1994: Man's civilization is cast in ruins.

I've been looking at Usenet conversations from 1994, trying to learn which mods stood out from the crowd in the earliest days. 10 Years of Doom listed the "best" releases, but a gaming experience can be memorable for other reasons; I'm looking for the levels that did something sloppily for the first time, and the levels people played for hours despite their production values. (Or perhaps because of them, the way you find yourself watching the same ninja movie daily for an entire summer.)

I plan to start a handful of new articles, and any notability questions can be raised in the usual manner. First, though, a few things not often discussed about 1994:

• Just scrolling through subject lines at the start was a bit surreal. They look like banner ads for dating services, only instead of local singles, they list DM opponents by area code.
• Simon Travaglia was around in those days...
• In January 1994, a primitive Thing randomizer promised to add endless replayability to Doom. (The difficulty tended to get out of control.)
• Originally, third-party editing utilities could only manipulate things, and the program didn't save the entire map into a WAD, only the thing locations. Then, editors appeared which could change linedef and sector properties by PEEK and POKE (e.g. Renegade Graphics, VERDA), but not rearrange vertexes or create new levels from scratch. So if you ever wondered why all those tiny maps in D!ZONE crashed your editor, and why others were just overstocked day-glo remixes of the shareware missions, now you know.
• The first serviceable node builder appears to have been the fourth and final beta of DEU v5.0. A few standalone node builders were released almost concurrently, at the very end of March; I assume this is because Raphael Quinet is a nice guy who shares technical information.  :>  Right away PWADs began to rain from the sky: four, five, six files that first weekend. (I stopped counting individual announcements at this point.) Many users tried and failed to get the new node builders up and running, however, and eventually decided to stick with proven tools, even if their algorithms were less polished. (Heaven help them if they were using this.) Also, then as now, some decided it was too much work to download more than one free utility. So if you ever wondered why Maximum Doom maps randomly exited with I_SignalHandler when their vertex counts were large, and why you would occasionally lurch through a long 1S wall in an outdoor area, and how authors could knowingly release maps with giant HOMs while claiming that they couldn't be removed, now you know.
• Human nature hasn't changed much in 25 years.
• As I suspected, this may be the most innovative map created without a node builder.
• SCREAM is an old friggin level. That guy was pretty smart eh?
• Many people refused to install the v1.4 → v1.666 upgrade patch when first released, because there had been so many hoax uploads.
• "For those that have been yearning to play THE alan, here's your chance." (notice the avalanche of replies)
• "Regardless of what some of my friends may think, I am >NOT< an FTP site. Nor am I a mail-server for DOOM binaries. If I recieve any requests via e-mail for these files, I will not only immediately delete them, I will return a letter bomb."

Anyway.

These are mods which looked notable, but not as notable as the types of mods I described at the top: WANTON12, TEMPLE11, WADPAK1A, MTFIRE09, DAEMON2, BARREL, STARWAR4, DARKNESS, HUNTE1M1, E1M1OSKU, FLASH, PEACE, UPLIFTNG, 23CASTLE, IDMAP01. (I hate saying this, because those authors worked so hard, and I always assume we have too few walkthroughs here.)

Finally, a certain number of WADs had no maps at all, only sound replacements. (Leukart's FAQ mentions these as well.) I failed to convince myself that any of these were really as unmistakable or as widely used as the level WADs. If you were there at the time, am I wrong?

Ryan W  04:02, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Updated and wikified: 17:08, 29 March 2019 (CDT)