He is the reason that I bought this game here on Steam. I played it as a kid on a friend's Apple IIe (iirc) and loved it. Maybe I also played it on my stepbrother's C64 if it was available there as well.

So I met Doug on EverQuest in the early 2000s. He was the one who wrote the original all-inclusive botting script for attended macroers. That's how I met him. I was playing a full group of 6 "by hand" and not running any scripts and he and I had become friends and he told me I'd triple my DPS if I started using his attended macro. I don't know that I outright tripled it, but I more than doubled my DPS, that's for sure. The current macros that people use for botting EQ1 are more or less based on his original ideas. Zbot was what he called it, since his main was Zabbaz. At least, that was his tank's name, so that's who he chatted as.

But his script for controlling characters using MacroQuest (well, MQ2) was just beyond brilliant. I got to know him a lot better, and he finally revealed that he was the one who originally created and coded Lode Runner. I told him about how much I used to love that game as a kid.

So when I was living in SoCal after we had both sort of quit EQ for other games and other things in our lives (I knew that he quit because after I cashed out of EQ and sold my first set of 6 characters, he asked me to sell all of his, since I had a PA.com sales account in good standing and he trusted me to sell his characters for him) he emailed me one day and said he was going to be in my neck of the woods. We met at a Denny's in Anaslime (sic) and he bought me lunch there. It was nice to sit and meet him face to face and talk about EQ, his macros, and game design / coding. He was a great guy and I really miss him.

Yes, was. I was getting to a point. I hadn't talked to him except maybe once since we met face to face, because we just drifted apart. I decided to look him up recently and found out that he had passed a few years back. This made me very sad, but I feel honored to have met him and even called him my friend.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for honoring his memory by playing his game!