First PWAD ever?

Heh, does anyone know what the first Doom PWAD ever made was? I think it's kinda a shame we don't all know this. :(

Oh, and if it sucked, what was the first playable (not necesarily good) PWAD?

Probably idmap01 (the deathmatch map made by American McGee).

The first inofficial PWAD ever was probably just a quick hex edited hack someone created in his basement and never released to the public.

Download it here.

Heh, talk about a n00b wad :P

Edit: Time to record a speedrun.

It does have some serious challenges though. It is very difficult to kill all the enemies with the ammo you have.

True. UV Max demo here.

Assmaster said:

Heh, talk about a n00b wad :P

Edit: Time to record a speedrun.

n00b?. Uhm, it was wrote with hex editor, I'd like to see you make av map20, rtc3057 demo with a hex editor.

Torn said:

n00b?. Uhm, it was wrote with hex editor, I'd like to see you make av map20, rtc3057 demo with a hex editor.

Done, I just dont feel like uploading it.

Heh, my previous post was just a joke. I realize how important this is historically.

Assmaster said:

Done, I just dont feel like uploading it.

Heh, my previous post was just a joke. I realize how important this is historically.

in the text file it seems like there was a fight, but I dunno if there was. But making the first doom map is kinda cool. :)

Heh, now I know why we all don't know this. Episode 1 style, though, which is cool.

Alright, then, what was the first real PWAD ever made?

What.... is this some kinda trick question....? :P
I have no clue, what is the first pwad????

Just because it was hex edited doesn't make it fake.

Quiet, fatty.

DC

Grimm said:

Heh, now I know why we all don't know this. Episode 1 style, though, which is cool.

Alright, then, what was the first real PWAD ever made?

Uhm, who knows, origwad was the first, imo. It will be hard to find the first real one as you call it. But good searching.

Well, you know, I mean a typical 1994 PWAD with not just 3 sectors sectors in it.

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=15

I don't know if that counts as 'playable', but it does have more than 3 sectors. The zipfile on the arhcives is actually dated the same as origwad, but the actual origwad wadfile in the zip is dated earlier.

Look at the archive sorted by date.

A lot of the early wads were modified id maps (and thus aren't in the archive). I have one called pits.wad, dated 03-Apr-94, which is a modified E1M6, but I imagine there were plenty of earlier ones. The earliest I have that isn't based on an id map (apart from origwad) is strmstr.wad (24-Apr-94), which has plenty of sectors, staircases, keys, monsters and stuff. Not a great map by any means though, and there are older ones in the archive.

Anyway, it seems your search for first "real" (according to your definition) pwad not based on an id map should focus on April 1994.

This could prove impossible to get closure on. There were a lot of pwads distributed back then which never made it on to the archive afaik.

The earliest date of a wad in my doom folder, excluding obvious OS-derived date errors, and AFTER doom actually came out, is HEVNHELL.wad, 17th January 1994.

The copy of that wad in the archive has files dated 12-May-94, and as you say, the files in the zip are dated in January 1994. I'd guess those January dates are either falsified or an error.

The author used a fairly standard-looking template for his text-file and mentioned that he used DEU 5.0 and BSP 1.0 - when were they released?

I have a wad called dmlite, it makes every single level in Doom fullbright. It's from 4/17/94.

DooMBoy said:

I have a wad called dmlite, it makes every single level in Doom fullbright. It's from 4/17/94.

Heh it probably just changes the palette.

DEU 5.0 was released on March 30, 1994. So, it is false!

Grimm said:

DEU 5.0 was released on March 30, 1994. So, it is false!

Heh, how do you know that? :)

EDIT: I already knew that (heck, I was using DEU 4. something other when it first came out ;) ), I was just wondering how Grimm did too.

How many friggin' versions of DEU were there in early '94? TO get to version 5.0 after the game had only been released for a few months must have meant they were whacking out new versions every few days.

I believe the early versions of DEU were for the shareware version, so its' development wasn't quite as fast as it seemes :) But there is a very good reason for the many releases.

When Doom was first released, no-one knew anything about the level structure (ID were remaining tight lipped - remember that these were different times), so it took a while for the on-line Doom community (which was probably even smaller than it is now, seeing as most people hadn't even heard of the 'net back then) to figure things out.

The very first version of DEU could only edit things (as in objects), but the Doom editor programmers of the time soon figured out how to change textures and flats. Attempting to move lines around create a weird effect (now known as HOM), which made even adding a new room to an existing map was impossible.

It wasn't until late Febuary 1994 that the basic structure of NODES was finally figured out, and editors like DEU 4.0 allowed you to view NODES (but not build them) for the first time. The DEU programmers didn't didn't waste time, and on 30th March (as previously said), DEU 5.0 was released; it was the first ever Doom editor that let you build new levels.

So in a nut shell, DEU (and other editors such as VERDA) had so many versions so quickly because there was a lot of stuff being discovered and added; and in those days, programmers of "rival" level editors actually co-operated with one enough (even going so far as to share certain code), but there was also a friendly competition to see who could implement new discoveries first :)

Grazza said:

A lot of the early wads were modified id maps (and thus aren't in the archive). I have one called pits.wad, dated 03-Apr-94, which is a modified E1M6, but I imagine there were plenty of earlier ones.

Indeed, there are some 80 of those just from March '94 in my archive.

The earliest I have that isn't based on an id map (apart from origwad) is strmstr.wad (24-Apr-94), which has plenty of sectors, staircases, keys, monsters and stuff. Not a great map by any means though, and there are older ones in the archive..Anyway, it seems your search for first "real" (according to your definition) pwad not based on an id map should focus on April 1994.

I vote for STONES.WAD dated March 26th! (January/February-stamped miscreants are naturally discounted =).

pritch said:

This could prove impossible to get closure on. There were a lot of pwads distributed back then which never made it on to the archive afaik.

A good point. Fortunately, the numerous early CDROM compilations like D!Zone, Demon Gate ect. give a pretty representative snapshot.

The earliest date of a wad in my doom folder, excluding obvious OS-derived date errors, and AFTER doom actually came out, is HEVNHELL.wad, 17th January 1994.

Got it too, same date. Using your criteria, the earliest WAD in my archive would be HALLS1-5.WAD (the grandfather of HALLSPRO in \deathmatch\g-i\). The date is January 1, which is clearly as BS as PLANT.WAD and NEWARENA.WAD's alleged 1980 date. There are also some files "from" 1990-1993, I guess we can safely ignore those.

Well, DEU 5.21 was my first editor, and one I used for a long time. I got it offa CD with the shareware version of Doom. Heh, it took me a long time to finally figure out how to get DEU to work. Anyway, I still have my old computer with DEU on it, and I remembered a file with the DEU history. I couldn't find it, so I dug up the CD, popped it into my new comp, looked through and found that file. The rest was a simple manner of thumbing through a text file. :)

DEU 5.21 is in the archive, and the text-file with the version history is called README.1ST.

I also notice that there is a full E1 replacement pwad called kneedeep.wad, dated 27-Apr-94, which was apparently first included with DEU 5.1. I played it today, and it's not too bad at all. Earliest full-episode pwad maybe?

The DEU package also includes some pwads with March 1994 dates, but they are very small maps for demonstration purposes only.

Surely any other March 1994 dates must be viewed with some suspicion, except that I'd be surprised if no one bashed out a "OMG PWAD!" map on March 31st. Yet again, I regret not having made a back-up of the CompuServe file archive, since that is where such a map would most likely have been released.

I have these compilation wads titled epi1best.wad, epi2best.wad and epi3best.wad. They contained user-made levels (I have no clue where the text files are, but I did have them) and whatnot, replacing all the registered Doom levels. epi1best.wad is dated 14th April, epi2best.wad is dated 25th April, and epi3best.wad is dated 18th May. I can't exactly recall if each of them replaced E*M9 or not, but I'll check whenever I feel like taking a look at them.