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Steve D

The History of Slaughtermaps

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I've been wondering about when slaughtermaps first appeared. Based on what little I know, I'd guess that one of the very first was Dario Casali's Punishr, from '95. At the very least, it was packed wall-to-wall with monsters. Is there anything before this?

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DMINATOR.WAD from 1994, though you won't find it in idgames due to it being basically a modified E1 with crazy (for 1994 machines) monster counts.

And even before that, actually even before PWADs, there was the infamous Doom Extra Hard addon, basically a modified (and mostly unplayable) modification of the v1.1 IWAD, done before proper editors for Doom even existed.

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DMINATOR is available at doomedsda.us, for example. Whether it's a slaughter wad or not is debatable though: it certainly has a very high monster density, but does it require the use of tactics we tend to associate with slaughter maps? I think not.

So, do we want another discussion on what is a slaughter map?

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Well, many Doom 1 PWADs had an "obligatory" Pinky Chainsaw Massacre staged fight, usually JUST as soon as you picked up the chainsaw, and then you had to patiently mow down a few dozens Pinkies in a row, before being allowed to progress any further.

Does that count as "slaughter"?

Then there are the infamous HORDES.WAD and HORDES2.WAD

Oh and:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/64542-long-wads-with-lots-of-monsters/

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I don't mean in a playing perspective, I mean in a history perspective.

Also interesting doesn't mean fun, I have found a particular one fun.

But over all I don't like it when only one thing about the game is focused on entirely and far too little focus on everything else about the game which I feel drains the fun out of it.

Continuously killing hundreds of monsters in gigantic rooms with next to no design and architecture can get to be very mindnumingly boring.

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Avoozl said:

Continuously killing hundreds of monsters in gigantic rooms with next to no design and architecture can get to be very mindnumingly boring.


You haven't played many maps in the Slaughterfest series have you? I didn't mean for that to sound nasty. Granted, they are mostly packed wall to wall with monsters, but the architecture is very much not lacking in design and aesthetics.

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As tedious as it would be to have yet another discussion on exactly what a "slaughtermap" is, it's probably impossible to have this discussion without having the tedious discussion first. After all, I'd be shocked if "big-ass map filled with lots of monsters, megaspheres, and BFGs" wasn't one of the first things that was done when people started editing maps; it's just such an incredibly natural thing to want to do.

Anyways, I believe the term was first coined for Deus Vult (the first one). That wad seems to draw influence from maps 26 and 30 of Scythe and maps 19, 25, 26, and 32 of Alien Vendetta, which in turn draw influence from a lot of the later maps in Hell Revealed (AV26 is obviously a tribute to HR24; AV32 is an obvious tribute to HR22; AV25 isn't an obvious tribute to any one map that I know of, but it is at least somewhat reminiscent of the likes of HR22 and HR28). You'll have to find someone who's been around longer than me to find out what the influences on HR were, but I'd imagine that they were probably maps like Go2It and Punishr.

It's kinda funny how easy a lot of HR's third episode is these days. HR24 is still what it always was, and HR26 is still pretty nasty, but HR28, HR22, and HR25 are hilariously easy by today's standards.

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This is worth a mention:
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?dir=lmps/H2HMud/
Monster-heavy maps created for a contest (the demos are worth watching). There are lots of revenants, which has been a common feature in slaughter maps.

Otherwise, some of the pre-Plutonia releases by Dario Casali (the famous Punisher and the later and less well-known Seej). In the Punisher text, he described it as the "first extreme wad", so he at least didn't feel there was a predecessor of the genre.

Otherwise I'm struggling to think of 1994 or 1995 maps that fit a reasonable definition of "slaughter map" without just being monsters randomly packed into a confined space. (Off the top of my head, at any rate.) Edit: Maybe some of Sonny Wasinger's maps (mostly 1995). Edit2: and let's not forget Squares (from early 1995).

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For me, the concept of a slaughtermap is where you take down hordes of heavyweight enemies, namely barons, arachnotrons, revenants, mancubi, and archviles, with squads of cyberdemons and even a few spider masterminds for good measure. Typically, slaughtermaps consist of large arenas, allowing the player to run around feely in the heat of the insanity, and the areas are chock full of rockets and cells since the weapons used greatly in these type of wads are the rocket launcher and the BFG9000.

If my memory serves correctly, Dario and Milo Casali were the founders of the slaughtermap concept, looking at some of their works like Punisher, Seej, Showdown (Memento Mori Map 23), and especially Plutonia's Go 2 It. However, back in the days, slaughtermaps exceeded no more than 600 in the monster count, with 200 being the bare minimum.

Plutonia is by no means a slaughter-based megawad, but at the time, its gameplay style is very peculiar and unlike anything that has been made prior to its release. Yonatan Donner and Haggay Niv would take this new kind of gameplay the Casalis have introduced in Doom and expand on the concept for their immortal Hell Revealed, with many of the later maps being slaughter-based aside from just having very tough fights with heavyweight enemies coupled with the horde of lower-tier enemies such as chaingunners, imps, and demons.

Because the Casalis, Yonatan Donner, and Haggay Niv have done such effective and well-orchestrated monster placement, their respected projects were a huge success, and future mappers would use Plutonia and HR as models for their respected projects. Mappers like Anders Johnsen (Alien Vendetta), Gusta and Method (Kama Sutra), Erik Alm (Scythe series), Huy "Doom Marine" Pham (Deus Vult 1 and 2), and even Joshy and Darkwave0000 (Speed of Doom).

However, what makes the slaughtermap concept appealing in Plutonia and HR is that not all of their levels are slaughter-based. Not even the later maps of HR get too excessive with the monster count, and there were still just some if not many slaughtermaps there. I see a lot of Plutonia/HR-inspired wads, but they go over the top with the monster count, examples like Sunder and the Slaughterfest series. This is what separates the wannabe megawads to the classics. Plutonia and HR were simply about difficult levels with a few to some slaughtermaps in the mix, and that's why the novelty worked very well in them, but when you have a mapset that consists of practically nothing but slaughtermaps, the novelty is just completely lost.

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"I have little experience in this highly specialized subgenre. Here, let me tell you how much it sucks and everything wrong with it; namely, that it's not enough like this completely different and broader gameplay that *I* like."

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Dario's punisher is not 1995 wad and was released after plutonia. The timestamp on idgames wadfile is a lie.

It would be actually kinda cool to have some sort of chronology of the harder or slaughter wads list of sorts. I keep mentioning it, but squadron 417 is imo closer to slaughter than hr and also it was released before hr.

However, back in the days, slaughtermaps exceeded no more than 600 in the monster count, with 200 being the bare minimum.


That could possibly be because of vanilla sprite limitation.

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j4rio said:

Dario's punisher is not 1995 wad and was released after plutonia. The timestamp on idgames wadfile is a lie.


So 1996, then? I seem to recall becoming aware of it at that time.

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It's in the 5 years of doom interview with Dario where he stated that punisher was made after plutonia, nothing more specific than that. It's 96 most likely though.

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T-Rex said:

For me, the concept of a slaughtermap is where you take down hordes of heavyweight enemies, namely barons, arachnotrons, revenants, mancubi, and archviles, with squads of cyberdemons and even a few spider masterminds for good measure. Typically, slaughtermaps consist of large arenas, allowing the player to run around feely in the heat of the insanity, and the areas are chock full of rockets and cells since the weapons used greatly in these type of wads are the rocket launcher and the BFG9000.


Hmm... (evil grin) this would allow to create ANTI-slaughtermaps: taking out hordes of weak but annoying enemies, in cramped spaces, using only weapons up to the RL, and with ammo and health being anything but plentiful, to top it off, with the player often finding himself pinned down/besieged by a chaotic horde ;-)

Imagine a fucking nightmare of hitscanners in cages, with pain elementals roaming through them, and countless fucking imps coming for you from every direction, on a large scale.

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j4rio said:

Dario's punisher is not 1995 wad and was released after plutonia. The timestamp on idgames wadfile is a lie.

No. Possibly made after Plutonia (or at least some aspects of it; we don't know exactly when Milo had the idea for Go2It) but released before it (like Icarus for TeamTNT). Date is correct.

(How could an uploader fake the archive's recorded upload date anyway? That's not something they control. They can fake the date-stamp inside the zip, but that's a separate matter. In this case the two sets of dates are consistent.)

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Grazza said:

(How could an uploader fake the archive's recorded upload date anyway? That's not something they control. They can fake the date-stamp inside the zip, but that's a separate matter. In this case the two sets of dates are consistent.)


I've seen some demos along with textfiles with incorrect dates (supposedly done in 80s) as well, probably something from Pecka. I've been taking these dates of files with grain of salt since then.

If there was some timeline somewhere then I could believe but it doesn't make much sense as it is. In which month was plutonia released?

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j4rio said:

In which month was plutonia released?

Final Doom went on sale in July 1996** (yes, there was a big delay - Icarus came out in March 1996, and work on that started after Evilution was finished). I particularly remember because I was in Seattle at the time, and was able to buy a copy a few days before it went on sale in the UK.

Please note the distinction between a file's date-stamp, which depends on the user's system date (which can be wrong or faked), and the upload date as recorded by the remote server (which is outside the user's control).

** Before anyone posts that the wiki says it was released on 17th June or May or whatever, read this.

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Interesting. Punisher says the upload date is in august of 95 so if the date on punisher truly doesn't lie, then plutonia was actually in the works during the first half of 1995. Also, the delay between finalization of plutonia and its official release would in that case be a whole year.

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Maes said:

Hmm... (evil grin) this would allow to create ANTI-slaughtermaps: taking out hordes of weak but annoying enemies, in cramped spaces, using only weapons up to the RL, and with ammo and health being anything but plentiful, to top it off, with the player often finding himself pinned down/besieged by a chaotic horde ;-)

Imagine a fucking nightmare of hitscanners in cages, with pain elementals roaming through them, and countless fucking imps coming for you from every direction, on a large scale.


That sounds good possibly. Or another thing I've thought of is a map where health is mega plentiful BUT damage is guaranteed to be mega plentiful too, like suddently surrounded by all chaingunners, or a mastermind on 4 sides, or close quarters w/ only rocket launcher and imps so lots of splash damage etc. but you have a whole row of medkits or whatever so constantly have to heal from all the damage.
Its easy enough to coin new words, or create sub genres if the term 'slaughter map' is hazily defined. Or just use words to describe it specifically 'a hard map with lots of demons' etc without needing some new term. The term works as a key word to find basically similar maps, not perfect but it works.

I can't really think of many other genres for maps actually.. monster count/density is just a variable. If there were lots of genres you could combine them in weird ways like:
western maps
alien maps
now combine 'alien western map' (but those were stupid genres from movies off the top of my head not good map genre examples (and there is a movie 'cowboys and aliens' and it was too shit to watch for more than 10 min)).

Well what are the main things that can vary in a wad:
monster count (high=slaughter map, low = uh, easy map?)
health (high=healing map, low=reality map (tod made a map where u have 1% health and can't get hit once i think)
clutter (high=uh, cluttery map, low = uh, arena or something)
gun types available
how much ammo
etc.

so now you could combine 'cluttery slaughtermap' etc. 'reality slaughtermap' lol.
Its not really like there's tons of possible genres, its all made with the building blocks of the same game. Unless you make all the textures like a 'western' theme or something but that's not gameplay.

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'Western' could be part of the description: "Western cluttered slaughtermap". I would love to have a 'standardized' set of these types of descriptions, that could be used to categorize each map in the archive. But, getting everyone to agree would be impossible, I'm afraid :(

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Classic
Slaughter
Run n Gun
Sandbox
Arena
Adventure
Puzzle
Gimmick/concept
Deprived* Frugal

These are all map genres I've heard from memory, which quite extensively describe the different type of levels and in some cases can overlap (slaughter/puzzle), (run n gun/adventure).

*cant for the life of my remember the popular term but it is where resources are limited.

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purist said:

*cant for the life of my remember the popular term but it is where resources are limited.


Survivalist.

BTW, great list!

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