Ethan Watson (GooberMan)

Ethan Watson (alias GooberMan) is a mapper and programmer who released several maps for the ZDoom source port. The most well known of these maps is Space Station Omega, which placed in Doomworld's Top 100 WADs of All Time feature.

GooberMan joined the Doom community in 2001 by registering an account on the Doomworld forums. His maps were characterised by heavy use of scripting; use of cutting-edge ZDoom features; and creative use of old ZDoom features to create a different type of playing experience in Doom. For example, Doom: The Arcade Game was designed to be a fast-paced money-chewing arcade game where the player started with a small time limit and had to kill enemies, collect items, perform certain actions, and find secrets to increase the timer.

He retired from mapping in 2004 to focus more on his video game programming career. The games he's worked on include Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Returnal.

In 2013, he returned to Doom mapping with the intention of creating a follow up to Space Station Omega. Prime Directive was subsequently released in 2015. He still regularly browses the Doomworld Forums as well as the ZDoom forums, and can be found on IRC on occasion.

As a hobby project, Watson created the Chocolate Doom fork Rum and Raisin Doom with the goal of modernizing the software renderer, with a standard 'RNR24' later becoming ID24 introduced in Doom + Doom II. This work was recognized with the Codeaward at the 2024 Cacowards.

Body of work

2022

• Rum and Raisin Doom

2024

• ID24

Levels

2001

• Doomworld Speedmapping Compilation #2 (Doomworld/idgames)
  • MAP07
• Doom: The Arcade Game (release 1)

2002

• GooberMan's DeathMatch series Map 1: Abandoned Asteroid Mine Cave (Doomworld/idgames)
• Doom Arcade: Phobos Bonus Level 2 - You Sunk My Battleship! (Doomworld/idgames)

2003

• The Gateway Experiments Episode 1: Space Station Omega (Doomworld/idgames)

2004

• RTC-3057: Blue hub1 (Doomworld/idgames)
  • Scripts

2015

• The Gateway Experiments Episode 5: Prime Directive (Doomworld/idgames)

2024

• Legacy of Rust
  • MAP08: Second Coming (with Xaser)
  • MAP10: Dis Union

Tech demo levels

2001

• Starbox - First example of a skybox with a moving viewpoint.

2013

• Half-Life transitions (Doomworld/idgames) - An effect for hub-based mapsets that emulates the Half-Life style of level transitions.
• Floor Demo (Doomworld/idgames) - First iteration of a rideable polyobject floor with friction.
• Floor Demo 2 (Doomworld/idgames) - Second iteration, this time illustrating polyobjects with a 3D floor applied to the control sector to provide completely three-dimensional rideable polyobjects.

External links

• Doom: The Arcade Game
• Rum and Raisin Doom at GitHub