Someone is recording himself playing through every WAD ever made

[[McD] James]

 

https://www.twitch.tv/joshthenesnerd

 

edit: He just stated that he's not sure if he's going to be playing any Terry WADs or not. His words were "I'm thinking that playing through every Terry WAD wouldn't be the worst idea in the world, but I'm concerned that some of them wouldn't be suitable for Twitch's guidelines. I'm still considering it."

Edited April 16, 2018 by Ajora

[mrthejoshmon]

Brave man, it is quite the monumental task...

 

Emphasis on the mental.

[Pegleg]

Impressive. Crazy, but impressive.

 

Is he working through them alphabetically or chronologically?

 

I wonder if @TimeOfDeath666 has any thoughts?

[Big Ol Billy]

Is this even possible? Seems like you'd need to have a pretty lenient definition of "playing through" to have any hope of finishing the task.

 

(Also, to be pedantic, the idgames archive definitely doesn't contain "every wad ever made." It's not even close to every wad ever publicly released, given that it lacks many wads from the compuserve and AOL communities circa mid-1990s plus many copyright infringing wads, which are probably vast in number.)

Edited April 16, 2018 by Big Ol Billy

[tmorrow]

Even if we limit the range of wads this guy is attempting to every wad on doomworld, he's in for a mighty big task. Good god we could really use a utility that will search through a file list, find all the wads within the zips, then count all the maps within the wads for us to come up with a grand total of maps. Without such a utility we can still get a crude measure of the size of the task by peeking at the doomworld ftp archive at the fullsort.gz and last.60days files.

 

The fullsort file grepped for zip files (to strip out text files) gives 19063 files. Once you remove utilities, resource packs like textures, skins, music, and sounds you've got around 16,000 wads left. I expect the guy won't be playing deathmatch only wads and that brings the pool down further to say 15,000. I made wild guesses for the last 2 numbers btw so don't hold me to them. I can say that my personal archive of wads, mostly sourced from doomworld is pretty damned tidy comes out to 15,317 playable wads so I think the 15,000 is a decent guess.

 

The last.60days file shows file inflows in the last 2 months and counting the zips within gives us 57 files or roughly one zip per day that we can extrapolate to roughly 1 new wad per day.

 

Now we all know there are vast differences between wads, number of maps, difficulty, playability, length of time required to play etc. But if you measured the time it took the play every map of every wad, small ones and big ones, easy ones and hard ones and then divided at the end by the number of wads played you'd have an average time to play each wad T. I can't tell you what T is but it exists and I'd expect it to be some number between 0-7 days. There are megawads that might take up to a week or two to complete but then there's lots of single player wads that take well under an hour to play.

 

If we assume the wad inflow stays the same and the guy plays n wads per day for the next N years. Then after N years he will have played 365*N*n wads. The total number of wads in Doomworld will be roughly 15,000 + 365*N. In order to have played all the wads:

 

365*N*n = 15000 + 365*N or

365*N(n-1) = 15000 or

N(n-1) = 41 approximately

 

As 10 year project, n=5, as a 20 year project, n=3, as a 40 year project, n=2.

 

In order to work out feasibility we really to tighten up the value of T, if T is bigger than 12 hours then he's got little hope.

[GamingMarine]

That's quite a bit of a huge challenge. There's been over 16,000+ WADs released since Doom's incarnation, so it's gonna take Josh several years (Or even decades) to successfully pull this off.

 

EDIT: Let's not forget that some WADs out there contain pornographic content (The idgames archive has an entire section dedicated to those), which is obviously against Twitch's Terms of Service.

Edited April 16, 2018 by GamingMarine : Forgot a certain detail

[Alfonzo]

Not like this is the most of his problems, but on some days WAD production would actually outpace a reasonably skilled player. Just ask any gathering of Abyssal speed mappers! A probably unaware John has now shined a spotlight on the poor bastard, however, so he has no choice but to stick it out until he dies of atrophy and malnourishment.

[xvertigox]

[Avoozl]

Darn it, I should've been the one to try and do this, I have way too much time on my hands almost every day now.

[joshthenesnerd]

my plan is to stop once i get to the april 2018 wads.

[Arl]

12 minutes ago, joshthenesnerd said:

my plan is to stop once i get to the april 2018 wads.

 

Or when your brain cease functioning.

[joshthenesnerd]

Just now, Arl said:

 

 

Or when your brain cease functioning.

which ever happens last

[Arl]

 

 

Good luck to you sir.

[Bushpig2dope]

[Spendragon]

That's crazy. I wish you good fortune on your voyage through the vast hellscape of troll megawads, questionable level architectures, computer/box labyrinths, lengthy, convoluted switch hunts, hundreds of thousands of flaming demons and god knows what else @joshthenesnerd!

[Caffeine Freak]

Make sure you grab the 'Maximum Doom' CD off e-bay or Amazon (1820 additional WADs, some of them *may* not be on idgames!) so you can make absolutely certain that you've played as many mid-90's maps as possible.

 

In all seriousness though, I'd set a more 'realistic' goal; say, all the top 100 WADs (which ranges from 1994-2003) followed by all the Cacoward WADs (ranges from 2004 onwards). That way, you get a great variety of taste in all the best of Doom mapping going all the way back to the beginning. 

 

I mean, it'll be more enjoyable than slogging through all the bad crap you're going to encounter. 

[dpstatic]

Just the idgames archive is not every wad ever made, or even publicly released. Still this an extremely ambitious project. I don't know josh, so I couldn't make any guesses as to how long he'll actually go through with this. Pretty cool though.

[Roofi]

Will you try to finish Chillax without cheating?

 

WIll you finish every wad generated by Oblige?

[seed]

That's a very ambitious goal, but boy does one need to have nerves of steel to even consider doing something like this. I doubt every single wad will be played though.

 

Heh, good luck anyway, gonna need it. And lots of money saved for therapy after the brain will crash completely.

[Avoozl]

But which wad will he do first? I would vote for wow.wad.

[WadArchive]

Make sure to complete all maps in https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/0-9/100kmaps

[geX]

This is insane and awesome.

 

Is there some kinda list of what wads he played on which days?

Edited April 16, 2018 by geX

[geo]

Good luck. There was someone else going through every game on Steam... to completion.

[VanaheimRanger]

This guy stole my profile pic ;)

[Memfis]

Are his streams interesting? Does he play and comment well?

[DMPhobos]

Best of luck man, i'll be sure to watch your stream from time to time

[NieMaMordy]

Let's be honest guys. He won't  mange to play even 100 of them.

[Deadwing]

As long as he doesn't finish the stuff he doesn't like (or use cheats)

[snapshot]

Seems like a very tough task to play through the entire idgames archive, best of luck.

[Killer5]

Josh is a cool dude. I believe in him!

 

It was crazy having John Romero et all pop into our streams yesterday. Got to see me die a bunch in his map :p. Seem like like nice folks.

 

Anyways good luck Josh.