Sandy Petersen, a retrospective of his Doom maps

[MajorRawne]

I used to be vocally critical about the contributions made to Doom and Doom 2 by poor old Sandy. But as time has worn on, I've started to appreciate a ton of things about classic Doom that used to bug me. For example, the random, unrecognisable geometry of the maps, with none of them resembling a real place: now I see that in Romero's design philosophy, gameplay trumps realism. You can also headcanon the weird, twisted map layouts to be the corrupting effect of hell. It renders geometry as we know it meaningless.

 

Another thing is, although I still maintain that the worst classic maps tend to be Sandy's, a lot of my absolute favourites are his too. In the Playstation version, a lot of his maps are ****ing terrifying. 

 

His Doom 2 maps come the closest to making you feel you're in a place that might actually exist (The Factory, The Suburbs, The Citadel). Nirvana gets a lot of flak but I love its weird dreamlike quality and it's nice to play a short, violent map amid a run of longer maps.

 

Sandy Petersen was always trying something new with his maps. He was inventive, creative, fiendish at times. So, after all these years: I'm sorry Sandy, your contribution to Doom was immense and it wouldn't have been the same without you!

Edited May 9, 2023 by MajorRawne

[Individualised]

Man, all I saw was "Sandy Petersen, a" and got worried that something had happened. Glad that's not the case.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Individualised

[MajorRawne]

Whoops, that honestly never occurred, edited the title!

[Maximum Matt]

I wanna see a walkthrough of his palace that was the inspiration for map19 Citadel.  

[Xerenogan]

I know what you mean. Over time I find myself coming around.

One thing I hear often is that arrow in downtown, and how that's supposed to be shorthand acknowledgment that your map is irredeemably confusing. Yet the more maps from the early 90s I play, the more I appreciate a simple arrow showing you where to start in a sandbox map. So many maps back then had arrows even in linear maps, heck there was one map of Enigma Episode that not only had an arrow in a linear (mostly) map, but you had to make an awkward jump off of it to progress.

 

I think it partly has to do with imagination. The longer you have, the more your brain can fill in what is already something fairly abstract.

I dunno, just some thoughts on it.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Xerenogan
spacing and words

[LadyMistDragon]

Speaking as someone who loves to rag on Sandy any chance I get, I completely agree. The role he holds in paving the way for future Doom mappers to try some rather oddball stuff is a little hard to deny when you've digged through some of the more hellish maps from the IWADS. It's hard to say if Sandy directly influenced the trend of surreality in the community generally, but it's doubtful things would be quite the same if it was the Romero, McGee, and some other guy show. 

[Biodegradable]

Petersen's our beloved Abstract Hellfather and while I personally don't care for a lot of his old Doom 2 maps, I respect his hustle and creativity given the immense workload that was dumped on him months before the deadline. While Romero has some excuse given he was helping license out the Doom engine to Raven Software and assorted business ventures, I still don't know why McGee, Willits and Green didn't pull their weight more to help out and left him to have bash together 18 maps, but he came through and that fact alone is a big credit to him.

 

Thank you, Sandy.

[Faceman2000]

I am a massive Sandy apologist. I love (most of) his maps. He created the first sandbox map with Mt Erebus, then expanded upon it with the magnificent Downtown. Entryway is one of the most iconic FPS maps of all time. E2M5 and E2M6 are dripping in atmosphere, and E2M6 was his first ever map! Compare that to your MyFirstMap.wad and tell me he’s a bad level designer. Tricks and Traps is delightfully malicious, The Pit is cunningly inventive (even if the progressive is a bit obscure), and Nirvana, well, sucks. They can’t all be winners when you produce as many maps in as short a time as he did.

[RataUnderground]

I think it is absolutely vital to understanding Sandy's vision in his maps to realize that he is the primary creator of "Call of Cthulhu". Read the description of Rlyeh in Lovecraft's story and you will understand.

[Gez]

7 hours ago, Biodegradable said:

While Romero has some excuse given he was helping license out the Doom engine to Raven Software and assorted business ventures, I still don't know why McGee, Willits and Green didn't pull their weight more to help out and left him to have bash together 18 maps, but he came through and that fact alone is a big credit to him.

American McGee and Shawn Green were originally hired for tech support, not level design. American McGee was a later hire, by the way. If you look at the ENDOOM credit screen for early versions of Doom, you'll see Green listed as software support, but not McGee, who appears only starting from v1.666 of the finished game. So we can guess McGee was not hired before they started working on developing Doom II. And while McGee was eventually promoted from tech support to level design, this didn't happen to Shawn Green, which probably explains why he's got only three credited levels in total.

 

As for Willits, as much as I loathe to defend the guy, he was hired in 1995.

[Biodegradable]

Thanks for the correction, Gez. As always, you're a regular walking-talking version of the DoomWiki. I had forgotten Willits wasn't around in '94. I guess McGee made all his maps a lot closer to Doom 2's release date? Feels like the only explanation for why the bulk of it was left to Sandy.

[Quagsire]

Big fan of Suburbs, not much so one of Barrels. Especially not a fan of six whole pain elementals in one long, wide corridor full of aforementioned barrels. Dick move.

[Helm]

Sandy Petersen has a storied extra-videogame history that rounds out his valuable contributions to id, he had a different sense of humor, more life experience than the rest of the younger company, had a big hand in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game which in certain ways carries more cultural cache than his Doom contributions themselves, he even had a story with Microprose that is not insignificant (Sword of the Samurai is one of the best games I've played on EGA actually) before jumping on to this stuff. I don't love every Sandy map in terms of gameplay, but every Sandy map created new concepts of what you could do with Doom (II) that a thousand younger mappers inherited the tropes of, scrutinized, inverted them.

Doom II's take on hell is terrible, it's a design concession to a limited engine. That's what I thought when I was 15. Now I look back at what is achieved with really limited means in Doom II... the level design could have literally felt like an 'Doom 1 Add-on'. I realize now it takes a real design and narrative talent to show off a lot of new concepts in Doom without actually getting meaningful engine extensions, there's so much to learn from that.
 

[Maximum Matt]

Sandy didn't f around when it came to mappige

[TheSlipgateStudios]

Sandy did a splendid job overall, but his biggest contribution is on another game, Quake, making the best episode in the game: The Elder World!

[Faceman2000]

22 hours ago, TheSlipgateStudios said:

Sandy did a splendid job overall, but his biggest contribution is on another game, Quake, making the best episode in the game: The Elder World!

I’m glad to hear someone feels the same: I’ve seen so much hate for Sandy’s episode, and I thought it was easily the best. He took better advantage of the 3D environment’s ability to create nightmarish worlds and he utilized some of the tougher enemies better too in my opinion.

[indigotyrian]

Petersen gets a lot of slag from Doom fans and its a real shame. He really has contributed a lot and I think he does good work. It's kind of shitty that he's been turned into a punchline and a punching bag for John Romero.

Edited May 14, 2023 by segfault

[Doomkid]

Even in the Sandy maps I’m not super fond of, there’s usually at least one great idea in there. In Nirvana, the idea of having a massive health stash in one area that you come back to, rather than being scattered through the map, is a unique idea.
 

Personally, when I started that map as a kid and saw SO many Medikits, I was just thinking “oh no…. What warrants all these…”. There was zero payoff sadly, but still, it was a cool concept and a cool sensation. If the map had even slightly lived up to the danger implied by all that health at the start, it would have been awesome.

 

Then there’s maps like Tricks n’ Traps and Barrels O’ Fun that I thought were awesome then, still solid now, and will defend with my dying breath.

 

Sandy loved presenting the player with a TON of something you’d never seen in high numbers prior - a ton of doors, a ton of barrels, a ton of medikits.. It contributed to an overwhelming feeling to see that kind of thing suddenly after always being handed out in moderation prior. It’s just one of his many gimmicks, but those gimmicks are the same reason I find Doom 2 more memorable on the whole than Doom 1 despite being mostly uglier and having worse music.

[kwc]

Sandy had a remarkably short time to build a large number of levels, and it is definitely evident in his output. I would consider a lot of his level's designs to be very "first pass" blockout style. It is within that, however, that you can plainly see that these designs have pretty solid foundations. Whether it's high level concepts like "What if the level looked like a hand" in Slough of Despair, or "What if I make a city level" in Suburbs, or low level mechanic-based stuff like a collections of discrete puzzles in Tricks 'n' Traps, or a single scenario that begs the player to induce infighting in Fortress of Mystery. 
A lot of Sandy's output comes off as half baked, but if you were to look at these for what they are, the potential behind most of his levels sits on foundationally strong level design. 

Unfortunately, one cannot ship alongside their levels and tell the player what they were "trying to do", so it makes sense why they get the reception they typically do. Half baked still comes off as half baked.

Edited May 14, 2023 by kwc

[Individualised]

I'm still convinced that (the level we know as) Fortress of Mystery (It's not even consistent in it's level slot across versions) wasn't meant to be in the game and was put there as a last minute replacement for another level. It seems similar to the test levels.

Edited May 14, 2023 by Individualised

["JL" was too short]

1 hour ago, kwc said:

Unfortunately, one cannot ship alongside their levels and tell the player what they were "trying to do", so it makes sense why they get the reception they typically do. Half baked still comes off as half baked. 

I would suggest that even if Doom II had somehow managed to include a commentary track from Sandy Petersen explaining what the heck was going on with half his levels, the consumer would still be entitled to disgruntlement at paying retail prices for half-baked content.

Trying to figure out how harshly to critique level designers in the mid-90s is always a rough needle to thread.  I was very recently watching a play-through of Hexen II and marveling at how simplistic some of the brushwork was, and how crappy the lighting and texture alignment was in places, in ways that seem hard to imagine not leaping off the screen at the casual observer even in 1997. 

[DNSKILL5]

Maybe I’m not as critical as some when it comes to the finer details of level design but I personally never had an issue with Doom 2’s level design whatsoever. 

[kwc]

17 minutes ago, jerrysheppy said:

I would suggest that even if Doom II had somehow managed to include a commentary track from Sandy Petersen explaining what the heck was going on with half his levels, the consumer would still be entitled to disgruntlement at paying retail prices for half-baked content.

Haha, that's an excellent point. It's a bit of a shame that has to be the case because I'd argue no work is ever really done and a lot ends up cut, kinda wish consumers understood this a bit more with games. It's not their responsibility to anyway, I suppose.
 

17 minutes ago, jerrysheppy said:

Trying to figure out how harshly to critique level designers in the mid-90s is always a rough needle to thread.  I was very recently watching a play-through of Hexen II and marveling at how simplistic some of the brushwork was, and how crappy the lighting and texture alignment was in places, in ways that seem hard to imagine not leaping off the screen at the casual observer even in 1997. 

I'm sure people pointed it out back when Hexen 2 released (those who had the patience to get far enough into it, of course ;)), however I imagine the lighting and detail of textures simply being observable captured the first-order of people's attentions, and the scrutiny came later. This sort of things makes me think of what elements of games today are we overlooking that our collective future-hindsight will find distracting or crappy.

The bottom line when talking about Sandy levels, I think for me, is that the criticism toward his output indicates how much further we have come at Doom level design as a community. It is not unwarranted to look at a Sandy level critically and identify the places in which it came short, I suppose I always feel compelled to put that little asterisk by his work as a reminder of the context surrounding it (temporal, hindsight, familiarity, etc.) Maybe this is "apologism"?

Edited May 15, 2023 by kwc

[LexiMax]

The Citadel is one of my favorite maps in Doom 2, and my headcanon is that it was a D&D map turned into a Doom level.

 

Edited May 15, 2023 by LexiMax

[Chocolate_Doomer]

Not a big fan of Doom's third chapter, but I will admit that Mt. Eberus is a map who'se design I enjoy.

Back when I first played the game on DOSbox, I thought that the quasi open-world map was a neat concept, and I actually enjoyed the level!

[Ludi]

The Citadel is such a based map in terms of nonlinearity and creativity that it makes up for how rough some of Sandy's less successful experiments were. Downtown isn't really that bad (outside of the ridiculous mega-armor secret) and Nirvana is way over-hated. 

Edited May 15, 2023 by Ludi

[Lila Feuer]

The Shores of Hell is my favorite episode from Doom 1 so yeah he's based.

[Ludi]

As much as I will dog on some on some of Sandy's less good maps, I would be so stoked to see him make an episode for Doom II or something like that. I would play that in a heartbeat.

[Mr. Freeze]

It's still so surreal to see the guy who made Call of Cthulhu, one of my favorite TTRPGs ever, as a part of one of my favorite game series ever. Man's doing all the sidequests. 

[ApprihensivSoul]

I typically consider Sandy as a man with his priorities straight. Where alot of maps were converted Tom Hall maps (something which needs to be studied more,) he found a way to make them fit. Where they weren't, he found ways to make things new. He utterly (read, not even resembled,) the polish and challenge of Romero, even at his peak, but Romero is a storyteller, where Sandy is a writer.

 

I've been working over Sandy's levels in a project for my own use lately, and if he had had one or two people with an eye for detail and challenge on follow-up duty, I think we'd be regarding them as among the best. 

Here's how I think of it: If we had had the roles switched, I fully believe Doom have been alot less fun. I fully wish we had had far more Romero maps in D1 and 2, but in the time constraints we had, Sandy was the right person for the job when it came to quantity. Perhaps rough, but certainly memorable and distinct.