I don't even remember exactly. John Hendrikx was the driving force behind everything, he wrote the original TextDemos. That was before the day and age of the World Wide Web, and I only had email access through my local BBS. Public announcements were done through READMEs in distributed archives. I think John was looking for people to participate in the TextDemo's README, and I joined him, as did the others. John was the hub for the project.
I would place that some time around 1994.
He did virtually all of the game programming - I wasn't much into 3D yet back then. I did the level editor, and probably small things here and there.
I also started composing a title MOD for the game, but that was rejected in favor of a much better one by someone who actually knows how to make music.
That happened around the time when I discovered that assembly isn't always the best tool, so I had just switched to C.
It was a pretty specialized and not particularly user-friendly tool, so that wouldn't have been a smart choice.
We never got that far - the game was just the basic 3D world, for the most part, and we didn't have complex levels yet that would have required more advanced spatial partitioning, or even lots of characters in the world.
It just fell apart. We were all young kids back then. In 1995, I had finished high school and went on to my mandatory military service. John wanted to go to school, I believe. At some point, we lost contact and haven't really heard from each other until 15 years later when we were contacted about Shade, and decided to look up each other, which revealed a funny coincidence - back then, I lived in Germany, and Zak was in the state of New York. Now we both live in the same city in California - just a few miles apart.
Maybe 10% - it really didn't go far beyond TextDemo57. We spent most of the time just settings things up, like the level editor.
Somewhat of a ego shooter in a dungeon.
No.
Yes - I got into the games industry in 1997 and have been making games ever since, although I've spent a considerable amount of time working on projects that got cancelled. More famous shipped games include "Mission: Impossible" for PS1 (1999) and "Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows" for PS2 and Xbox (2005). I'm currently at Rockstar San Diego, working on "Red Dead Redemption" for PS3 and Xbox 360, out in May 2010.