Great moments in PC gaming It’s a bite-sized celebration of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Doom 2
Developer: id software
Year: 1994
Doom 2 was my favorite game in the 90’s, but I didn’t really enjoy playing it. I played with cheats, mainly his IDCLIP. Doomguy was able to walk through walls and explore the boundaries of the map. I was overwhelmed by his 3D world in id Software’s classic, fighting monsters and collecting keys seemed boring in comparison.
I sit in a dark room listening to Cradle of Filth, soaking in the strange atmosphere of Doom’s hellscape from within the walls, taking in the mysterious rhythms of enemy idol animations, and how all those rooms work. I got a sense of it. , the hall and the courtyard are connected.
There was no internet for most of the 90’s, so I had no idea what was going on in the Doom mapping community. My uncle gave me some fanmade .wad discs that he downloaded and, crucially, his editor for a jerky Doom map called WADED. That program changed the course of my teenage years. I wasn’t a normal kid riding my bike around town and hanging out with friends, but a normal kid staying home alone, building Doom levels and listening to black metal. This is much cooler.
I then learned that WADED was not the most widely used mapping tool in the 90’s and the version I used was quite buggy. It crashed frequently and world building was always overshadowed by the threat of losing my job. From what I can remember, it didn’t work well with sectors that were too large (basically separate blocks of levels with their own height and floor and ceiling textures). But I was his teen, so it didn’t matter. Others obviously didn’t, but I always had the time and patience for WADED around the world. “Rofl WADED” is Doomworld and he has read 1 review. “Seriously, get yourself a real editor.”
WADED didn’t have a steep learning curve, but it took me a while to figure it out. My excitement knew no bounds after learning that lines were needed to form enclosed shapes, and that lines had to be turned into fan shapes to form rooms. I made it! A minor problem, however, is that turning a closed shape into a sector crashes the program at least 30% of the time. oh well! I had to start over.
The first level I created was about 40 single sprite trees and a large outdoor area of about 50. Mancubi (opens in new tab)It was pretty silly, but I made it and played a ton of it. Stairs (a series of elongated sectors of increasing height pushed together), doors (sectors with lines that lift the sector upwards), and other features we once took for granted in every Doom level.
I was pretty keen on creating a level that resembled a real city space. My specialty was a level with many outdoor environments, filled with rectangular buildings decorated with elaborate tri-hard facades. Enemy placement was mostly an afterthought. I didn’t build the levels with the player in mind. it wasn’t other players. I couldn’t upload them anywhere. Sometimes I showed it to my mother and she said she was proud of it. Sorry Mom, I’m busy recreating my local gas station (never mind the red sky).
There are about 20 levels that I’m happy with, 20 that I don’t like, and probably hundreds of abandoned projects. I lost them all but this is weird my dreams sometimes happen in a Doom level I made they are when I kill hundreds of imps in one fell swoop with his BFG It’s not a heroic dream of killing. Those are normal dreams that take place in these weird video game realms that I know all too well.
If I was born a little later, I might have played Minecraft in creative mode. Free-form experimentation is key in Minecraft, as it is in WADED, but I think you should try it when you’re young and have the time. Lately I’ve been playing shooting games in a boring way.
