Richard “Levelord” Gray has died at 68. His maps gave Duke Nukem 3D its grubby, lived-in city, and he left his name daubed across a fair few of its walls. He died on 12 October, and Apogee Entertainment shared the news the following day. His friend Joe Siegler said Gray had been fighting cancer on and off for some time, and that word came from Gray’s wife, Olga.
Gray came to the trade late, and gloriously so. He built his first Doom level at 35. He was in his forties when Apogee’s Scott Miller hired him straight out of the modding scene in 1994, which should cheer anyone who suspects the games industry stops hiring at 26. In March 1995 he moved from Blood to the Duke team, and the third episode, Shrapnel City, was almost entirely his work, bar the boss map and one secret level.
Duke 3D‘s great trick, after a few years of Doom‘s abstract techbases, was putting you somewhere you recognised: streets, hotels, bars and other places you could imagine queuing in. Gray’s levels were full of that. He also hid one of the decade’s best Easter eggs, a room you could only reach by cheating. In it, a message informed you that you weren’t supposed to be there. It was a personal note to every teenager who had ever typed in a noclip code.
Not long after Duke shipped, he left 3D Realms to co-found Hipnotic Interactive, soon renamed Ritual Entertainment. Ritual’s output included the Quake mission pack Scourge of Armagon, SiN, Heavy Metal: FAKK 2, Star Trek: Elite Force II and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. For SiN he built “Behind Zee Bookcase”, the first deathmatch map to shrink players to the size of rats, turning a gentleman’s study into a coliseum. In 2009 he set up Let It Rain Games.
The tributes have been warm. John Romero called him “a gentle soul”, and fellow developers lined up to praise his kindness as much as his craft. Level design has mostly been treated as an invisible art, admired only when it goes wrong. Gray signed his work like a mason carving his mark into a cathedral pillar, and we’re all the richer for knowing whose house we were blowing up.
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