The Sky May Be

The Sky May Be is a semi-serious joke WAD for Doom.

It was created by Doug the Eagle and Kansam. Kansam is also known for Kansam's Trial. Doug the Eagle has recently been mostly known for his highly humourous "anti-walkthroughs" and strange findings from Ultima game series, and other games as well.

The WAD is named after a texture experiment, where one of the textures was called "sky (maybe)". While the texture wasn't ultimately used in the WAD, the name stuck.

The WAD consists of Douglas Adams-style humor throughout three levels, two of which are training levels: E1M1 is a stock-up level, E1M2 is another tutorial level.

E2M1 is the actual giant level where most of the action happens. It has extremely ugly graphics (most wall textures consist of single colour, or are based on Windows 3.11 screen shots), incongruous music (Bach's Brandenburg concerto no. 3) and strange sound clips (from various movies and TV series, etc).

Also included is the Blessed Engine DeHackEd patch, version 1.6b, which changes a lot of things about the weapon and monster behaviour in a way that probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but will undoubtedly be quite amusing.

The Sky May Be was featured in Doomworld's Top 100 Most Memorable Maps, placing 7th.

Plot
From the text file included with the file:


 * The Great God Imp has shown mercy on your soul and cast you into the hellish pits of his virtual toybox.
 * Running around the garish lego buildings, you become aware that the virtual toychest is actually running under windows 3.11. However the mouse is broken and the ALT and F4 keys have been removed.
 * You must find a way to shut down the system and end this nightmare!
 * Oh, and watch out for the Great God Imp. He may not be so kind next time He sees you.

Notable Level Quirks

 * Opposite of the door to "the Firmament" is a door with a danger sign on it. In vanilla Doom, opening the door will close the game and the message "I Told You So" will be shown at the DOS prompt. Nothing special happens in modern source ports.
 * Pressing "Cancel" on the Windows 3.1 prompt in the exit room will cause the ceiling to come down and crush the player. This does not work properly in more modern source ports.

The Blessed Engine
The Blessed Engine is an DeHackEd patch included with The Sky May Be. Among other things, it does the following:
 * Most of the in-game messages are changed, some of them having nothing to do with the game. The "picked up a medikit that you REALLY need!" message in particular has been changed to refer to its rarity.
 * Monster behaviour is altered wildly.
 * Zombiemen moonwalk and reveal themselves to have living, shapeshifting shotgun guy/spectre hybrids inside them when killed.
 * Imps throw BFG9000 projectiles, complete with BFG tracers. Other imps are not immune to these tracers.
 * Demons shoot plasma bolts out of their mouths that each shoot out chaingun fire. They disappear when killed and cannot be resurrected on Nightmare difficulty.
 * Spectres are now fully visible. Standalone spectres shoot out rockets that behave like the revenant's missiles when killed.
 * Cacodemons' bites have the power of BFG blasts, also complete with BFG tracers. Other cacodemons are also not immune to these tracers. They disappear when killed and cannot be resurrected on Nightmare difficulty.
 * Lost souls do ten times the damage.
 * Barons of Hell throw fireballs that each deal around 80 million damage, far higher than the damage limit for Invulnerability.
 * Cyberdemons shoot radioactive missiles. They are not immune to the radiation given off by these missiles.
 * Spiderdemons can now glide through the air and shoot three times as fast.
 * A new enemy, the "Great God Imp", is introduced. It acts just like other imps, but with total invulnerability and the ability to clip through walls.
 * The weapons are changed:
 * The fist is continuous-fire, like the chainsaw, and hits every tic.
 * The chainsaw's sprite is replaced by the plasma rifle's and makes the player spin around the target when hitting it.
 * The pistol is continuous-fire and accurate.
 * The shotgun, now referred to as the "shellgun", is continuous-fire.
 * The chaingun, now referred to as the "Instant Discharge Cannon", empties all the bullets the player has simultaneously on the target. It crashes on source ports that have an infinite ammo cheat turned on.
 * The rocket launcher shoots radioactive missiles.
 * The plasma rifle is now a radioactive mine-layer and has the same sprite as the rocket launcher. The mines will briefly head towards the player when first laid down.
 * The BFG9000, now referred to as the "Blessing Cannon", will either deal damage in the billions, or "bless" the target, rendering them immortal. It does nothing in source ports that fix the integer overflow bug like ZDoom.
 * Barrels slowly move closer to you when in close proximity and explode and scream when touched.
 * Burning barrels are now autonomous and can resurrect any monster whose corpse they come in contact with. In addition, their destruction now counts towards the final kill percentage.
 * Burnt trees can now be destroyed. In ports like ZDoom, they instead bloom into bigger trees.

The Blessed Engine 1.9
A standalone version was released on May 26, 1997. This version includes support for The Ultimate Doom.

The Blessed Engine for Doom II
For years requests for a Doom II version of The Blessed Engine were not being met. Doug the Eagle uploaded a video on in 2008 highlighting the then unreleased Doom II version of The Blessed Engine. Finally, in 2016, this version was uploaded. According to tapewolf, the pseudonym of Doug the Eagle, this version had the following changes: It's based on an earlier branch of the mod, so not everything that was in 1.9 is in the doom 2 version.

The main change is that it makes most of the Doom 2 monsters work to some degree, except for the mancubus which is a barrel and doesn't trigger the action specials on maps such as Dead Simple.

The only properly overhauled Doom 2 monster is the Hell knight, renamed to 'the eraser' It was highlighted by Maes on July 21, 2016 in a Doomworld thread titled: "Doom 2 version of the Blessed Engine finally released!" . On June 30, 2017, Maes added in a local copy of the file.

Reception
For a long time, the WAD has divided opinions; it's often seen as either worst WAD ever made, or work of a genius. On the aims, Doug the Eagle writes, "my chief aim in 'The Sky May Be' was to create something totally new and utterly unlike anything that had ever been seen in Doom before. I believe, that for good or ill, I succeeded in that goal."''

The review by Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse, a feature hosted at Something Awful that focuses on inept custom level design on various FPSes, gave the WAD the score of -48, lowest of the three Doom/Doom II WADs reviewed on the site. It is also enshrined in the DoomWorld's Top 10 Infamous WADs list.