Top 10 Infamous WADs

The Top 10 Infamous WADs article was created by Andrew "Linguica" Stine and Mike "Cyb" Watson for Doomworlds celebration of Doom's 10th birthday. It was created as a counter-article to the 100 best WADs ever.

The list

 * 1. The Sky May Be - Doug the Eagle and Kansam
 * The Sky May Be is known for being referred to as "the strangest WAD ever made". Playing it is a frustrating and annoying experience, with the map being a series of massive, open rooms with the most bizarre architecture, many of the sounds being replaced by audio clips from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and a DEHACKED patch that completely changes the core Doom gameplay in bizarre and amusing ways.


 * 2. Wow - Paul Thrussell
 * Paul Thrussell's only contribution to the Doom community, which has become infamous for being one of the most primitive maps ever submitted to the /idgames archive, consisting of a square room with a pit with missing lower textures, resulting in a giant HOM. The futility of the map is made even worse by the author try to pass off this glaring error as an intended "illusio-pit", in which resides a single cyberdemon.


 * 3. UAC Labs - Eric Harris
 * A WAD created by Eric Harris, one of the instigators of the Columbine High School massacre, it was believed to be modelled after Columbine High School after authorities discovered their levels, so that he and Dylan Klebold could "practise" the shootout of the Columbine. It was later determined that none of the Harris levels resembled the school, and the fact that the two shooters played Doom had nothing (or very little) to do with the shootout.


 * 4. Nuts - B.P.R.D.
 * This WAD (excluding its two successors) possibly has the map with the highest monster count in Doom history (10,617). The map itself is two giant rooms with massive crowds of monsters covering every part of it. The player is given a plasma rifle, a BFG, invulnerability spheres and a gratuitous amount of cell ammo, but even so, few have completed this map legitimately - part due to the fact that the sheer number of monsters slows framerate to a crawl, making it almost unplayable.


 * 5. Evilution - TeamTNT
 * Following the announcement that TeamTNT had accepted a packaging deal from id Software to package their WAD alongside The Plutonia Experiment as the second part of Final Doom, a flamewar erupted within the Doom community, splitting it into two sides - those that supported TeamTNT for going pro, and those that branded them as "sellouts".


 * 6. Gothic99 - Matt Dixon & friends
 * Undoubtedly the most failed release made by the Gothic team, this WAD is a showcase of fervent abuse of trim textures to create quite ugly, over-detailed maps with equally poor gameplay. The amount of detail gone into the first level alone is enough to lag a deathmatch game to a crawl.


 * 7. Imp Encounter - anonymous
 * This WAD is nothing more than a cutscene that quite graphically depicts a marine copulating with an imp, and has hence gained a reputation as an infamous WAD.


 * 8. Mockery - Scott Cover
 * A primitive level deliberately made with many flaws to showcase the simple but glaring mistakes that all mappers can make. However, the concept of making deliberately poor maps caught on, resulting in the production of a Mockery megaWAD, and hence, this WAD is believed to be the basis of all joke WADs.


 * 9. Slige maps - Dave Chess
 * The release of this map pack triggered a concern over authors who willingly released maps generated by SLIGE, passing them off as their own work. Since then, the uploading of SLIGE maps to the /idgames archive has been forbidden.


 * 10. Mordeth E2 - Gaston Lahaut
 * Since the release of Mordeth, the community has eagerly been awaiting the sequel to this ground-breaking WAD for over ten years. It has become infamous for being the WAD with the longest development time ever, so much so that a Mordeth Award section in the Cacowards is awarded to the WAD of that year that has taken the longest time to develop. Mordeth E2's hefty delay is down to a number of reasons: engine changes, team members leaving, and a thief actually stealing the computer on which the files resided.