3-Tech (VRGL_3T.WAD)

3-TECH
by Vick "Virgil the Doom Poet" Bobkov

Ol' Maligheri wasn't much of a community project guy beyond his work with Plutonia 2, but he did try to get in on a few contests during his active period. One of these was 10 Sectors, where Vick had the faint distinction of being picked for the top 32 leftovers collection, 10 Sectors 2. The other considerably less popular contest nonetheless had him rubbing elbows with Erik Alm and Doug Merrill and might also have been the genesis of his Sam Woodman bromance. Though The Metabolist ultimately collected the results as the One Week Mapping Contest collection in 2001, Virgil saw fit to publish his one entry on its own during the same year. The fancifully-titled 3-Tech is a MAP01 replacement for Boom-compatible source ports.

Marine Army 1 (M_ARMY1.WAD)

MARINE ARMY 1
by Vick "Virgil the Doom Poet" Bobkov

When I downloaded this, there were a few givens. It had a huge warning label at the top of the accompanying file specifying, among other thing, that M_ARMY1 (a MAP01 replacement released in 2001) was designed for ZDoom and had neither solo or multi-player functions. The author attempted to shroud it under the cloak of experimentation and even went so far as to command a lack of criticism. All this, and for what? A "nice surprise?" The /idgames comments were characteristically descriptive and the information offered by Virgil himself was coy, to say the least. My imagination conjured the image of some sort of scripted ZDoom event not unlike the opening of Doom 64 where a complement of marines takes on some of Hell's finest.

AfterDoom 2: Deep Space Pirsuit (ADSP.WAD)

Virgil released a number of PWADs as part of his "appetizer" series (Black and White, Dark Castle, Ash to Ash) while trying to talk up his big project, the main course. As far as I can tell, though, Vick never actually finished it; fair Euterpe withdrew her favor and all we have left is the 2001 pre-release of AfterDoom 2: Deep Space Pirsuit. ([sic].) While the teaser only includes thirteen Doom II levels out of the planned thirty-two, I think that I have a pretty good feeling of how the finished ASDP would play out. Oh dear goodness do I know what the rest was going to be like.

Void and Rainbow (RAINBOW*.PK3)

VOID AND RAINBOW
by "Serious_MOod"

Serious_MOod started an authorial career on the unassuming, orthogonal Dark Side of Deimos in 2013. While S_M's following releases weren't staunchly traditional, neither were they wildly divergent from the typical Doom experience, especially when you consider that the alpha textures utilized in Beta Labs and BLABS2 have become a recognized theme in its own right. Color me surprised, among other things, with Void and Rainbow. It's a single level release for GZDoom published in 2017, featuring running and jumping and fighting and humping. Well, mostly the middle two, plus a healthy dash of Roy G. Biv.

Beta Labs 2 (BLABS2.WAD)

There's always been some level of interest in Doom's pre-release history and it's reponsible for a fair bit of inspiration for projects in the community. The successful ones borrow the assets and then make regular maps in their own particular idioms (Favillesco, Alpha Accident) while the failures try to fulfill the promise of Tom Hall's Doom Bible. If you're not going to catch a fish, though, you might as well not catch a big fish. Serious_MOod helmed a release from the former category, 2015's Beta Labs, and recently followed it up with the similarly-titled sequel, BLABS2, in 2017. It's a five-level minisode for limit-removing ports, spanning E1M1 through E1M5, concluding on an end credits map in E1M6.