Here's something fun – the latest amazing Kickstarter commission courtesy of the great Alan Henderson of the Penned Guin fame!

This time I asked the maestro to penguinify my biggest idols. Yes, I have those – and it is exactly the ones you'd expect if you've followed my ramblings for any length of time; the rockstar and the rocket scientist, John Romero and John Carmack.

If you somehow don't know who these gods among men are – possible only if you've never played a video game before – they are the two of the founders of id Software, the house that created the first-person-shooter genre how we know it today. Though neither of them works at id any more, these two programmers were responsible for making all of their break-through originals tick. Carmack was created the ahead-of-its-time technology, while the gameplay programming (and level design) was Romero's wheelhouse.

These days Romero runs, together with his wife Brenda, a new Ireland-based indie studio Romero Games – while Carmack has moved from the realm of games to virtual reality and artificial intelligence research.

I'd go as far to say TAGAP wouldn't exist without these two gents. Thanks to the source codes of the original id productions being released to the wild, most of what I know about the game programming I learned studying their handiwork.

So, a huge thank you for both the entertainment and kind-of-edutainment you've provided all these, John and John. I hope you don't mind the penguinification – and if you do, don't blame Mr. Henderson, I put him to it!

I sat on this one a while, just so we could make this more timely – after all, the birthday of DOOM is this week. Another huge thank you to Mr. Henderson for another beauty I need to frame!