Who coined the term "Slaughtermap/wad"?

I always wondered why they were called slaughtermaps/wads,well you do slaughter a lot of monsters/get slaughtered by the lots of monsters (depends on skill) but who originated the term and why that name?
 

I believe people referred to Hell Revealed as a slaughter wad back when it was new, would have to do a lot of digging in a lot of old Doom forums to find the real answer I'm sure.

incidentally I was searching the forums for the answer to this not too long ago. The earliest post I could find was one by Alm in 2002:

The term seemed to be used a lot to describe HR, and even older things like PUNISHER.WAD, so it's possible it has its roots in the late 90s even? There might be some old-guard around here (or someone with better googling skills, perhaps ;D) who could clarify further.

I don't remember encountering the term until around 2000 or so when HR2, Plut2 and so on were in development/publicity mode. Prior to that, ultra-spam monster wads were usually just referred to as "coop only" even if they were beatable solo, and then we retconned the "slaughter map" term to them after this year 2000ish period.

Vorpal is probably right.  I was going to say my recollection was that it was "slaughterfest" first and then "slaughtermap"/"slaughter WAD" came later, but as far as any text file where a WAD is self-described as such, the earliest appearance of "slaughtermap" seems to appear in the same place as the earliest non-deathmatch usage of "slaughterfest" as a description of map design style, that being in the text for Deus Vult II in 2008.  It would likely have been in general use earlier but it seems like that would be around the time that map designers decided to adopt it as an official description of what they were making.

Well, just on the Doomworld forums, it's easy enough to find early examples.

First instance of "slaughter map" was Erik Alm in 2002 as already linked https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/134280

Next used in late 2003 https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/340555 and early 2004 https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/350436 . Here is Kristian Ronge in Jan 2004 called Doom2 Map07 "the first slaughter map" https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/362452

Grazza in August 2004 asking for "slaughter-style" demos https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/27472-good-quotslaughterquot-demos/

It looks like "slaughter map" was a term that bounced around people who were adjacent to Doom speedrunning and was a term that speedrunners would have recognized or at least been able to understand instantly.

Earliest mention of the word "slaughtermap": Graf Zahl in 2006 https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/626207 and then not used again until 2008.

In 2008 gggmork referred to a "typical slaughtermap" even though no one else seemed to be regularly typifying this https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/737243

Speaking of 2008: insane_gazebo made a thread specifically asking for "slaughter maps" https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/44225-help-me-find-more-slaughter-maps/ in what I assume was preparation for making Sunder.

This 2009 post by Grazza suggests than even by 2009 the term "slaughtermap" was not the common usage:

On 3/10/2009 at 5:35 AM, Grazza said:

A search of the forums for "slaughter wads" might yield some useful results. (Belial went through a phase of demoing a lot of slaughter maps, so you could check which ones he chose.)

I was a bit curious about the history of the term, so I did a Whole Text file search for the word Slaughter in the doomworld downloads section. I looked through the text files of the first 130 wads & here's what I noticed. The top 3 instances of the word Slaughter were:

1. In relation to slaughtering your buddies in Deathmatch.

2. Some kind of slaughter is is often mentioned in the story.

3. In referencing another wad (Slaughter Until Death for example)

A few wads though used slaughter to describe the game play. Prior to 1998 the preferred term to describe high density maps is Slaughterhouse as seen in The Corruption of Substation Alpha, Loser, infesto.wad, & Slaughter House 5. A few other wads that describe their game play as slaughter are Melee.wad, Ash to Ash, oneweek.wad, & Alien Vendetta. Once I got to Alien Vendetta I changed my search to "Slaughter Map", there Scythe 2 & Deus Vault II were the first 2 results with that search.

That term was used loosely and regularly during the 90'ies Compet-N days, the origins would be impossible to track, but for sure it predates the 2000s by several years. Casali maps and Hell Revealed were already referred to as "slaughter maps" by then.

Erik used to hang on irc #nightmare a lot, and probably got used to the term being chucked around there, as it was the primary nest for speedrunners back in the day.

Speaking of which, where is the IRC crowd hanging these days?