InstaDoom (INSTADM.ZIP)

INSTADOOM
by Andrew "Linguica" Stine

If you bore witness to any aspect of the InstaDoom craze back in 2015, it was probably its included add-on, Selfie Doom. Given the mod's title, it's clear that the selfie stick wasn't the original focus, but for awhile it was One Hot Topic. I was right there, too, taking a number of Doomguy selfies for the Doom WADs Tumblr until some people became especially tired of them. Like Vuvuzela Doom, the star burned bright, searing its place in the big book of Doom history as one of the more humorous footnotes, to be resurrected for a laugh when the need presents itself.

The intended attraction, I believe, was... InstaDoom, derived from Instagram. It is a collection of 40 Instagram filters, later expanded to 57 via "Instadoom DLC Pack 1", which purportedly mimicks the free filters available for the VSCO Cam application. You pick whichever filter you want, load it up with Doom, and then play and screenshot to your heart's content. The effect is achieved through the use of individual palettes and colormaps per "filter", which is why it's compatible with pretty much any Doom source port, including vanilla. That also makes it way more cumbersome than, say, taking a picture and THEN applying the filter of your choosing, but where's the fun in that?

Of course, no one is really interested in screenshotting Doom with arbitrary color "filters", much less playing it, and I suspect that that's part of the joke. I dunno if the satire will influence any Instagram users, especially given that Selfie Doom completely overshadowed the Insta portion of the package, but there's something there, I think. What is the interest in applying color filters to real pictures a la Instagram? Are the colors of reality not interesting enough on their own merits? I'd hate to take a gorgeous vista from, say, Swim With the Whales, and then ram it through a color filter as though it would be any more preferable.

Throwing all that aside, the breakout star of InstaDoom was the selfie stick mod, the aptly-named Selfie Doom. It's also amazingly vanilla compatible, using some DeHackEd trickery and - most importantly - amazing weapon sprites to simulate the act of Doomguy flippantly taking a selfie, complete with camera flash. The original incarnation replaced the BFG, and still does in non-ZDoom ports, also swapping chainsaw and BFG pickups so that you can grab it and go to town in MAP01. The execution in ZDoom replaces nothing, instead adding the selfie stick as an alternate slot 7 weapon already in your arsenal, which is a nice change to accommodate ZDoom mods. I remember running into some difficulties while trying to use the stick during Doom Vacation, and while I may never use the Selfie mod again, I appreciate the pains taken to make sure that it would be much simpler in the event that I did.

This version of Selfie Doom is dubbed the "Buddy Adding Edition" (BAE), for use in multiplayer. I can't be bothered to actually try the functionality out myself, but if you load up SELFIE.WAD and SELFIE.DEH in, say, Eternity, you can see it in action in the third demo. When Doomguy strikes his pose, the three other players showboat in their own amusing way. Another thing I discovered through the demos is that holding down the trigger keeps Doomguy in the shifty-eyes state until released, in case you need a little more time to set up the perfect shot. I guess it never occurred to me that I could, y'know, keep "firing".

Has the sun set on InstaDoom? I, uh, don't think that ship ever really left the harbor. The joy of Selfie Doom, however, has been burned from many hearts, and I know that I did a decent enough job helping it along on my Tumblr account, now preserved here. Whatever you may think of Selfie Doom, it pushed this evergreen wonder back into the public eye in a big way. Sure, a lot of those eyes were rolling, but it's good to remind the world that the Doom community is alive and well and as capable as ever of creating stuff that quickly escapes its oft-insular confines.

This post is part of a series on
Doomworld's 2015 Cacowards

The Top Ten	Best Multiplayer	Runners Up
Sunlust	Don't Be a Bitch Remastered	Doomed Space Wars
Erkattäññe	ChaosCore CTF	Crumpets
Skulldash	Best Gameplay Mod	Prime Directive
Swift Death	DoomRL Arsenal	Pinnacle of Darkness
Breach	Mordeth Award	Ol' No Name
Valiant	ChaosCore CTF	32in24-14
50 Shades of Graytall	Mockaward
Sheer Poison	InstaDoom
dead.wire	Mapper of the Year
Return to Hadron	dannebubinga