Team Insanity

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Team Insanity was a website hosted by Doomworld between 1999 and 2001 that reviewed PWADs and held speedrunning competitions. It was comprised of more than a dozen members at any given time, led by Australian Simon Varszeghy (Chief). Each member would take turns writing reviews for levels submitted by the Doom community. In the late 1990s Team Insanity began developing a partial conversion named Doom Millennium which has been in development hell since.

Members[edit]

As of 2001, Team Insanity members past and present included:

Doom Millennium[edit]

Doom Millennium is an in-development partial conversion for Doom II targeting source port Eternity Engine. Alongside Mordeth, it has gained notoriety for its lengthy development cycle dating back to at least 1997. Doomworld's Cacowards in 2005 included a side-joke noting Millennium still remains unreleased.

Development history[edit]

The project was started by Team Insanity as a BOOM megawad with 32 new levels. By late 1999 over 20 levels were completed by the team.[1] Composers Janek Szulew and Jamie Robertson joined to write custom music for the mapset. On October 20, 2000 Jaime released a physical CD of the soundtrack called The Last Sunset.[2]

In 2000 a decision was made to create a source modification for advanced features beyond DeHackEd's abilities. Chris Gascoigne (Muel) started a fork of Eternity Engine and worked on it into early 2001. On July 11, 2001 Lüt posted to the project web site that Joel Murdoch had joined to fix engine bugs with the intention to hit a release date of October 15, 2001.

The 2001 release date was missed and Lüt announced on August 16, 2002 he was stepping down as team lead due to being too busy. Responsibilities were handed over to Chris Laverdure (Dashiva) who within weeks posted to the project web site that the release date would be reached before Doom 3. By Doom 3's August 2004 release, Millennium was not released but Lüt returned as team lead.

Between 2001 and 2004, Christopher Lutz created a new boss arena and Stephen Browning (Scuba Steve) contributed new enemy sprites. Esa Repo (Espi) was involved in detailing the maps to keep consistent theming across the new hub. A decision had also been made to move from a custom source port to instead use Eternity Engine.

The project web site has not been updated since July 26, 2004.

Doom Millennium levels released standalone[edit]

With the project status in limbo, some of the authors eventually decided to release their levels separately.

  • Paul Corfiatis has put out three of his four Millennium maps under new titles.
  • On January 6, 2010 Chris Hansen released High/Low 4, a significantly upgraded version of his Millennium level paranoi2.wad. (Doomworld/idgames)
    • On February 8, 2018 he published the original unmodified WAD to his personal website.[3] (windward.dk)
  • On January 26, 2018 Kristian Aro released his four single player levels as Doom Millennium Mini-Episode. (Doomworld forums thread)

Current status[edit]

Lüt has hinted Doom Millennium is still under active development by periodically posting level design screenshots to the Doomworld forums and community Discord servers.

Team website abandoned[edit]

On September 9, 2001 Lüt updated the Doom Millennium website to say, "...Team Insanity: it's on hold until I finish Millennium." After 169 WAD reviews, the Team Insanity web site was not updated after this date. On August 12, 2011 Lüt confirmed Team Insanity's review section was defunct because it had been replaced in the community by Doomworld's crowdsourced The /newstuff Chronicles.[4] After Doomworld changed servers in 2015, it took down most of its hosted sites including Team Insanity's.

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. "Doom Millennium - Screenshots." Retrieved 14 August 2020.
  2. Andrew Stine (Linguica) (20 October 2000). "Doom Millennium Soundtrack Released." Doomworld. Retrieved 14 August 2020.
  3.  (8 February 2018). "Paranoid." Chris Hansen's DOOM page. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  4. Steve Dudzik (Lüt) (12 August 2011). "Single Status Update." Doomworld forums. Retrieved 14 August 2020.