Few game communities are as obsessed with the vagaries of the development process as Doom's. At this point, we've seen enough beta and alpha materials for an editorial reconstruction on par with The History of Middle-Earth. I've seen plenty of projects come and go that derive some amount of influence from the alpha / beta materials. The ones that are dead-set on using the Doom Bible as their design document have not fared well. The others grab the unused resources and then make something that's like Doom, but not, as reflected by the sensibilities of the authors. Beta Labs is one of these latter projects, a joint effort by Serious_MOod and Chaingunner, two crazy dudes from Russia. Released in 2015, it's an E1 replacement to be played in limit-removing ports, but its architecture and design are far from being a carbon copy of Knee Deep in the Dead.
