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harrys-21st-birthday video-games MOOD, or A Martian Anabasis
Sometimes you walk through a door backwards and the idea hits you.
In my case, the door was from the kitchen into the hallway in our old apartment, and through some phenomenology or poetics of space, I’d only ever really noticed or experienced that door in one direction. Then one day, I noticed the reverse of the door: the light, the shape, the cracking paint, the literal cracks.
This inspired a DOOM WAD.
I’ve been keen on the modding & wadding scene for Doom (1993)—though admittedly a dilettante compared to others—since just about the time of the game’s release, or at least since the time I’d fully internalised the Official Strategies & Secrets of the base game. Despite that, the idea of actually crafting a Doom (1993) MEGAWAD or even a single level from scratch has always intimidated me, despite some genuinely fantastic tutorials out there.
(This is where I take a moment to shout out Harry’s 21st Birthday, available on itch and GeoCities, which I did release back in, sigh, November 2003. It was a different time. I was a different, angrier, stupider man. I apologise.)
In that threshold moment, when I was seeing the whole world anew, potent with possibility, I realised: what if I just copied someone else’s work?
That is, I could use the original Doom (1993) levels, flip the start & exit points in each, and just muddle about with existing geometry; and I could go a step further, and reverse the sequence of levels themselves, so you’d start at the feet of the Spider Mastermind in E3M8 (now E1M1), and run like a bat out of Hell, making for the Hangar bay in E1M1 (now E3M8) where the original game began.
Thus, I could gain a working knowledge of the toolsets (SLADE, in this case), independent of level design per se.
It took some learning, some frustration, and some revelation, but it’s been rewarding; it’s a thirty-plus year-old game, which means there are plenty of caveats, but happily there are even more bountiful solutions and flame wars in the community forums; and as intended, I now feel much more comfortable with the tools & language of editing Doom (1993).
Finally, after much experimentation and tweaking, I’m releasing my first WAD:
Original by Don Ivan Punchatz
As outlined above, the narrative suggested itself: instead of a magic portal that whisks Doomguy straight back to the green fields of Earth, you’re going out the way you came in:
Prologue
E3M8
TEAR. AND. RIP!