Diabolos (DIABOLOS.WAD)

DIABOLOS

by T. Elliot Cannon

aka "Myscha the Sled Dog"

A lot of Doom WAD authors from the '90s went on to work in the gaming industry. We're very familiar with names like Dario and Milo Casali, Tom Mustaine, Sverre Kvernmo... but less so with dudes like T. Elliot Cannon. TEC authored eight of the original Unreal's 38 single-player maps but started out cutting his teeth on Doom II. If you aren't much of a WAD archaeologist then Cannon's name will probably be unfamiliar. His biggest legacy as far as community recognition is concerned is as one of the founding fathers of The Talosian Incident, but he also authored some deathmatch levels, including contributions to Team TNT's Bloodlands and Grievance. Myscha--his handle is based on the name of one of his beloved dogs--didn't end up authoring any maps for TALOSIAN, but if he had, then we'd have some very different things to say about it, based on Diabolos. This is a MAP01 replacement for Doom II, released in 1996.

I'm not entirely sure what the chronology of his singleplayer works is. Iditarod, Odyssey, and Diabolos were all uploaded to /idgames around the same time, apparently a Compuserve migration. My initial assumption was that Iditarod was created first, followed by Odyssey, and I'm pretty sure that Diabolos came last, based on the .TXTs included with the first two. It seems as though each of the Odyssey levels was crafted and released individually before being bundled together, though, so it seemed equally likely that Myscha cranked out Iditarod in anticipation of Quake and bundled his previous levels as Odyssey, in the process making a copy-paste error in the .TXT header while using his Iditarod .TXT as a template for Odyssey. After looking at the .TXTs for some of his deathmatch PWADs that I was given after initially writing this review, it definitely seems that his deathmatch SLEDDOG came first, with Iditarod in hot pursuit, followed by the production of the individual levels of Odyssey, all (or most) of this happening in '95. I'm purely guessing here, but it seems to me that Diabolos was penned for the occasion, maybe as a sort of Christening for his maiden /idgames voyage. Cannon would only release one more single-player level, Pazuzu, about a month later, before he was snagged for Unreal. It's a shame that he left Doom so firmly behind, but I can't blame him when 1) he was getting paid, and 2) as an architect, I assume that he found it far more satisfying to build three-dimensional spaces in an engine that allowed for room-over-room.

Ordinarily, I'd have played Iditarod and Odyssey first, but I didn't figure out that they were probably created before Diabolos until after I'd played through it. Cannon didn't include a story to go alongside it, but based on the very barebones details included in Odyssey, he was more of an environmental storyteller, making him a natural fit for Unreal's lonely adventurescapes. What he deigns to tell us is that Diabolos is Greek for "devil". There's a broader theme across his levels in between all the sled dog-related titles, selectively referencing antiquity cultures like Mesopotamia, Maya, and Egypt. While a cool detail of his works, I don't think that you'd be able to make any historical inferences based on the architecture alone. Cannon didn't use any custom textures beyond a starry sky and it doesn't look like his level design utilized recognizable megastructures as seen from the outside.

Myscha claims that this level is very difficult. He's not joking, but there's a peculiar bottleneck that occurs early on in the map, a room with a shoulder-height catwalk. At some point while traversing this room you are going to end up releasing two pain elementals and chances are you're going to be very low on ammo. Now, there are a lot of resources that you can take advantage of if you know where to get them, including a box of shotgun shells, a combat shotgun, and a soul sphere, not to mention the ammo laying around the bottom of the trenches, but if you're playing this for the first time then you're likely to get wrecked.

The pain elemental bottleneck is the most awkward of any of the situations that you're going to encounter, I think. Once you pass this, and supposing that you tease out the soul sphere / super shotgun, you'll be back to relatively normal cramped combat. Well, apart from the three revenant crew on the north side of the northeast balcony, I guess. And the narrow ledge staircase that's ringed by shotgun guys that are perfectly happy to take cheap shots at you while you climb up. And numerous instances of monsters teleporting one by one behind the player. And the hilarious chaingun-guy-on-the-other-side-of-the-health-pack-shelf trap. I suppose that some people might not enjoy slow-dancing with a Baron in a small pit. ...You know what? I find this to be a VERY fun '96 level, but it's hard to recommend to run and gun disciples of the '1X era.

Cannon's level design utilizes verticality. The author makes a big deal of it in his .TXT and is very careful to start the player in a position where they must jump down, emphasizing Doom's three-dimensional space. Several progression points in the map require that the player use a lift on a freestanding pillar that sets them up to jump down to a ledge. It doesn't feel quite as important as Myscha makes it out to be, but the level certainly isn't flat, and most of the lifts that you ride up are designed so that you can jump right back off of them. In fact, this is the only way to escape from two out of the three pits in the pain elemental catwalk chamber.

As this is from '96, you can expect to be flummoxed by the way in which you're required to move through the map if you aren't crypto-brained. You'll eventually get to a point in the northeast wing where you flip a switch and nothing seems to have happened. Just remember that there was a big dais in the center of the level hub with a blue skull key on it. The west wing seems to dead-end with you opening up teleporters to the outer areas with the mirrored Baphomet icons, but if you take a look at the automap then you'll see that one of the shrines is built differently. The only question is what you have to do in order to open the shrine.

Diabolos is just a plain good-looking level. It's a brick and metal temple-outpost with essential architectural details that Cannon included in order to keep it out of the realm of the impossible. Features like the large supporting columns and braces in the ceiling in the first major room serve to anchor it with an air of reality. The northeast portion of the map is full of micro-details related to drainage holes and blood but I also really enjoyed the red and yellow key placement, the two of them enshrined in fire and blood, respectively. The yellow key was a little hard to grab in ZDoom so you may want to play this in a port that replicates vanilla Doom's bump grab properties. I'd also like to give a shoutout to those cute little sconces that hold supplies like bullet boxes.

Diabolos is the first of Myscha's Doom works that I've experienced but a long, long time ago I played through the original Unreal campaign (my Voodoo 3dfx graphics card came with it and gosh did I enjoy it). It's tough for me to trace a line directly from Diabolos to, say, Chizra, especially with so many intervening years, but it's easy to see that Cannon pointed the way toward environmental level design with his work and obviously looked forward to a player character with more vertical mobility. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what he did firsthand in Odyssey as well as his experimental "Doom II progression compressed into 10 maps" Iditarod. If you're a Doom antiquarian such as myself, then you should definitely load up Diabolos.

DIABOLOS

LET THE DEVIL TAKE YOU OVER

DIABOLOS