Iditarod (IDITAROD.WAD)

T. Elliot Cannon made something like seventeen single-player levels for Doom II and eleven deathmatch arenas before being recommended to Epic Games by John Anderson aka Dr. Sleep and being hired for Unreal. Both Iditarod and Odyssey were originally released on Compuserve, I believe, which makes an absolute timeline difficult to pin down, given that Compuserve shuttered its doors more than 20 years ago. I originally believed that Cannon made the individual levels of Odyssey first and then cobbled together Iditarod during the anticipation of Quake. After experiencing Iditarod first-hand, I wasn't so sure. Both PWADs were absolutely created by the same person, but I found it difficult to believe that Cannon built the carefully-crafted Odyssey first and then cranked out Iditarod. Looking through packages of his Deathmatch levels that I obtained after I initially wrote these reviews, it would seem that the true order of production would be SLEDDOG, IDITAROD, some of Odyssey, and then Grisha, all of this occurring in 1995. Both SP PWADs were uploaded to /idgames alongside Diabolos on April 7th of 1996. Iditarod replaces MAP01 through MAP10 of Doom II.

One Bloody Night (BLDNIGHT.WAD)

Erik Alm is largely regarded as the WADfather of the Doom community's direction in combat due to his double-shot of the much loved Scythe and then, later, Scythe II. The third episode of Scythe generally comes as a thunderclap to folks who love its shorter, "cute" levels, but anyone familiar with Alm's work could see it coming from a mile away. Alm's fondness for both short, warm-up type levels as well as bone-crushing challenge encounters is evident in his contributions to Sam Woodman's ONEWEEK and it's similarly mirrored here, in One Bloody Night. This is a nine-level episode for vanilla Doom II that replaces MAP01-MAP09, released in the middle of 2002.

Abyssal Speedmapping Session 7 (ABYSPED7.WAD)

The Doom community has generally had semi-regular speedmapping events in one form or another but in my mind they seemed to get new life in 2013. One of the longer-running institutions--now defunct--is The Abyssal Speedmapping Sessions. The Abyss was a forum that ended up receiving some of the now defunct NewDoom regulars, and Obsidian wanted to bring them together to make some Doom maps. The first ABYSPED didn't have the greatest turnout but they kept it strong, eventually ending at a grand total of 69 iterations. ABYSPED7 is the seventh Abyssal Speedmapping Session, organized in June of 2014. A bunch of regulars from past sessions showed up as well as some, err, new blood, to put out a grand total of 14 levels, replacing MAP01-MAP14.

Tangerine Nightmare (TN.WAD)

The French Doom Community celebrated in 2024 with a huge win, finally pushing out a release candidate of their Necromantic Thirst megaWAD after years of development. They didn't get there by just chipping away at their mega-project, though. franckFRAG and WH-Wilou84 fostered a creative community through their 3 Heures d'Agonie speedmapping project, which got sequels in 3HA2 and 3HA3. This seemed to activate authors like Datacore, who has since become one of the most productive authors of their subset of the Doom diaspora. Tangerine Nightmare started as a Datacore-led project with an emphasis on an orange color scheme. At some point, and I can't exactly tell by reading the development thread, franckFRAG sort of organically became the lead. What started as a vanilla adventure became a (mostly) limit-removing episode for Doom II, finalized in early 2018, replacing MAP01-MAP10.

007: License to Spell DooM (007LTSD.WAD)

Stephen Clark was something of a self-appointed vanilla advocate, a dude believed that OG Doom and Doom II were capable of great things that could close some of the gap between them and Quake and subsequent FPS games. He made Operation: Lightning, a Doom II episode that deliberately evoked Quake II with its dropships and had carefully arranged vanilla sector machinery to create effects like exploding reactors, flooding vessels, and collapsing bases. Then he took his lessons learned and authored Fragport, a 2001 "21st Century Doom 2 Episode" that was actually a megaWAD and which toned down some of OP-LITE2's worst excesses. Then he pushed Heretic into uncomfortably ingenious places with the Shadowcaster episode in 2002. This is also the year where he learned to stop worrying and love the ZDoom. Enter 007: License to Spell DooM, an E4 replacement for The Ultimate Doom.

Ultimate Doom Project Leftovers (UDPL.WAD)

Memfis established a reputation as a crafter of levels that would be fine openers for megaWADs because, well, he perennially started larger projects and stalled after the first level or so. Hence Ultimate Doom Project Leftovers, an archival release from 2012 that was published to /idgames in 2013. There is something morbidly amusing in UDPL as a demonstration of why he was pigeonholed into the "XXM1" / "MAP01" characterization, given that it replaces the first level of each of Ultimate Doom's four episodes. If you are looking for a more "substantial" experience, then UDPL will probably not make a convert of you. Its levels are short and not even classically difficult, insofar as how they differ from the standards set by id's own E1M1, E2M1, E3M1, and E4M1. They are assumed to be vanilla-compatible but may require a limit-removing source port.

Shadowcaster (SHADOW.WAD)

From 2000 to 2002, Stephen Clark (aka The Ultimate DooMer) had created an episode for the original Doom and then converted it to Doom II (Operation: Lightning) and crafted his epic, 21st-century Doom II megaWAD (Fragport). His next target for his own brand of experimentation and modernization was everyone's favorite Doom clone, Heretic. Shadowcaster is an episode 5 replacement for Shadows of the Serpent Riders, released in September of 2002. I'm not up on my Raven Software lore but I don't think that there were any major engine changes between the original release and the free expansion that would have necessitated using the E5 slot. Presumably, this was more of an aesthetic decision where the author could avoid having to contend with a clashing intermission screen.

Operation: Lightning (OP-LITE2.WAD)

Stephen Clark, aka The Ultimate Doomer, made his debut splash in 2001 with his solo megaWAD, Fragport, but he had previously made an eight-map Doom episode called Operation: Lightning. Somewhere down the line he converted it to Doom II and added three more levels. While it was finished mid-2000, Clark didn't publish it until early 2002, once he saw some positive feedback for Fragport. OP-LITE2 replaces MAP01-MAP12 with the final map merely being an episode bumper to keep you from coasting into the regular Doom II campaign. It is as far as I know vanilla-compatible and should function correctly in the source port of your choice.

OTTAWAU.WAD ver 0.9 (OTTAWA09.WAD)

Jean-Serge Gagnon released and updated his Forest Valley PWAD through 1994-1995. The final publication included a teaser for his next subject - the Ottawa University that must have been near and dear to his heart. OTTAWAU was never properly finished. Gagnon had planned out level names for the entire episode but in spite of the "ver 0.9" descriptor, the set only spans E1M1-E1M5 and E1M9. E1M5 only has the starting area built and it's apparent after perusing README.1ST that Gagnon and his team were not even finished with the maps that are included in OTTAWAU. This more or less final version was published in March of '95, a few days after the last version of FOREST.

No Hope For Life Episode 1: Back to the Fight (NHFL.WAD)

The road to Hell is paved with E1 replacements. No Hope For Life is a joint venture by three fixtures of Doom's source port boom: Andy Leaver, Jay Trent, and Pablo Dictter. Andy had already done a small set of E1 levels, bitebwad, in 2000. Jay participated in the 2001 Doom Center E1 Mapping Contest (judged by the man himself, John Romero), clinching 2nd place out of fifteen entries. Pablo had published a ton of levels by this point, many of which are no longer publicly available, and was working on an E4 replacement with Karthik Abhiram, Tobias Munch, Damian Lee, and Joel Murdoch - The Ninth Gate. tNG never fully panned out, though, whereas we have 2001's No Hope For Life Episode 1: Back to the Fight available to download on /idgames... admittedly some two years after its initial, official release. The authors suggest ZDoom but it should work in any limit-removing port, the primary concern being the dreaded visplane overlord.

Blackness (BLKNS.WAD)

Samuel Villarreal kicked off his career with two sizable releases. DSV was a megaWAD that could be played back in each of the then-popular source ports. A sizable portion of its levels were based on Doom 64 maps, ever near and dear to Kaiser's heart. Blackness was released at the exact same time in 2000 and appears to have been intended for a bigger run. This second installment of the DSV series, however, only came out to a five-level hub with a final boss map. The author described it as "abandoned" and a parody of Hexen. I can agree with the first statement but I doubt whether it was initially intended to satirize or poke fun at Hexen. If so, then it would be amusing considering how much of Hexen is woven into Doom 64's DNA. This set was explicitly designed for ZDoom; owing to its relatively early place in the port's history, it is not compatible with later versions of (G)ZDoom. Jumping is absolutely required.

Subversion (SUB-EP.WAD)

Pablo Dictter was a community fixture during the source port boom, releasing a slurry of small maps and also contributing to a couple of larger products, chiefly Alien Vendetta. He was a contributor to several different original Doom productions as well. One of them was No Hope For Life Episode One: Back to the Fight. The E1 replacement had PD working alongside Community Chest regular Andy Leaver as well as Jay Trent, now of The Becoming fame. Somewhere during the process of building NHFL, three of Pablo's levels were cut as they had too many darn maps. Dictter picked the castoffs up, dusted them off, wired them three more levels, and sent them to /idgames in July of 2001 as Subversion. This is a partial Episode 3 replacement for the Ultimate Doom spanning E3M4-E3M9.

lilith (lilith.pk3)

In 2019 I wrote a review for Mark Klem's CRINGE! episode. I namedropped lilith while talking about stuff like glitches and Metroid's bug-derived "hidden worlds". I had not seen much of this 2017 episode outside of screenshots and maybe a video or .GIF that I only half-remember. I knew that it was going to be weird and visually noisy. It would not be wrong, however, to say that I had very little idea of what lilith actually feels like to play. I believe that all PWADs are made to be experienced but there is an inescapable essence to this 2017 Cacoward winner that cannot be communicated over a consumable gif or pithy video. I would even go so far as to say that you should play it with as little foreknowledge as possible.

Titan 1024 (TITA1024.WAD)

It feels like a long time ago but, back in 2014, the author of the Titan series pointed me toward his then recent entry: Titan 1024, a sort of re-imagining of the then ten-year old levels within the 1024 limit. I said that I would do one better and play both the original as well as Titan 2 before checking out TITA1024. Well, after six and a half years, here we are! Sorry for the wait, Ixnatifual. Titan 1024 is a ten-level episode for Doom II to be played in GZDoom. It was originally released in 2012, some three and a half years after his last publication. The author notes that jumping is acceptable, but crouching is forbidden. The number of situations where the former comes up is... not big, but try not to forget that it's an option.

Doom 64: The Lost Levels (DOOM64.WAD)

Samuel Villarreal has had one of Doom's longest and storied love affairs. The object of his affection? Doom 64. Kaiser started out converting its levels or otherwise using them as inspiration for part of his 2000 megaWAD debut, DSV. (Not to forget about the more polished reconstructions in his Console Doom.) He spearheaded the Herculean effort to recreate the entire experience in Doomsday for 2003's Absolution TC. 2011 saw the official release of the next phase of his passion project, the reverse-engineered Doom64 EX source port. It's been clear that some of the developers of Doom 2016 have a lot of love for the largely forgotten '97 release so it's cool to see all this hard work pay off in an official re-release for both consoles and PC using Kaiser's KEX engine, used for some other Night Dive re-publications, as the base. There's slightly more to this story, though - The Lost Levels.

Hellscape (DHS-LUTZ.WAD)

A large portion of Chris's inimitable career has been spent taking classic Doom themes and rendering them in his particular idiom. This began with his debut, Inferno, but extends to Phobos: Anomaly Reborn as well as several aborted attempts at a similar E2 scenario. Doom the Way id Did's "Lake of Fire" and No End In Sight's "Poison Control" were more id-oriented but the latter's "The Blood Beneath" is a considerable E4 take. I dunno how long Lutz had kicked around this particular idea but The Dying End, its MAP29, was released individually in 2007. Not as a teaser or anything; as far as I know there was zero indication that Hellscape was in development until its public unveiling in 2015. This Doom II episode was finally released in 2017 and replaces MAP21-MAP30, Chris's least favorite run of levels in the original campaign. The bare-minimum compatibility is Boom / MBF but the author suggests using a port with more complex Z-clipping, e.g. ZDoom.

Dissolution (DISTION.WAD)

Bryant (aka "Gunrock") and Kevin ("The Solution") Robinson made Project Slipgate some time in 2001. It was a Quake-themed outing that explored the cool but sparingly-used (at least in the original campaign) "Complex" scheme as well as darker, disturbing fortresses. It also had something of a Doom 64 feel due to colored lighting, heavy atmosphere, and other aspects. The brothers decided to revisit the aesthetic with a side-story, released in 2002. Dissolution is yet another episode for ZDoom. It replaces MAP01-MAP07, though it's worth noting that the opener is a cinematic sweep of a fortress and neither requires nor takes any player input.

Project Slipgate (SLIPGATE.WAD)

Bryant and Kevin are the brothers Robinson. You might know them as Team Demise but I wasn't aware that they had a website until I started poking around for this review. They more commonly go by Gunrock and The Solution and they generally make levels for feature-rich source ports. (G)ZDoom, Vavoom, you know the type. Unraveling their development history has been a challenge because they are fond of going back and remastering their old works while eliminating the older versions. Where their debut, quake2doom, tried to bring the magic of Quake II to Doom, Project Slipgate worked with idtech2's flagship title. The most recent version replaces MAP01-MAP11, the same number but not slots as the original 2002 (2001?) release. It's built for ZDoom but the authors are fond enough of GZDoom's special effects that they recommend using it if you can.

Return to Hadron Episode 2 - The Collider's New Clothes (HADRONE2.WAD)

Matt Powell aka "cannonball" made a splash in 2012 dabbling in both Slaughterfest 2012 as well as some scattered Ultimate Doom works. One of these - his speedy episode 1 - eventually became 2013's ConC.E.R.N.ed, a megaWAD replacing the original trilogy. 2014 drove E4 fetishists wild with Thy Flesh Turned Into a Draft Excluder. DRAFTEX was a leap forward in his craft and while it wasn't meant to be appended to CONCERN he passed the savings on to the player in 2015's Return to Hadron. E1 revisited the locale of his megaWAD's first episode while changing some things up to suit his developing gameplay sensibilities. In 2017 we were fortunate to receive the second part, The Collider's New Clothes. This one replaces The Shores of Hell and should play in any limit-removing source port.

Counterattack (MEK-CATK.WAD)

I have played a handful of Mechadon levels but they were all within the context of community projects. Granted, his outstanding work in larger pieces like Claustrophobia 1024 was why he was chosen as Doomworld's Mapper of the Year in 2009. A large portion - the majority, even - of Brett's material is actually created for multiplayer mapsets. This is a major aspect of his pie-in-the-sky project, Supplice. His single-player solo work is much rarer but he tends to use his powers for good, e.g. bailing out megaWADs in crisis. Counterattack is its own thing, though, a set born from his submission to the first Vinesauce Mapping Contest (this one's MAP02). The rest of the material was built bafflingly quickly and released in early 2017. There are about nine map replacements in all consisting of five normal, two utility, and two bonus. The set is meant for play in Boom compatible ports but the engine has got to pack some horsepower under the hood. It was specifically tested in PrBoom-Plus, ZDoom, GZDoom, and Eternity.