Gestalt666's Town of Heresy (666TOWN.WAD)

GESTALT666'S

TOWN OF HERESY

by John "Gestalt666" Bye

By mid-1997, John was pretty much done with Doom. He would still contribute a few maps to The Darkening E1 but he had gone over to the Quake side after seeing Black Star Coven's first team release, The Talosian Incident. When the time came to open a relief valve, then, he opted to design something for a different idtech game - Heretic. Thus became Gestalt666's Town of Heresy, an E1M1 replacement. It's Bye's final solo release and caps off a career characterized by atmosphere more than anything in its level design. He also had a wild, unpredictable streak with bits like the computerized domain of CyberDoom and "The Living Maze" from Cygnus IV. 666TOWN is - for the most part - unlike any of these things.

Sacrifice (Doom Tutorial) (SACRIF.ZIP)

SACRIFICE

A DOOM TUTORIAL

by John "Gestalt666" Bye

I made some assumptions on Bye's back catalog based on the way in which they were uploaded to the archive but I've come to find out that Sacrifice was actually his first published level. In 1996 he converted it to a Doom II map and then offered it up to the community along with a slightly worked-over version as a sort of Goofus / Gallant pairing. His intent was to illustrate some freshman foibles in order for beginners to have a better idea on how to handle part of PWADcraft's essential window dressing. This is the equivalent of polishing a turd due to the source material but John does show in a few instances that a bare minimum of work can breathe a bit of life into stale scenes.

The Subway (C4SUBWAY.WAD)

THE SUBWAY

by John "Gestalt666" Bye

When Bye released The Park in mid-'96 his Cygnus IV episode was just beginning. The author had despaired of the amount of effort that he had poured into Magnum Opus and was focusing on shorter levels. With the publishing of The Subway a few months afterward, though, his work was nearly complete; the original version would release later in September. This single map offering was a primer for the sort of level design that prospective players could expect from the entire adventure. It's a MAP09 replacement for Doom II and if you've already played CYGNUS20 then you can check out because, much like PARK, C4SUBWAY is functionally identical to the finished product. It has the same backing track, too, so you don't even get that novelty.

The Park (PARK.WAD)

THE PARK
by John J. "Spook" Bye

Bye released a handful of small, single releases before declaring his Magnum Opus, after which he vowed to stick to less time-consuming level design. The result of this three-month creative streak would outpace his previous levels in just about every aspect and result in his most accomplished solo work - Cygnus IV. Two of its maps actually saw additional publication in 1996 - apart from the not-quite-megaWAD. The Park is the first of them, being the opening level of the episode. It's a MAP01 replacement for Doom II. Spoiler alert: if you've already played the entire fourteen-level publication then this offers absolutely no mechanical differences.

Maze - BIG IS BEAUTIFUL (MAZE.WAD)

MAZE

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL

by "Spooky" John Bye

This is the second level that Bye authored and it's sort of a disappointment after having seen the conceptual promise of CyberDoom. I'm almost prefer to play his highly orthogonal lighting experiments. The title is Maze and while this accurately describes its main setpiece it fails to fully encapsulate the more banal aspects of its level design. The subtitle, BIG IS BEAUTIFUL, can be true especially when we're talking about the macrotecture that typifies high skill ceiling mapsets. Not for MAZE, though. This was originally made back in 1995 and is an E1M1 replacement for the original Doom.

The Darkening Episode 1: The Nameless Project (DARKEN.WAD)

1998 seemed to mark the death of super cool community projects for Doom. Everyone seemed to be too busy playing Quake, realizing Warren Marshall's very public fear. So imagine when The Darkening debuted its first episode in 1999, "The Nameless Project", looking very much like Doom but with a keen eye for lighting characteristic of many of these authors' earlier works. Lighting isn't the only element borrowed from Quake. It's nothing like Iikka Kernanen's ode to the big Q in Requiem, but there's a certain aesthetic clearly echoed with the use of Shub-Niggurath slipgates and the new textures that clearly shows that Doom II wasn't the only thing on the minds of this team. Still, they managed to stop boxing Shub-Niggurath long enough to put out eleven more levels for Doom II.