Doom modding

Even though WADs modified Doom by replacing graphics and audio, the amount of customization was somewhat limited; much of the game's behavior, including the timing and strength of weapons and enemies, was hard-coded in the Doom executable file and impossible to alter in WADs. DeHackEd, a Doom editing program created by Greg Lewis, addressed this by letting users modify parameters inside of the Doom executable itself, allowing for a greater degree of customization.

Commercial WADs

Around 1994 and 1995, WADs were distributed primarily through

• Kenneth Scott, who contributed artwork to Hacx: Twitch 'n Kill, later became the art director at id Software and 343 Industries on the post-Bungie Halo games.
• Tim Willits, who contributed two levels to Master Levels for Doom II, later became the lead designer at id Software.
• Dario Casali, author of a quarter of Final Doom, was hired by Valve to work on Half-Life
  .
• Sverre Kvernmo, designer of five levels in Master Levels for Doom II and member of TeamTNT, was hired by Ion Storm for Daikatana.
• Thief II: The Metal Age
  . Keränen was later hired by Valve.
• John Anderson (level designer), also known as "Dr. Sleep", author of five levels in Master Levels for Doom II and E4M7 in The Ultimate Doom, later worked on Blood, Unreal, and Daikatana.
• SiN
  . He later contributed to the Unreal series.

Source port era

Around 1997, interest in Doom WADs began to decline, as attention was drawn to newer games with more advanced technology and more customizable design, including id Software's own Quake and Quake II. However, a dedicated following continued into the new century, with modern Doom modding becoming more popular than Quake and Quake II modding.

On December 23, 1997, id Software released the source code to the Doom engine, initially under a restrictive license. On October 3, 1999, it was released again under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later. With the source code available, it became possible for programmers to modify any aspect of the game, remove technical limitations and bugs, and add entirely new features.

These engine modifications, or

A WAD that gives the game an overhaul to incorporate an entirely different game setting, character set, and story, instead of simply providing new levels or graphic changes, is called a total conversion. The phrase was coined by Justin Fisher, as part of the title of Aliens TC, or Aliens Total Conversion.^[7] Add-ons that provide extensive changes to a similar degree but retain distinctive parts or characteristics of the original games, such as characters or weapons, are often by extension called partial conversions.

List of WADs

Since custom map editing started in 1994, many Doom, Doom II and Doom 64 WADs have been created, and some have acquired fame even outside of the modding community. The following is a select listing of popular and historically significant WADs.

Megawads

• Eternal Doom is a 32-level megawad for Doom II created by Team Eternal and TeamTNT. It was released non-commercially in several versions, with the final one being released on November 14, 1997. Eternal Doom received media attention in 2020, when through further modding, it was played through Doom Eternal.^[8]
• Going Down is a 32-level megawad for Doom II released in 2013, and a winner in that year's Cacowards. It was created by the English freelance animator Cyriak Harris.^[9]
• Icarus: Alien Vanguard is a 32-level megawad for Doom II created by TeamTNT and released on March 22, 1996. It was developed as a freeware release after TNT: Evilution was picked up by id Software to be released as part of Final Doom.^[10]
• Memento Mori is a 32-level megawad for Doom II created by two members of The Innocent Crew, Denis and Thomas Möller, along with other authors, including Tom Mustaine and both Dario and Milo Casali. It was initially released on December 10, 1995, and saw an updated release in February 1996. A 32-level sequel megawad, Memento Mori II, was created and released on July 27, 1996.^[11] In Doomworld's Top 100 WADs of All Time, Memento Mori was voted as the #1 WAD of 1996, and its sequel as #2.^[12]
• Requiem is a 32-level megawad for Doom II created by the same people that worked on the previously released Memento Mori series, in addition to some new mappers that worked specifically on this project. It was released and uploaded on the idgames archive on July 4, 1997.^[13]
• In 2016, John Romero released two new maps – Phobos Mission Control and Tech Gone Bad.^[11] After the positive response, he released Sigil, a complete 9-level episode, in May 2019.^[14][15]

Total conversions

• Action Doom 2: Urban Brawl is a 2008
  source port. The game features cel-shaded graphics reminiscent of a comic book, and is played in the style of a beat 'em up, with some gunplay present as well.^[16]
• Aliens TC is an 11-level
  total conversion based on the movie Aliens, created by Justin Fisher and released on November 3, 1994.^[17] In 2017, another modder by the name of Kontra_Kommando made a remake of Aliens TC.^[18]
• Ashes 2063 is a post-apocalypse themed TC created by Vostyok. Inspired by 1980s post-apocalyptic movies, it features new monsters, weapons and an original soundtrack.[19]
• Batman Doom is a 32-level total conversion created by ACE Team Software and released in April 1999. It contains modified game behavior along with new weapons, items, and characters from the world of the comic book superhero Batman.^[20]
• Chex Quest 3
  , released in 1997 and 2008, respectively, both of which contained five levels and were released as freeware.
• Doom 64: Retribution is a remake of Doom 64, the Nintendo 64 version of Doom, which differs drastically from its DOS version. Doom 64: Retribution contains different levels, graphics, and audio based on the Nintendo 64 game.^[13]
• Grezzo 2 is a 2012 total conversion developed by Italian game designer Nicola Piro, notable for plagiarizing other games and Doom mods, and for its vulgar, blasphemous content.^[22][23]
• Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a Doom modification that uses the Doom Legacy source port to completely change the game from a first-person shooter to a third-person platformer based on Sonic the Hedgehog.^[24] In 2018, Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, a kart racing game based off of the game, was released as a standalone modification.^[25]
• Void is a single-level modification based on the 2000 game American McGee's Alice,^[26] which was itself made by former id Software employee American McGee.

Miscellaneous

• D!Zone – Created by WizardWorks, an expansion pack featuring hundreds of levels for Doom and Doom II . D!Zone was reviewed in 1995 in Dragon by Jay & Dee in the "Eye of the Monitor" column. Jay gave the pack 1 out of 5 stars, while Dee gave the pack 1½ stars.^[27]
• Origwad – Created by Jeff Bird and released on March 7, 1994, it is notable for being the first custom WAD to be released for Doom.^[4] Origwad consists of a single level with two rooms separated by one door, and a total of six enemies, making it very basic compared to later WADs.

• The Harris levels – Doom and Doom II levels created by
  FBI after the 1999 massacre.^[28] Downloads for the levels Deathmatching in Bricks (BRICKS.WAD), Hockey.wad (HOCKEY.WAD), KILLER (KILLER.WAD), Mortal Kombat Doom (FIGHTME.WAD), Outdoors (outdoors.wad), Station (STATION.WAD), and UAC Labs (UACLABS.WAD) have been found in the years since. Dylan Klebold, a friend of Harris and the other perpetrator of the massacre, was credited by Harris for playtesting Deathmatching in Bricks. The ENDOOM screen for UAC Labs shows the names of other WADs made by Harris, though they have since been lost
  : Assault, Techout, Thrasher, Realdeth, and Realdoom, which is a patch for another WAD. UAC Labs was mentioned in Doomworld's Top 10 Infamous WADs list.
• Lullaby, a level created by Danlex in 2021 which contained surreal visuals.[29]
• National Videogame Museum, a recreation of the real life National Videogame Museum by employee Chris Bacarani. The level took over a year to make, and is featured as an exhibit in the physical museum.^[30]
• Nuts! – Released in 2001, Nuts is one of the first documented joke WADs. Nuts consists of a single room, with an invulnerability power up, plasma rifle, BFG, and 10,617 enemy monsters.^[26] Its creator, B.P.R.D, created multiple sequels, and a version of Nuts was made in Dusk.^[31]
• The Sky May Be – A notable joke WAD, most of the game takes place in an oversized sector, where many textures are replaced with solid colors, and many sounds replaced with audio from Monty Python's Flying Circus.^[32] The WAD was mentioned in Doomworld's The Top 10 Infamous WADs list and it is sometimes considered to be one of the worst WADs ever created.
• UAC Military Nightmare – A
  Skulltag WAD made by "Terry" in 2008 which was notorious for its use of vulgar scripts, jump scares, strange graphics, absurd difficulty, and otherwise-useless data that existed to either bloat the WAD's file size or tamper with the player's settings. The WAD itself was removed from Doomworld in 2014 due to the aforementioned useless data, but has since been reuploaded with said data removed. This WAD spawned a genre of WADs known as "Terrywads", or "Terry Traps", which contain similar content to UAC Military Nightmare.^[33] In 2008, UAC Military Nightmare received a Cacoward for Worst WAD, wherein it is described as "the worst wad file the world has ever known."^[34]
• Lilith – A wad created in 2017 that uses
  ZDoom sourceport to create graphical and musical distortion, and changes in enemy behavior, resulting in a "glitchcore nightmare."^[35] Lilith was also a winner in the 2017 Cacowards.^[36]
• MyHouse.wad – Posted by Doomworld user Steve Nelson (Veddge) on March 3, 2023, MyHouse.wad was supposedly a remake of a WAD made by the creator's recently deceased friend, featuring that friend's house. In reality, the WAD is a liminal horror map loosely inspired by the 2000 novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and the online urban legend The Backrooms. It also has a number of other references to other things on the internet considered mysterious, such as an area inspired by the art of Jared Pike,^[37] and also using The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet. Being an extremely cryptic and surreal experience, it features an abundance of lore found both in-game and across other sources on the Internet. It is praised as one of Doom II's most technologically advanced mods.^[38]

Freedoom

Freedoom

Phase 1 title screen (v0.12.1)
Original author(s)	Various contributors
Initial release	16 April 2003; 21 years ago (2003-04-16)
Stable release	0.13.0 / 29 January 2024; 2 months ago (2024-01-29)
3-clause BSD (requires a Doom engine source port under the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later to play)
Website	https://freedoom.github.io/

Freedoom is a project aiming to create a

The project distributes three IWAD files: the two single-player campaigns named Freedoom: Phase 1 and Freedoom: Phase 2, and FreeDM, which contains a collection of deathmatch levels.^[41]

A similar project, Blasphemer, aims to create a complete free version of

Many specialized Doom editors are used to modify graphics and audio lumps, such as XWE, SLADE, Wintex, and SLumpEd. The DeHackEd executable patching utility modifies monsters, items, and weapon behavior. In ZDoom, users can create new monsters, weapons, and items through a scripting language called DECORATE, made to address many of the shortcomings of DeHackEd, such as not being able to add new objects, and not being able to deviate far from the behavior of the original weapons and monsters.^{[citation needed]}

WAD2 and WAD3

In Quake, WAD files were replaced with PAK files. WAD files still remain in Quake files, though their use is limited to textures. Since WAD2 and WAD3 use a slightly larger directory structure, they are incompatible with Doom.

See also

• Quake modding

References