The Roots of Doom Mapping

[Walter confetti]

Wonderful article!

[joepallai]

Really good article that will get more than one read by me.   Any chance of it being put into a pdf?    

[NiGHTMARE]

Great article, I especially enjoyed the write up on Espi's works. Suspended in Dusk and the style of mapping that has developed from it are what I now try to adhere to for my own levels. It does seem that SID may have itself been influenced somewhat by The Darkening E2 - just compare the opening areas of the first maps in both wads, for example.

 

I'm surprised Chris Lutz's earlier work such as Phobos Anomaly Reborn and Caverns of Darkness didn't get a mention anywhere (or maybe I missed them?). The former in particular was a big influence for many subsequent maps, particularly KDIZD.

 

I would also argue that at least one megawad released prior to AV had an example of "That One Level", namely Iikka Keranen's Doorway to Quake level in Requiem. (Incidentally Iikka's another mapper who deserves a mention. Again his influence can be felt in many a later map, though I suppose more on the DM side.)

Edited December 11, 2019 by NiGHTMARE

[yakfak]

excellent article. gonna refer people to this when they go into that whole "gameplay gameplay gameplay" routine to remind 'em that there's a hundred reasons to make a map and a hundred priorities to rank when you're making one <3 the idea that Scythe 2 is basically the progenitor of all maps after Scythe 2 sorta bugged me but I think I'll get over it giggle

[Phobus]

After telling myself I'd read this a page at a time over a week or two, I got enthralled and read the whole thing in one sitting. Probably took me three hours or so, with the distractions life tried to obstruct me with, but the article was always going to win. It's a fantastic bit of writing and quite the adventure through a time period that I've seen bits of in detail and been dimly aware of for other parts.

 

I was surprised there wasn't a chapter on the '94-'95, pre-Final Doom wild west of modding, or perhaps more of a note on how TCs such as Alien Doom and Batman Doom would've been precursors to the Big Budget Doom section, but generally speaking it felt like the major points of mapping for single-player Doom were covered.I could almost mark on a timeline where the periods described began to blur into each other, and trace my own Doom journey through a lot of it. Reading the last few chapters left me feeling like a bit of a bystander, having arrived late to the first half of the history, been in the middle third and then fallen by the wayside only to watch things carry on without me. It's a testament to the size, strength and diversity of the entire Doom modding community that I can think of so many mappers who have achieved huge things over the years, yet either weren't mentioned at all, or passed by with just a hint or a name-dropped project.

 

Incredible and, in it's way, sobering. Well done, @Not Jabba.

[Ziad EL Zein]

Thank you for the wonderful article ... 

This took me back in time way back to the good old days it made my day. 

 

Edited December 11, 2019 by Ziad EL Zein

[Linguica]

2 hours ago, Phobus said:

I was surprised there wasn't a chapter on the '94-'95, pre-Final Doom wild west of modding, or perhaps more of a note on how TCs such as Alien Doom and Batman Doom would've been precursors to the Big Budget Doom section

 

To be fair, the article is focusing on the history of Doom mapping, to the exclusion of gameplay mods etc, and Batman Doom / ALIENS-TC were not best known for their level design (ironically, those are the exact two mods I mention in my D4V article). This also goes into why the pre-2000s history is a little thin, since most Doomers before the modern world wide web were making stuff for a relatively unknown audience, and there wasn't the same feedback loop of projects influencing other projects.

[Jimmy]

Took me a number of hours but I finally finished it. Awesome article. Already covers plenty. Thanks for covering everything you did, NJ. :)

[Not Jabba]

 

8 hours ago, NiGHTMARE said:

I'm surprised Chris Lutz's earlier work such as Phobos Anomaly Reborn and Caverns of Darkness didn't get a mention anywhere (or maybe I missed them?). The former in particular was a big influence for many subsequent maps, particularly KDIZD.

 

(Incidentally Iikka's another mapper who deserves a mention. Again his influence can be felt in many a later map, though I suppose more on the DM side.)

 

The article is going a bit broader than that, zooming back out to the big overarching styles or schools of mapping, and to me, stuff like this felt not only a bit too specific, but also somewhat divorced from the larger historical trends. In other words, Keranen had a huge influence on later mappers in that they borrowed the specific idea of seeking out vanilla tricks to achieve pseudo-3D effects that looked like they shouldn't be possible in Doom, but that's one very specific idea that's been used by people irrespective of their mapping style. Similarly, the idea of recreating IWAD maps in a more modern form is something that pops up again and again, regardless of what style people are using to recreate them. The immortal "doomcute" trope fell into that same category.

These strains of influence are definitely interesting, but I think they'd have to be in the form of smaller, self-contained "gaiden" articles. Maybe I'll find myself feeling that ambitious at some point, but I think it'll be a little while before I'm up for doing much Doom writing again :P

 

6 hours ago, yakfak said:

the idea that Scythe 2 is basically the progenitor of all maps after Scythe 2 sorta bugged me

 

I don't think I went quite that far. I would say most modern mapping to one degree or another, and definitely most if not all blockbuster megawads to a very large degree. I'm glad that the current era is starting to move away from being so Alm-oriented and seems to be looking toward generally broader/more diverse ideas of what makes a good map and what techniques or styles can be used to get there, even among more classic-styled maps (See Lost Civ, for instance, which is pretty Doomworld-mainstream and gameplay-oriented and yet has little relation to Alm's style). It's also why I wanted to spend some time talking about the value of individual voices in the conclusion, which as you may note is accompanied by screenshots of the three least conventional releases I could think of.

 

12 hours ago, Xaser said:

I do kinda yearn for a sequel that focuses on the gameplay modding world. It's kinda this weird parallel universe that occasionally crosses over into the mapping space, but has its own history and legendary figures (Immoral Conduct, anyone?) -- ditto for multiplayer, as pointed out.

 

...though I suppose we'd need a new author for that, as the un-Jabba mentioned, and I'm certainly not wordsmithy enough to do it. :P

 

Linguica actually asked Terminus to write that history for 25 Years of Doom, before the Roots article was conceived. He tentatively agreed to it, but a lot was going on and it never got off the ground.

 

11 hours ago, Bauul said:

It's interesting to me how Elementalism fits relatively neatly into the narrative you outlined Not Jabba, when in hindsight we weren't aware of any such emerging theme when we began the project in late 2017. The origins of the project actually stem from the Community Tier of Skulldash Expanded Edition. Dragonfly invited a selection of mappers to contribute to that project, and once it shipped Elementalism coalesced out of a motivation we had to continue working together. As such, the core team of Elementalism is primarily alumni of Skulldash.

 

But when looked at through a 2019 lens, it does seem to fit into the theme. Other upcoming megawads like Age of Hell, Refracted Reality and the similar share an equitable goal of heavily utilizing UDMF to achieve specific artistic visions, but remaining focused on a classic (or close to classic) Doom gameplay feel. All these were founded independently of each other, so I wonder if this is something of a natural expansion of Doom mapping.

 

One thing that I tried to stress at various points in the article is how pretty much everything seemed to have happened very naturally, as though the course of the history was practically inevitable from the very beginning; the divisions and syntheses are the sorts of things that would happen in any community, and many of the more specific ideas (the way people handled early source port maps, or the way forums led to community projects, e.g.) were natural responses to very fundamental changes in the makeup of the community or the tools at its disposal. The Doom community is unique in that it's lasted for so long and had so much activity that it's been really easy to see these trends writ large. 

 

In analyzing the history and writing the article, I also felt that influence in general is something that usually happens indirectly and subconsciously, and can only really be looked at in terms of broader trends rather than what people might directly think is influencing them. Once ideas take hold and become part of a broader culture, they disseminate very quickly, and reach people's imaginations in ways that those people may not expect; e.g., you don't have to have played Eternal Doom to be influenced by Eternal Doom, and even if you have played it, it can be one of your core influences without you even realizing it.

 

I can give you some concrete examples from my own experience with Wayfarer. If you asked me about the mappers who inspired me the most, I would give you names like lupinx-Kassman, dobu, Mechadon, Lainos, and Xaser. And if you look at Wayfarer, you can probably see those influences in the areas where I was most consciously trying to realize big, specific ideas -- the places where I was trying to create a really cool individual area, or the maps where I had an interesting piece of running lore that I was building into the fabric of the level, for instance. But in between all those big ideas was the bread-and-butter of the mapset, the basic cloth of my mapping style, the general mode of combat design -- and if I really wanted to zoom out and look at that as a whole, I'd have to say that it probably all points to skillsaw and darkwave, who are not people I would normally think of as my primary influences but who nonetheless informed the broader, fundamental way that I look at mapping more than than anyone else.

 

This is true of more specific tropes as well. Although I liked Legacy of Heroes quite a bit, I wouldn't have thought of it as one of my favorite mapsets or one that influenced me. But when I played it and wrote about it for /newstuff, I specifically remember being struck by the way it handled secrets vs. everything else -- i.e., the main flow of the action/progression is mostly unobstructed, but the secrets are framed as super cryptic sidequests, significant pieces of the map that create a strong sense of Eternal Doom influence without getting in the way of the broader picture. At some point while creating Wayfarer, I realized that I was doing that exact thing; that particular aspect of LoH's design had gotten stuck in my mind. I could also point to NEIS and Lainos's masterpieces and some other releases for giving me inspiration there, but my mind went back to LoH specifically on a number of occasions as I realized how I was building my secrets.

In terms of broad "schools" of mapping, Wayfarer clearly fits into the trend described in chapter 11, which means I'm following in the lineage of Adventures of Square in a fundamental way. I started creating the episode in late 2016; I first played Square in mid-2018. So how is it one of my major influences? I have a pretty good idea. The idea of being able to create something that felt classic/neoclassic while using ZDoom features is something that came on gradually from playing a bunch of different recent releases; it was also forced to some extent by working in a game that has no Boom format or Dehacked support, but I know that I was already interested in it before I started making the episode. The main releases that struck me as being on to something, initially, were Elf Gets Pissed and Mercury Rain. Both were created by members of BigBrik Games after Square E1, and follow the same philosophy as Square to a more limited degree (as does Wayfarer). I was also *aware* of Square, obviously, and other major releases like dead.wire and dead.air (which although I listed them in chapter 5 could also easily be considered to be in the trend of chapter 11). Jimmy and Xaser are both vocal, prolific, and community-oriented people, and I would consider them two of the biggest advocates for the idea of classic-but-GZDoom in general.

 

So yeah, all of this makes historical analysis super interesting. I had a lot of fun not just conceptualizing the trends, but figuring out how to even approach that conceptualization.

Edited December 11, 2019 by Not Jabba

[Horus]

Just finished...what a wonderful article, an engaging read from start to finish, and very well structured covering off Doom's different solo-mapping themes. You say in this thread this took up most of your free time in the last 2 months, I can believe that and surprised it didn't take up longer tbh!

 

That there a bunch of comments saying 'you missed out x' shows the breadth and depth of the history of Doom mapping. It would take an eternity to capture everything and I think @Not Jabba covered the salient points very well

 

And now for a well earned rest I hope!

 

Edited December 12, 2019 by Horus

[cybdmn]

Finally finished reading the article. One of the best writings about Doom i‘ve ever read. Great analysis of the different styles, and a good lesson in mapping history. And well written too. The only article i‘ve Ever read as interesting as this was JP Le Bretons article about what game designers could learn from Doom, over at his site Vector Poem.

 

A must read for everyone who call himself a Doom Fan.

 

if you ever expand it, and release as a book, I will insta-buy it.

[Woolie Wool]

Came for the Doom wads, stayed for the Hegelian dialectics. Absolutely fantastic read and indeed a much, much better way to talk about the history of mapping than the obvious "10 best/10 worst/10 most whatever" lists. That said, I feel the Memento Mori/Requiem series deserved at least a minor spotlight, considering that they were not only highly revered in their day, but their more ambitious levels, especially those by Iikka Keränen and the Casalis, prototyped both combat-based and adventure-based mapping before Plutonia and Eternal.

 

Also it's amazing how your description of The Adventures of Square line up perfectly about how I felt about it when I first played the E1 release--finally a ZDoom mod that goes crazy with the features and uses them effectively to create an experience that was its own thing. I had waited over ten years for a game like Square.

Edited December 12, 2019 by Woolie Wool

[Worm]

This is not just good writing about Doom, I'd hold it up as an example of great writing about video games, period. It easily beats those lame "retrospectives" that get posted on popular sites. Maybe the narrow focus would make it hard for an outsider to appreciate, but I think anyone should be able to grasp the following point: it takes decades of artistry to make this level of analysis not just possible, but deserved. It's the kind of thing you can point to when someone asks, "What's the big deal about having a mod scene, anyway?"

 

 

Edited December 13, 2019 by Worm

[mattjoes]

I loved reading this article. I found this particularly insightful:
 

Quote

The idea that you can simultaneously have smooth, tough gameplay alongside strong aesthetics or mood must seem glaringly obvious from a 2019 perspective, but like all good ideas, somebody actually had to do it before it became obvious that it could be done.

 

[Nembras]

Thank you so much for writing this article (or book, rather). It is incredibly fun to read, and oh so useful to me. I got back into Doom in the last 2 years or so (having played the games back in the 90s), and once I had fought my way through Ultimate Doom and Doom2, I was ready to dive into the world of wads, but I had no idea where to start. It was easy enough to find wads that are held in high regard by the community, but it was hard to find out whether a wad was suited for me.

 

Not knowing the lingo, and having no way to gauge a wad's difficulty in relation to my skill, it was nearly impossible to know what to expect prior to loading up a wad. Too often I was just overwhelmed by a horde of monsters when all I wanted was check out the aesthetics for wich a wad was praised. Or I headed into map expecting a 30 minute experience when in fact it would take me hours to reach the end. I did find some stuff that I enjoyed, and with time I became a bit more savvy as to where to look, and what to look for, but the world of wads still is a vast and confusing jungle to me.

 

"The Roots of Doom Mapping" offers the unified overview that I have been craving. I now have a much clearer idea of what there is, and what to look for. This write-up singlehandedly improved my enjoyment of Doom wads, and I'm sure I'm not the only new-ish player who will find it helpful.

[OniriA]

I'm still in the process of reading this expansive essay (taking small bites every day) and just finished 'till the part about Alien Vendetta last evening. Yeah, Misri Halek is the best. 

[gaspe]

Very good job on this NotJabba, I like it more than the cacowards to be honest, and I still have to finish the whole thing. Like others have already said the lack of 94' wads and a proper spotlight to classics like the Memento Moris or Requiem was a bit disappointing since I think they still have an influence these days, but I can understand if time and space didn't allow for them as this work is already massive as it is. My favourite part was Chapter 3 and I must say that I feel very honored that LoH was included in the list among wads that I all consider to be excellent.

[Andy Johnsen]

This is simply a great read. It's amazing that the game has been around for so long we now have full fledged historians writing beautiful pieces on the evolution of user made content by supplying insights and tidbits to give us a deeper and broader understanding of it.

As a contributor to AV, it's neat to be tangled up in the rich history of Doom mapping. There's certainly a more objective and interesting reflection in your writing than possible from a personal view, in the particular case of the late 90's.

Thanks to Not Jabba and everyone who helped and put effort into giving us this sprawling booklet - there's obviously a lot of time, research and insight gone into this. Very cool.

[Synthdrm]

Chapter 1 describes perfectly why I prefer Doom 2 to 1.

[Ashley_Pomeroy]

Good read. The talk of horror influences and mutable reality made me wonder why System Shock wasn't mentioned, but I learn from the internet that it was released just seven days before Doom 2, which means that it couldn't have had any influence on the Doom games. I had always assumed it predated Doom a little bit, but no. In that game the idea of an alternative reality perverting our own was even more explicit and the maps were simultaneously realistic and fantastical - they were a plausible depiction of an unusual environment. Furthermore parts of the game took place inside a virtual world, and the final level was a creepy alien environment that had been altered by SHODAN. This has nothing to do with Doom, I'm waffling.

 

I'm old enough to have played the first two Doom games when they were new, but I quickly jumped to Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc, and ignored Doom until the late 2000s. I feel a bit sad because I completely missed the original heyday - the CDs with thousands of poor-quality shovelware maps, the porn wads with Anna Nicole Smith, the sound and graphic replacements with Barney the Dinosaur, and of course stuff like Hell Revealed and Alien Vendetta, which must have seemed like rare little diamonds in a sea of sewage at the time. I wonder how Doom fans in those days passed on the knowledge that such-and-such a mapset was genuinely good? Usenet? Photocopied fanzines? Coded messages?

 

Playing the classic old megawads in the 2000s was a bit like exploring old Garry's Mod maps, or old internet forums that have devolved into just a handful of posters. I was aware that there had been an active subculture buzzing with enthusiasm many years ago, but in the late 2000s only the relics remained. The people who made the best Doom maps will never win the Turner Prize, or an Academy Award; they will never receive any formal recognition, and yet in their own field, in that one narrow field, they were supergods. The level designing equivalent of a master furniture maker whose name is lost to time, but whose furniture fetches a high price at auction. Or their name is remembered, but the rest of their life is forgotten, and history condensed all of the things they did, their lives and loves, into a handful of artistic works.

 

But that's unfair because the Doom modding community is still around and still producing excellent maps. There is nonetheless something uniquely melancholic about popping open a crude recreation of someone's high school from 1995, and the text file gives out the author's home address(!) and asks for people to get in touch. A different world, a different internet.

 

Back in October I went to Hong Kong for a fortnight, and I remember going through Doomworld's archives to see if there were any maps set in Hong Kong - why the heck not - and I found "Hong Kong Handover 1997", a decent map (that seemingly has nothing to do with Hong Kong). The author is now a professor at a university in Australia, but again a little trace of him remains in id/games/doom/maps/ etc. And perhaps China's security services have a copy just in case. Whenever I play a map from the past I wonder if the author is still alive. He or she never knew that I played it; from their point of view the map was like the Voyager space probes. We launched them into a huge dark emptiness and we'll never know if aliens will ever find them. We'll all be long-dead by then.

 

One thing. As mentioned, back in 1995, 1996 my recollection is that Doom was mud. It was old news - it cast a big shadow but it was yesterday's game. The gaming scene was a lot more fast-moving then and people craved novelty, and the idea of Doom as a retro classic felt odd at the time (partially because PC games didn't age well; pretty much everything from the CGA and EGA eras was dead as a doornail by the mid-1990s). I've always wondered why the people who made e.g. Eternal Doom or for that matter Alien Vendetta carrying on making maps. Especially the period in the late 1990s / early 2000s after Doom had ceased to be a thing, but before source ports became dominant and there was a larger, internet-driven retro Doom scene.

 

By 1998 the chances of Id or anyone hiring a Doom level designer must have been pretty slim, and everybody else had moved on to Quake and Quake II. The typical megawad must have taken ages to make, for a very small audience. But then again some people spend their spare time making model railways entirely for their own amusement, or huge Lego models that they build, look at, and then dismantle. It's good that people have that drive.

 

To my mind the designers who made Scythe and The Darkening were like folk music purists. They continued to play the old music long after the youngsters had gone electric, using instruments that were hard to learn. My impression is that Brutal Doom made the original Doom hip again - the trailers have millions of views on Youtube and it has coverage in the mainstream gaming press, which is unusually for a Doom TC - but there must have been a dark age when Doom was just an embarassing old footnote. And yet they kept going, and the world is better off for it.

[Linguica]

2 hours ago, Ashley_Pomeroy said:

but there must have been a dark age when Doom was just an embarassing old footnote. And yet they kept going, and the world is better off for it.

 

As the article itself points out, Doom is an art scene.

[TimeOfDeath666]

Quote

Hardcore players will generally recognize that “slaughter,” despite being a fraught term, does refer to a distinct genre of mapping—though its branches don’t all necessarily trace back to the same trunk. Matt Tropiano’s “For We Are Many” (Community Chest 3 map 29) and Huy Pham’s Deus Vult series, which were early examples of hyper-dense slaughtermaps and distant forerunners of the modern genre, evolved out of the type of combat you see in the later maps of Scythe 2 and Alien Vendetta. Meanwhile, death-destiny was developing a Plutonia/Chord-inspired mapping style that revolved around the extremely unfriendly placement of small groups of monsters but frequently extrapolated that type of combat into much larger, denser playgrounds. Some years later, TimeofDeath developed multiple unusual combat modes guided by a variety of eclectic interests, including coop play and rocket jumping, often featuring them in enormous maps with many hundreds or thousands of monsters. Call it convergent evolution, if you will. But the primary school of design that has dominated hardcore challenge mapping throughout the 2010s can easily be traced back to one insane level designer.

Thanks for mentioning me but just a couple notes, I was releasing coop slaughtermaps in 2005 on zdaemon and rocket jumping slaughtermaps in 2006 on doomworld before Death-Destiny or Insane_Gazebo showed up. gggmork was also around before those two in 2007. We weren't the typical "omg look at my crazy map with monsterzzz", we were total badasses who put our money where our doom builder is and demoed our own maps like big boys. We helped revitalize the slaughter/hard mapping and demo scenes. Everyone wanted a piece of us for testing their wads, including Insane_Gazebo before he started his sunder thread.

 

Quote

The first thing anyone will notice about Sunder is that it’s huge. Huge and visually intricate, creating a sense of scale that was previously unrivaled and has rarely been matched even in the decade since its initial unfinished release—probably because it’s very difficult to pull off successfully with the classic sidedef limits, and perhaps because its many creative children have “known better” than to try and chain every other design choice in the service of creating that enormous scope.

The biggest reason was because huge open areas with lots of detail and monsters is a recipe for lag and unplayability. And I'm not disputing sunder's influence, but huge-scale maps were already a thing before Insane_Gazebo showed up:

Spoiler

Drown in Blood MAP01 (2005)

 

Drown in Blood MAP26 (2006)

 

Sloth MAP01 (2006)

 

Sloth MAP03 (2006)

 

Sloth MAP04 (2006)

 

rjsloth MAP02 (2006)

 

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 minutes ago, TimeOfDeath666 said:

rocket jumping slaughtermaps

I want a piece of those

[cybdmn]

On 12/17/2019 at 11:44 PM, Ashley_Pomeroy said:

It was old news - it cast a big shadow but it was yesterday's game.

 

Unlike every other game, Doom never was old for me. Ever since my first PC, Doom was the thing i installed right after installing the operating system, and even today i don't own any computer where there is Doom missing.

 

Every other game from the yesterdays is a guest on my computers from time to time, Doom is a resident.

[Vermil]

4 hours ago, cybdmn said:

 

Unlike every other game, Doom never was old for me. Ever since my first PC, Doom was the thing i installed right after installing the operating system, and even today i don't own any computer where there is Doom missing.

 

Every other game from the yesterdays is a guest on my computers from time to time, Doom is a resident.

 

Same here. Once the operating system is set up, Doom get's installed on it.

[Jaska]

Great writing! I'll have to get back to it and check stuff which it mentioned. Doom-scene is so huge it's (almost) overwhelming.

[elend]

 

I have decided to convert Not Jabba's humongous essay about the history of Doom mapping to an ebook format purely for my own joy, ease of reading, and archival purposes. I copy pasted everything into Word, formatted it as best I could to ebook standards and created some cover art, while I am at it. The article features a ton of pictures and thus depending on your ebook reader and settings it might look a bit funny in places, as well as resulting in quite a beefy .epub (PDF and Kindle versions available as well). The Kindle version is untested, but did look good on a desktop ebook viewer.

 

 

Hosting on other sites might possibly be encouraged if Not Jabba agrees to this. I am not sure and it's probably best to ask him first. If you encounter any formatting problems, errors that might have snuck in or anything else, please let me know and I try to fix it.

 

Download:

epub - http://www.vidgames.de/images/temp/doom_wad/roots/Roots_epub.zip

pdf - http://www.vidgames.de/images/temp/doom_wad/roots/Roots_pdf.zip

kindle - http://www.vidgames.de/images/temp/doom_wad/roots/Roots_kindle.zip

 

[Not Jabba]

10 hours ago, elend said:

Hosting on other sites might possibly be encouraged if Not Jabba agrees to this.

 

That's fine with me :)

[Final Verdict]

That was a good read and well articulated. 

 

I knew about the early years as I was playing wads back then, but the 2010-2019 part filled in some gaps and got me up to speed. It took me almost 2 hours to get through (I read all of it, it's well written), but it was worth it. 

[Scuba Steve]

OK, I *really* need to make the coffee table book now...