American McGee shares a Microsoft horror story:
A few days ago Windows XP on my primary work computer decided that it wasn’t a legal copy. Strange since the copy running on there was pre-installed at the time that the machine was built by Alienware. There used to be a Windows serial number on the back of the machine, but the sticker has since fallen off. What’s worse, as soon as I started receiving the dreaded, “You may be a victim of software piracy…” notices, I also started noticing increased system instability. All of this culminated in what I can only assume was some form of malware infection, a hardware crash (related to my soundcard), and a pretty complete system failure.
His name would make this a perfect Simply American post, heh. Other than that though, you may wonder who cares about American McGee. The trick is that he’s a fairly important guy in the history of computer games:
Look toward the bottom of this screenshot of a new PrBoom feature: a nifty console to display all the stuff doom prints after it runs. McGee was there for Doom 2 and Ultimate Doom, designing maps 2-7, 14, and 22 for the former (yes, he did Dead Simple, to me the most memorable of Doom levels).
What he does will attract attention. Not as much as Carmack or Romero, granted, but some. So this is interesting.