Return to Phobos

Return to Phobos is a Doom episode replacement mod of nine levels, created by Michael Kelsey. As part of their 10 Years of Doom feature, Doomworld named it one of the ten best WADs of 1994.

A version of this episode appeared on Maximum Doom as RETURN02.WAD.

Story
After winning the original boss battle, the protagonist awakens to find that it was all a dream. He falls asleep again and experiences a similar journey through various buildings and battles, although with fewer paranormal phenomena this time.

Levels

 * E1M1
 * E1M2
 * E1M3
 * E1M4
 * E1M5
 * E1M6
 * E1M7
 * E1M8
 * E1M9

Inspiration and development
In his readme, Kelsey records no fewer than twelve beta releases of this episode, mostly to test and adjust network play. RETURN.WAD finally appeared on August 1, 1994, whereupon several major architectural bugs and at least two incompatibilities with Doom v1.666 were soon pointed out. This produced the revised file RETURN01.WAD on August 11.

Trivia
Throughout the bundled documentation, the name "Doom" is written as "D**m" in light of presumed legal concerns. (This occasionally extends to other proper nouns such as "s*rsetup".) Similarly, Kelsey has apologized for creating a mod that replaced the shareware episode, although each of the levels does contain at least one Registered Doom component.