Since id Software released Doom in 1993, thousands of user-made WADS and maps have been and continue to be created for the Doom community's entertainment. These are their stories.
PAZUZU WINGS OF POSSESSION by T. Elliot Cannon aka "Myscha the Sled Dog" T. Elliot Cannon has a brief but promising Doom II authorship that was cut down in its prime by being hired to work on Unreal at the recommendation of John Anderson of Master Levels For Doom II fame. He released the raw, cramped, and switch-crazy Iditarod ; the charming architectural delight of Odyssey ; and then published…
DIABOLOS by T. Elliot Cannon aka "Myscha the Sled Dog" A lot of Doom WAD authors from the '90s went on to work in the gaming industry. We're very familiar with names like Dario and Milo Casali, Tom Mustaine, Sverre Kvernmo... but less so with dudes like T. Elliot Cannon. TEC authored eight of the original Unreal 's 38 single-player maps but started out cutting his teeth on Doom II . If you aren't…
T. Elliot Cannon went on to have a relatively robust career in the video game industry beginning with Unreal , but he got his start--like so many others--with Doom . It appears that Cannon's heyday was focused on the period where the community was anticipating Quake . I initially thought that the Ancients Series marked Cannon's first forays into single-player level design. These maps appear to…
T. Elliot Cannon made something like seventeen single-player levels for Doom II and eleven deathmatch arenas before being recommended to Epic Games by John Anderson aka Dr. Sleep and being hired for Unreal . Both Iditarod and Odyssey were originally released on Compuserve, I believe, which makes an absolute timeline difficult to pin down, given that Compuserve shuttered its doors more than 20…
In 2009, Whoo opened the doors for TNT2 , what was to be a spiritual sequel to TNT: Evilution . What followed was one of the longest and most protracted and most importantly PUBLIC development cycles in the community. Somewhere along the way, Steve Muller aka "Kyka" took the reigns of development along with a few other forum regulars who really wanted to see TNT2 make it to completion. I…
CAVEMEN by "Sphagne" Some folks wish that the first two Community Chests had been more exclusionary. Its original call to arms did not specifically ask for maps that had not previously been released, which is why Sphagne, Gene Bird, and Daniel Trim ended up submitting some of their previously-released maps to CCHEST , with Gene Bird sneaking a few (as well as one original!) into CCHEST2 . The vast…
THE REAL CRUSHER by "Black Void" The original Community Chest was an interesting hodgepodge of folks who had already had long and storied careers, like Rex Claussen, Stephen Clark, and Samuel Villarreal, as well as authors like Sphagne, Gene Bird, and Daniel Trim, who had released a bunch of solo levels over the previous year or two, some of which found their way into the collection. Black Void…
X-treme is a two-level demo of a megaWAD project that Erik Alm declined to finish, released months after he published Scythe , late in 2003. If Alm had finished out the whole thing then it might have ended up as a gold standard for masochists the world over. As it stands, EAXT is whispered among consumers of ultra-hard mapsets, with the likes of gggmork theorizing whether or not it could be…
KMETL14 by Kurt Kesler Kurt Kesler made a bunch of vanilla levels that got rolled up into KMEGA1 before moving onto limit-removing with KHILLS , Boom with KBOOM , and, of course, ZDoom with KZDOOM . In 2023, we got the first KGZDOOM , KGZDOOM1 . At the end of 2024 Kurt added another wrinkle to his legacy--the first in a series of new KMETL maps, no longer for vanilla but for limit-removing ports.…
MAKE, TEST, POST. by "Memfis" Memfis has long had a love-affair with quirky stuff from Doom 's '90s period. The vast majority of his catalogue leading up to and following really doesn't reflect the attitude represented in Kuchitsu , however, outside of perhaps Green Day . His smaller solo releases were more representative of his love for classic megaWADs like Requiem ( REQUIMEM ), Memento Mori II…
Doom is wonderful. Wraith knew this and believed in it so much that he wanted to give players an excuse "to play First Doom one more time". To this end, he crafted Wonderful Doom . This megaWAD was apparently released in several iterations before being released in time to feature as a runner-up in the 2007 Cacowards, with several updates since then. It replaces every level in The Ultimate Doom…
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by "Rex Claussen" Rex kicked off 2002 with an idiosyncrasy from the year before, officially releasing Invictus to /idgames. This was a vanilla level for the original Doom where most of Rex's works since his debut had been for ZDoom and, for a long stride, leveraged assets from post- Doom FPS games like Hexen II , Half-Life , the Quake series, and Dark Forces . The…
Stanimapping is a failed portmanteau of "stamina" and "mapping", coined by Chris "Purist" Bourke to describe a design process where the author sits down and then does not stop mapping until their work is complete. (In Bourke's defense, Stanimapping flows better than Stamimapping, and Staminapping is something we all do from time to time.) This is basically speedmapping but without a specific time…
KILL THE CYBIE by Esa Repo aka "Espi" Espi made a deathmatch map in 2002 called Narcosis . Apparently he had enough people request that he turn it into a single-player level that he did so, so in 2003 we received a file by the name of SISOCRAN , which of course is Narcosis spelled backwards. Its official title is Kill the Cybie and it's a single-level for ZDoom on account of it uses a script to…
DEFRAGMENTATION FACTOR by Eugene Guschin aka "Wraith" Defragmentation Factor is Wraith's /idgames debut, a Doom II MAP01 replacement published in 2006 to be played in any source port. Guschin was a member of Clan [B0S] during its heyday with Da Will , Sacrament , and A.L.T. , but he had established a cornerstone in the community a few years before "Russian Realism" with Wonderful Doom . He has a…
Erik Alm is largely regarded as the WADfather of the Doom community's direction in combat due to his double-shot of the much loved Scythe and then, later, Scythe II . The third episode of Scythe generally comes as a thunderclap to folks who love its shorter, "cute" levels, but anyone familiar with Alm's work could see it coming from a mile away. Alm's fondness for both short, warm-up type levels…
BLOOD RUNNERS by "Sphagne" Sphagne sits alongside Gene Bird and Daniel Trim as an author who published levels prior to Community Chest and who submitted them back when the original CCHEST pitch was something more along the lines of, "Have you ever wanted to see one of your works ensconced within a megaWAD?" Thus far, the five Sphagne levels that I've covered-- Simphony of Death , Secret Lab ,…
THE PROCESS by Mike Alfredson aka "Use3D" Use3D has been making maps for a long time. So much of his creative energy has been tied up in his two one-man megaWADs, Doom Beyond and Nilla Doom , so much so that he actually jettisoned a number of his oldest maps from Doom Beyond and released them as singular outtakes. I've been covering all of these levels in my run-up to the original Community Chest…
Kesler's Still Kickin' , released in 2004, seemed to be the last that we'd hear from him in terms of new material. Then, in 2018, he reconnected with Doom and started showing off screenshots of him horsing around in an editor. KMETL 2018 didn't ultimately pan out--Kesler had to back away for awhile and lost what he had been working on--but when he eventually returned he plinked away until we got…
November of 2013 marked the beginning of perhaps Memfis's most productive span of authorship, kicking off with How Eye Killed Time and--apart from a lull in March--built multiple PWADs a month until July of 2014, right after his epic /idgames archive dump in June of 2014. Garbage is the second WAD published during this period, a two-level minisode for Doom II to be played in theoretically any…
The Doom community has generally had semi-regular speedmapping events in one form or another but in my mind they seemed to get new life in 2013. One of the longer-running institutions--now defunct--is The Abyssal Speedmapping Sessions . The Abyss was a forum that ended up receiving some of the now defunct NewDoom regulars, and Obsidian wanted to bring them together to make some Doom maps. The…
INVICTUS by Rex Claussen Wow, it's been a long time since I've played me some Claussen maps. Pre- Invictus , Rex made a ton of levels including a series of partial and total conversions ( A Hex On You , Phoenix Rising , Paranoia , Temple of the Ancients , The Darkest Hour ). Along the way, while I imagine The Darkest Hour was about a month away from being released, Claussen participated in…
TOWER OF LIES by "scwiba" scwiba got his start in the 1 Monster project, kicking off a career of gimmick-dedicated mapsets. He was awfully quiet for the following nine or so years until 2016, with the Cacoward-winning Absolutely Killed . In the year prior in 2015, however, he published this level, Tower of Lies . It's a MAP01 replacement for Doom II to be played in a limit-removing port. Not…
RUMA by Esa Repo aka "Espi" It's taken about three years to get here since I first played Espi's Barons o' Fun , but I finally made it. Ruma made Doomworld's Top 100 WADs list as one of the entries from 2002. It's a single map for Doom II , to be played in what appears to be any limit-removing port. Historians take note: Repo intimates in the .TXT that this was going to be MAP03 of his…
GREYMOOD by "MysteriousHaruko" Misty has had a healthy community career over the past seven or so years, working to co-host the Pigeon Speedmapping Sessions and contributing to a variety of community projects. She's also had a smattering of solo releases, including but not limited to the 2022 Cacoward HM Caffeine Injection . Greymood is her first public offering, a MAP01 replacement for Doom II…