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Lizardcommando

What was the first custom wads you have played?

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The only two that I know for sure were Yakworld and Zeus off of a shovelware CD called Doom I & II Collection. There’s a good chance that I did others too but those were the only ones that stick out in my mind. I was mostly looking for stuff that said they had new graphics in the description.

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The first WAD that I DIDN'T play was some completely random PWAD I downloaded off a BBS in the summer of 1994. I had the Doom shareware so I tried to run the WAD and it (obviously) didn't work, so I sent an email to the email address in the text file asking what I was doing wrong. The author emailed back and patiently explained I had to own the full game. Good thing cringe compilations hadn't been invented!

 

Spoiler

That is also why I leave some of the dumber threads intact on these forums, since I know that kids don't really know what they are doing and have to figure it out somehow

 

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Deus Vult.

 

After completing Plutonia I began to wonder just how dense a Doom wad could be. A friend of mine, a huge Doom fan, suggested that I give Deus Vult a shot to really see what Doom was capable of. I don't have strong memories of any individual moments, but I can imagine I was blown away and also satisfied. Deus Vult is a great introduction to what good slaughter can be. It emphasizes finding any cover you can and slowly gaining ground in those big battle rooms.

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First doom wad was SCYTHE

 

first gameplay mod was brutal doom... That's how i started with doom and i had more fun with vanilla

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H_HOTEL <idgames link> gets a special shout out from me. Made in 1994, it was one of the first maps I saw the had extensive use of Doom Furniture™.

 

My impressionable young mind was blown wide open to the potential for sector decoration. The heart-shaped bed in particular is a standout, never to be repeated or imitated as far as I've seen.

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The earliest custom wads I can remember playing are Plutonia 2, Hell Revealed 1 & 2, NoChance and Sunder.

It's funny how I enjoyed playing super-hard stuff back in the days of when I was more of a Doom newbie.  Nowadays however, I'd be happier just playing laid-back, casual megawads.

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My first gameplay mod was ProjectMSX on the Hellbound megawad. I don't remember much about that experience but it was a formative one. ProjectMSX is very different from vanilla Doom and it showed me how different mods could be.

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I literally have no idea. I'm fairly certain that it was something off of the Doomworld top 100 list though. Since i started playing pwads in order from 1994 and onwards it may have been something such as Doomsday of UAC or something similar, and this was in the late 2000's on my old laptop.

 

I know it's kind of crazy to start with something that old and that may be why i prefer older/classic style pwads. Too bad i didn't sign up here back then lol (my internet wasn't that great though) but i'm here now and that's what counts i guess ;)

 

For my first "custom" wad, as in with custom assets and or gameplay, it might have been brutal Doom as i remember getting into Doom more with that. Than after playing it a few times i got bored of it and went back to playing more vanilla maps lol. But i enjoyed it for what it was.

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since im rather new to doom mods (at least compared to some of you guys) I believe the first wad I played was Zen Dynamics

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I’m pretty sure it was UAC_DEAD for me too. It blew me away. The overturned truck, the UAC sign, the space ship exit, and of course the invisible staircase. It’s my favorite DOOM experience short of playing the original for the first time. I’d like to meet the guy who made it and shake his hand.

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Wow. I'm not sure. It was 25 years ago.

 

Since I got Shareware Doom in June, 1994 and played the ever-loving heck out of Knee Deep in the Dead until sometime a few months later when I got the full version, it would've been late 1994 or early 1995 when I played my first pwad.

 

I only had a few friends that had Doom (one had Wolfenstein 3D, but I was the first one to get Doom) and I didn't know anything about the online Doom community, which would have been in its infancy anyway. I went on a few BBS's, but none of them hosted anything Doom-related that I can remember. We had a 14.4 kbps modem, so I was able to get online, but I don't recall downloading any pwads online. If I did, it was only a few.

 

A friend of mine had D!Zone, so that's where I got the first pwads I played. I only remember a few of those early maps, specifically:

  • Outpost 21 (I first played the Doom version, although there is also a Doom 2 version, if you're interested)
  • Pentagram (I think that was the name--the automap was a giant Sigil of Baphomet--I didn't even finish it, I just wanted to see what it was like given the automap--I think this is the map)
  • Some map with a ton of revenants (that one may have been downloaded, I'm not sure)--this map was supposed to "one of the hardest maps" at the time, and I recall my friend exclaiming, "Is this even possible?" All I remember of it was walking around a corner and being face-to-face with a cluster of a dozen or more revenants shooting at me through a window.

I highly doubt it was either one of these, those are just the two I remember, and they were very early on in my non-iwad playing experience. I do recall reading that Outpost 21 was the "first iwad-quality user-created pwad," which was why I looked it up on D!Zone.

 

I played various other pwads off D!Zone, but none of them were memorable enough to stick in my mind. I vaguely recall the starting room of one map, but only because it seemed like a mismatched collection of the Hellish textures, hanging bodies, blood, columns with a heart, etc.--like someone was trying to make a map with all the "evil" features.

 

 

@NaturalTvventy Leo Martin Lim created "Doomsday of the UAC." I'm sure a lot of people want to shake his hand. I've often wondered what made him think to try self-referencing sectors.

 

Also, that was apparently his only contribution ever to the Doom community, unless he did it under a different name. Well, if you have only one foot to put forward in 1994, it may as well be that one.

Edited by Pegleg : Leo Martin Lim

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I remember it was cyb's void and a few wads from the cacowards stuff wayback in 2014 when I realized I could load maps by dropping them on the exe. 

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Simpson's Doom, thanks to this mod i found out about source-ports like zdoom, PrBoom and about the big community as well because i wasn't able to make it run on dosbox. Good old times.

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On 10/1/2019 at 2:00 PM, pcorf said:

 

I don't think I encountered a REoL map until I played some of his Quake 2 maps that PC Gamer shoved on a CD way back when. I remember sometime around 2000 or so that I played some of his Doom levels, which is mostly a blur. He did make some interesting looking architecture by using a pile of sectors to simulate sloped parts of ceilings and such. Only gameplay element I remember is being on a tiny ledge, against a wall and having a cyberdemon shooting rockets at me, which I thought was a bit mental at the time. Wonder what map that was.. .. haha.

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I honestly can't remember the first one. I do remember however trying custom wads for the first time when Zdoom was the newest thing and most of the authors were trying to make use of exclusive Zdoom features. Think one of the reasons for this was just how easy/simple it was to run a pwad with Zdoom for pre-teen me.

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I found it was possible to make Doom levels after it seeing being highlighted on the TV show, Bad Influence, back in the 90s. However the earliest pwads I played were limited to ones with batch files, because I think I only had Doom 2 and I mustn't have known how to use the command line or the appropriate command in dos to load the wads.

 

As such the earliest pwads I played after repeated searches and finding the idgames archive, were a slightly weird trio of levels called the Altair series, and more prominently, Dimensions of Time. They aren't that great (particularly the Altair levels) but as they were among the first I played, and playing totally new doom levels seemed absolutely amazing, I loved them.

 

Later I had Final Doom and was able to use Doom95 to load pwads. I therefore also tried this oddball set by Malcolm Sailor, Realm of Chaos and The Twilight Zone, the former of which I still quite like. I was aware of Doomworld at the time and the forum, but was not particularly interested in 'putting my face out' and preferred to just play Doom levels. Also it meant I still did not know about source ports and boom, so this meant some of the pwads I found weren't playable.

 

Finally after intermittently playing pwads in this fashion I decided to look again into Doom around the time when I went to university in 2004ish - I found the Doomworld top 100 and learned about source ports, and then later started noticing newstuff, and it went from there.

 

 

Oh and for fun, here is the TV show clip I mentioned showing Doom level editing (starting @ 1min 40 seconds)

 

Edited by Sui Generis

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