Legends of Symbian - Markus Mertama

Ladies and gentlemen,

there is a lot of people in Symbian and PPC community who have grown into legends, and many forumers know and respect them. There is one person for me though, who will always hold number 1 top member of community of all times.

Markus Mertama (hailing from Finland) - the creator of C2Doom, famous port of Doom to S80, S60 and S60v3 Symbian devices. You might say, so what, he made a port for Doom - whats up with that? The truth is, his efforts launched a wave of other developers, realizing the true power of smartphones, and made ports to Symbian friendly devices on their own (from the later ports I could name Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3 (only on the most powerful phones), Duke Nukem 3D and the Shadow Warrior) - but the original was always the best. C2Doom allows you to set gfx details, music and sounds, redefine controls that fit YOU the best, and using the shell, you can load any .WAD game ever out. And the whole shell was for free. That rocks.

Mertama noticed popularity gained after releasing the original CDoom and later C2Doom, and when he modded C2Doom for S60v3 devicec, he did one thing that sort of annoyed me - he made us fellow members of the community pay for it. Of course, only loyal followers did that - BiNPDA took the application and cracked it, same as they usually do. Mertama himself though is a very nice person - when I had problems with .wad files on 6630 or when I had difficulties with redefining keys on the S60v3 version, he helped me as much as he could.

And the summary? Thanks to Markus, I was able to spend hundreds of hours beating Doom games on my very phone - and I enjoyed it. Thanks, Markus.


In the next episode of Legends of Symbian, we'll go through the painful rise and fall of Aivanet.com - stay tuned!