"This is a great loss for our platoon!" He said with a mysteriously cheerful cadence.

This game has the feeling of a bunch of young, relatively inexperienced Slavic devs who weren't told certain things were impossible or not worth doing with the tech so just went and did them and overshot needs by a factor of 5, before having to throttle back on others when the deadline loomed.

Carmack: "I fear no engine, but that *thing*..."
(Chasm footage)
Carmack: "...it scares me."

On Chasm's fake 3D, there's a quote from John Carmack that I wish I could find again where he basically said that tech limitations can be resolved with sufficiently clever design. Chasm knows that what you think you want is full 3D like Quake, but by playing to its strengths with engaging 2.5D map design and combat while creating a convincing illusion of 3D, your mind just fills in the blanks and makes you think that you're getting everything you wanted. It's almost like good old fashioned stage magic: the only difference between pulling out a card versus making a card "disappear" is to make you look away at just the right moment. It's as much about programming the audience as it is the game.

This feels like the kind of insane artistic fuckery that come from pure spite at being denied access to the resources other aritsts take for granted. Its like the sculptor who was given shit marble to work with and busted his ass to produce crazy organic looking statues.

You are absolutely right about "it seems they were learning this engine as they went along", exact thing was happening. It started from small team of just graduated programmers and went along until magically acquired funds to finish and distribute the game.

Civvie having a optimized version of Chasm for years only to later notice it was made by Szymanski is so perfect it feels like fate.

What is the TimeQuake, CV-11?

When you mentioned it being about time travel and having Egypt in it, I kept thinking "what is this, Serious Sam? Are Croteam members of the Chasm Cult too?"

Then I got thinking. Game made by slavs featuring teleporting monsters, time travel, Egypt, Medieval Europe, a weird blend of enemies, bosses that are glorified puzzles and engines that managed to get really impressive feats onto low to mid end hardware through the power of proprietary jank.

Look at all the time things we can time discover once our time eyes have been time opened

This was the first game I ever saw in stores and asked my Mom for. I was 6. She said no. That figure on the cover, I saw him in my dreams for years and wondered what it meant. That image formed the foundation of my young psyche, but remained a mystery for so long. Now I know the truth and can die peacefully. Thank you Civvie

I'm surprised you didn't mention the fact enemies will change their attacks once you blow limbs off. Like the Jokers will bite you once they lose both arms.

Ok, what the developers did to get a 2.5D game to look this good is some kind of dark arcane magic. That is seriously impressive.

This is such a mishmash of other game's DNA that I constantly feel like I recognize it even though I've never heard of Chasm before.

17:46 - the floor is actually meant to explode and drench everything in lava. You see several lava pieces, but the floor remains intact. The "floor" is actually an animated 3D object that's not working properly. That's why you keep dying unless you enter the portal.
Edit: Also, I know you don't really cover mods, but we actually "ported" this game to ZDoom. We call it ZRift, and I took it upon myself to recreate all the maps in the Doom editor... The plan was to expand upon the game with new maps and enemies, but the project kind of stopped.

I love the line "Try to pay maximum attention"

It's such an obviously non-human thing to say but it's still fluent enough english for the voice actor to pass it off as a coherent sentence

That engine is absolutely insane.

So this was Timesplitters before Timesplitters was a thing? This game must really be from the future.

Getting Doom engine, Build engine, and Quake engine vibes all at the same time. What a weird, magical cocktail. Amazing stuff.

I'm always tickled when I see another person acknowledge Chasm's existence. It's like, yeah, I wasn't dreaming, that game was real.

The more I learned about how this game worked, the less I saw the devs as game designers and more as mad scientists hunched over a computer, watching their creation slowly come to life, and ever so subtly muttering “It’s hideous. It’s perfect.”

The way he said "This is a great loss for our platoon" tells me he only read this line once, and it was during recording, and even though he clearly read the sentence wrong because his tone of voice is happy sounding, they still used it. This is why Civvie cannot overuse the word "Jank." Because the jank just keeps janking. Ain't no party like a Slav Jank party because a Slav Jank party only stops when the game freezes.