Loxbourne posted:

Poor, poor Tom Hall. The guy is an excellent comedy writer with some decent game design ideas, but he has an amazing knack for hitching himself to stars just before those stars burn out or go supernova.

He was a key man in the early days of ID Software but got thrown out by his business partners because he kept pushing to give Doom more story elements. Masters of Doom outright states the famous hanging Commander Keens in Doom 2 were a parting gently caress you to the guy because the ID in-house artist wanted to revel in being able to draw blood and gore.

He injected his trademark brand of humour into Duke Nukem 3D (and DNF later showed us what the game would have been like without it, holy crap). Then he worked on the first version of Prey while that got stuck in development hell.

So Romero drags him (somehow, given his past firing) into Ion Storm and he's caught up in that clusterfuck. The leaked Ion internal emails pretty much paint him as a struggling yes-man caught between a wannabe rock god and a predatory con artist. But he finally got given the resources to make the game he wanted.

And at least he got Anachronox out - or rather, a third of the intended game. After it was gutted by having most of the devs transferred off the project to get Daikatana finished.

He tried and failed a few Kickstarter retro projects, and was last seen making Facebook games. A tragic figure who probably had some serious masterwork in him if he hadn't kept signing on with delusional arseholes and letting them handle "the biz stuff".