SQUARES
by Costa Lappas
Squares, a single level released for Doom II in 1995, has earned a place in community history for two reasons. It was one of the earliest slaughtermaps in a sense that's distinct from levels containing slaughter-like encounters (i.e. the teleport ambush featured in "Suburbs") while connoting some sort of challenge. It's also one of the pillars upon which Huy Pham's Deus Vult was built, a fact that's more obvious in the release of the alternate / early version Deus Vult Zero. In the .TXT, author Costa Lappas advertised it as "extremely hard if not impossible to complete on the hard level". A quick look at the DooMed Speed Demo Archives shows at least seven players to have successfully cut their teeth on 1SQUARES while playing on Ultra-Violence and one finishing the map on Nightmare, so it's certainly not insurmountable.
