diagnoses of narcissism and bipolar disorder didn't play leading roles in a movie industry player's decision to purposefully avoid paying nearly $600,000 in taxes, a Calgary judge ruled yesterday.

Former Calgarian William John Alexander Dever Jr., who now lives in Indiana, clutched the hand of a teary, unidentified woman and gave her an impassioned kiss before a court officer whisked the 41-year-old away to begin a 20-month sentence for tax evasion.

Dever Jr. was also ordered to undergo psychotherapy for his narcissism, or self-absorption, and pay $595,146 in fines.

That's the equivalent of what he attempted to cheat out of Canada Customs and Revenue Agency between 1993 and 1996 on top of the still-owed taxes.

Dever, director of several marketing and entertainment companies, pleaded guilty March 7, to five counts of tax evasion following a customs investigation which uncovered a trail of shady activity.

'Planned deceit'

Judge Bob Davie said the agreed-upon facts were "serious.

"They demonstrate a carefully planned and executed scheme of deception," he said.

According to the report, "Dever used his experience and knowledge of films and limited partnership tax shelters to participate in, or continually create structures whereby he could generate monies to fund his ventures, debts and personal expenses."

Two companies, Market Square Entertainment Inc., which produced feature film, television and video productions, and Entertainment Equity Funding Corp. prepared 434 fictitious invoices to bill themselves for films which cost millions less than reported.

Dever submitted six stolen or plagiarized U.S. films to Heritage Canada claiming they were Canadian to receive tax benefits.

An investigation found names of people had been changed in the movie credits to falsely show that Canadians worked on the film.

Dever also stated the cost of the films to be $5 million, in fact they were less than $130,000.

Not convinced

Defence lawyer Stephen Jenuth asked Judge Davie to consider in sentencing the recent assessments by doctors.

Davie said he wasn't convinced Dever was bipolar, but did say he clearly was narcissistic, "characterized by a pattern of grandiosity."

Davie rejected the Crown's request for at least two years in jail, noting Dever had no prior record, and saved the courts an estimated two months in trial costs by pleading guilty.