Trydent (TRYDENT.WAD)

TRYDENT
by Bjorn Hermans and Holger Nathrath

Bjorn Hermans and Holger Nathrath cranked out three Doom episodes early in the Doom community's history, known commonly as the Serenity trilogy. Afterward, they had two Doom II projects in progress that were never completed, Serenity For Doom II and Serenity IV. Whether the latter was to be a megaWAD or just an episode, we'll never know, but we do have a few levels that were originally designed for Serenity IV but were released independently following its death. Trydent, a MAP01 replacement published in 1995, is one such offering. As with Arachna, Hermans and Nathrath's duties are switched; here, Hermans is the mapper and Nathrath his playtester.

All Hell is Breaking Loose (ALLHELL.WAD)

Up until the advent of DeHackEd, all of the "crazy" Doom mods were basically just sprite replacements. While Obituary is sort of the grand daddy of S.T.R.A.I.N. and some of the more subtle augments, the batshit insane mods can lay claim to The Sky May Be, or more sensibly, All Hell is Breaking Loose. Released in 1996 by one Joel Huenink, with a guest map by brothers Michael (Risen) and Chris (Kamikazi) Niggel, ALLHELL is a "near Total Conversion" for Doom II, replacing MAP01 to MAP05. It changes virtually all monster behavior, tossing many of them around in DeHackEd to make new and even more threatening beasties, and revamps Doomguy's arsenal to compensate for the increased lethality of the hordes of Hell.

Arachna (ARACHNA.WAD and ARACHNA2.WAD)

ARACHNA
by Bjorn Hermans and Holger Nathrath

Bjorn Hermans and Holger Nathrath are well-known in the Doom community for their Serenity trilogy, released over '94 and '95. Their body of work outside Serenity, however, is fairly light. They were apparently in the process of converting Serenity over to Doom II as well as releasing a Serenity episode entirely for Doom II, but both projects halted. Arachna is one of the few shreds of their work left, and surprisingly, it's by Bjorn Hermans! Nathrath did all the major mapping for the Serenity trilogy, so I found it interesting to see what Hermans was capable of. It comes in two flavors, Doom and Doom II, both being released around the same time in 1995 as E3M1 and MAP01, respectively.

The Lost Episodes of Doom (JPTR_V40.WAD)

Chris Klie, one of Doom's pioneer authors, was steadily cranking out levels for the original Doom in 1994. At some point, he caught the notice of Jonathan Mendoza, who wanted to write a story and strategy guide around it. Klie, excited to have his work published in a commercial format, agreed and suggested that they include Bob Carter in the project, another early player in Doom's burgeoning mod scene whose work Klie fancied. Both authors contributed much of the publicly released WADs they'd put out at the time. Together, they became The Lost Episodes of Doom, regarded as the first "commercial" megaWAD... even though the /idgames archive makes this 1995 collection of 24 levels almost entirely shovelware.

H2H-Xmas (H2H-XMAS.WAD)

H2H-Xmas is a lot of things. It is the sequel to Xmas Doom, a small 1994 Christmas-themed minisode that detailed Doomguy as the savior of Christmas. Indeed, some of the Xmas Doom personnel contributed to H2H-Xmas, most notably Joe Wilcox of Simply Silly Software, who went on to do the most reviled Duke Nukem 3D expansion, the similarly-themed Nuclear Winter. It is also one of Doom's first community megaWADs, though it was built on the foundation of the H2HMud competition, which challenged demo recorders to test their mettle in maps built by David Swift (and a few others), led by the Head to Head (H2H) Gaming Network. H2H never really caught on, though, and the ultra-hard level pack that resulted would have languished in obscurity... were it not for H2H-Xmas.

Xmas Doom (XD1.WAD)

Joe Wilcox has enjoyed something of a monopoly over the early days of FPS add-on content. As Simply Silly Software, he's been responsible for several utilities, including the D!Zone and H!Zone frontends, later going on to produce two commercial addons for Duke Nukem 3D, the better known of which being Nuclear Winter, a Christmas-themed production that ultimately pits Duke against a mind-controlled Santa Claus who is backed by aliens and the Feminist Elven Militia. Nuclear Winter will never win a popularity contest against Duke it Out in DC and Duke Caribbean, for reasons that vary from player to player, but it wasn't even the first Christmas-themed expansion that Wilcox had a hand in.

The Enigma Episode (ENIGMA.WAD)

Of all the authors I've ever played, Jim Flynn is my favorite, and will probably remain so barring some kind of crazy Doom PWAD renaissance where people are straining to make large, complex levels that have solid themes or surreal texture and color combinations. Of course, Jim is mostly popular as one of the authors behind the Master Levels for Doom II, which brings us to an interesting point. The Enigma Episode, published back in 1995, is actually a re-release of almost all of Jim's older maps for the original Doom, painstakingly transmogrified to Doom II. I haven't played the originals, but some antiquarians were kind enough to put them on /idgames back in the mid-2000s.

Perdition's Gate research

Because I don't really have enough info to incorporate this into either the Perdition's Gate or Hell to Pay pages yet, I'm throwing something together right now because it's somewhat interesting info regarding the topic and I'm going to be touching on it in the near future. I dunno, it could be feature of its own, maybe something like Connections, but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently interested in other authors yet to really pull something together.

This is a little bit of puzzle-piecing I've cobbled together through independent research. Glancing through .TXTs, searching for author info on the archives, etc.. Tom Mustaine mentions on his website/blog that the Hell to Pay project was headed by an individual named Jim Elson, and that Elson along with Jimmy "Evilgenius" Sieben and Mackey "Avatar" McCandlish helped push Perdition's Gate out the door. Now, glancing through the .TXT file for Perdition's Gate, I come across the following credit list.


Lich: Artwork, Design, Production Manager, Sound
Tom Mustaine: Artwork, Design, Music, Production Assistant
ArchDaemon: Design, Programming
Mackey McCandlish: Artwork, Design
Pavel Hodek: Artwork
Bob Mustaine: Design
Mark Gundy: Marketing
Anavrin: Music
Kristin Weeks: Computer Voice
Jaroslaw Wolski: Artwork


Now, for some connecting. I've actually reviewed one of Pavel Hodek's works, Galaxia. He's also a fairly prolific author in the archives, particularly with deathmatch mapping, though he's worked single player into all the levels (as far as I have seen). Hodek was also one of the primary authors behind H2H-Xmas (which I will be reviewing in the near future), supplying 8 of the 32 maps of the series. It started as a branch off from a small mapset derived from the Head-to-Head International Doomers Competition (read more about it here on Doomworld, the sixth paragraph of ).

The original H2HMud team: Dave Swift aka "Mud", Jimmy Sieben aka "Evil Genius", Greg Lewis aka "Tree", Mark Gundy aka "Mag", and Jim Elson aka H2HMud. From what I gathered in a .TXT of a map by Jimmy Sieben, Elson ran the original H2H competition, and incidentally headed the H2H-Xmas project given his status as "Quality Control & final assembley". So, this establishes Elson as having project leadership skills, and working together with both Jimmy Sieben and Pavel Hodek, as well as Mark Gundy. I'd say H2H-Xmas planted the seeds of the Hell to Pay project, at least.

Here's something that confused me. Perdition's Gate lists neither Jim Elson nor Jimmy Sieben as having worked on it, yet we can clearly see from Tom Mustaine's own recollections that they did. Two people credited for "Design" in Perdition's Gate are using handles, "Lich" and "Archdaemon". From this, we can deduce that Jim Elson, indicated by Tom Mustaine as the project manager and already established as a project leader , used the handle of Lich for Perdition's Gate for reasons unknown. We can also deduce that Jimmy Sieben used the handle of ArchDaemon for Perditon's Gate, again for reasons unknown. Actually, hold it.

Final Doom was released May 31, 1996, though I understand that TNT Evilution had been commercially developed for some time, as TNT's following WAD, Icarus: Alien Vanguard, was released more than two months prior. TNT's own website page for Evilution declares that the original WAD was finished in November, 1995 (!!). Perdition's Gate (and, I assume, Hell to Pay) was released in 1996, I'm betting in the wake of Final Doom. As suggested by Doomworld forumgoer T-Rex, Siebens probably used an alias to distance himself from Evilution, which the community had had a less than glowing reaction to. Additionally, looking through TNT's member names associated with project lists, you can clearly see Jim Elson, aka H2H, credited as a contributor to Evilution. In the list Ty Halderman dropped in this thread on Doomworld, you'll notice that Elson isn't credited as doing any mapping work for Evilution. However, in that same post, Ty states that

"Of course this is just the levels--there was a lot of other stuff done that virtually equaled the effort in doing levels. In fact we only divvied up 1/2 of the purchase price as being for level work."

I'm gonna guess that Jim Elson, given his previous history with H2HMud and H2H-Xmas and what I know of Perdition's Gate and Hell to Pay, worked on TNT Evilution somewhere in the realm of project management, maybe even "Quality Control & final assembley". As such, I'll posit that he used the moniker of Lich for this project for the same reason Jimmy Sieben did. Mackey McCandlish had no such need, not having participated in Final Doom. Of course, that doesn't account for why Tom Mustaine brazenly slapped his name on the project, given that he was just as much a part of Evilution as everyone else. I can only conclude that Tom Mustaine gives no fucks, and that makes him one of the greatest mappers of all.

What I take away from this is that the two Wraith Corp. Doom II commercial MegaWADs have far more in common with the similarly commercial (but overseen by id) TNT Evilution than I originally thought, and that's even knowing that Tom Mustaine started Perdition's Gate with the intent of selling it to id as part of Final Doom. If there are alternate universes, perhaps one has some commercial Final Doom trilogy. There's some interesting parallels, too. Tom and his dad as relatives crafting a megawad with Milo and Dario as relatives working on Plutonia, and here, instead of Milo and Dario getting split off from Evilution to craft their "solo" project, Tom and his dad started out with a solo project and got the rest of the Wraith Corporation team grafted on to it. Now I'll never be able to divorce the idea of the Wraith Corp WADs as a sister series to id's Final Doom.