Doom community mourns longtime, award-winning modder Ty Halderman

The Doom community is mourning a well known and well liked modder who died at the end of July following a short battle with brain cancer. He was 69.

Ty Halderman was a member of the modding team that delivered 1996's TNT: Evilution (pictured), a major 32-level mod that ultimately got a formal publishing arrangement with id Software and was released in an expansion called Final Doom. Several of its levels later appeared in the PlayStation version of Final Doom. The launch of Final Doom was very controversial in the Doom community at the time, much in the same way paid mods generated controversy for Steam earlier this year.

Halderman also was credited as a main programmer for 1998's Boom, a very influential source port of Doom. Halderman was honored with a lifetime achievement award by DoomWorld's Cacowards last year.

Since 1998, Halderman also had maintained the idgames archive, a comprehensive online repository of levels, toolkits and other modding tools for games that use the Doom engine. Mod enthusiasts became concerned about Halderman when they noticed no new files had been added since April. One visited Halderman's home in person and learned he had been hospitalized.

A family member posted on Aug. 6 that Halderman died on July 31, surrounded by his family. "It has meant a lot to read all of the posts by people concerned with his health," the family member noted.