PC Zone Doom Level Competition - A little piece of history from 1994

[Endless]

One of my main duties in the Doom Wiki, is finding and playing WADs from the 90s to upload screenshots to their pages. While scouring the archives, I found out about TMP, a WAD with an unknown author. It is usually rare for such thing to be in the wiki, so that caught my attention. I went down a rabbit hole and read the .txt, finding that TMP was supposedly the winner of a magazine competition from PC Zone, and the author name is Gary McAndrew. I did more digging and managed to found the issues where the event happened!

 

PC Zone 15 (where the event was announced)

PC Zone 19 (where the winners were announced)

 

 

It was an awesome find and I decided to preserve it our history and made an article for it on the Doom Wiki. This happened some months ago already.

 

Today, I was able to find the compilation of the 25 finalist WADs, which to my surprise, were archived on /idgames.

 

Sadly, the remaining submissions seem to have been lost, but according to the article, they existed as part of the compiling CD-ROM back when the event ended. Probably lost to time, but I think it is worth a shot asking if someone knows any of the remaining missing WADs, and maybe they can be somehow rescued.

 

A total of 120 submissions were sent, but only the 25 finalist (plus the winner) were archived on /idgames.

 

Anyway, hope you guys enjoy this little piece of forgotten Doom history. If you know of other similar events, would be awesome to read about them :)

[Individualised]

Lmao at this

 

Great find.

[Endless]

10 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Lmao at this

 

Great find.

Shady loopholes everywhere!

 

Also the mention that Doom maps are ''two dimensional'', ouch.

[Murdoch]

Holy crap, I actually remember this. Great find.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Interesting.  Unfortunately it doesn't look like the cover CD for PC Zone issue 19 is archived anywhere, and the big stack of CDs on my shelf that I had a momentary hope for are PC Gamer instead.  Might be worth watching eBay for?

 

This also reminds me of this flyer from one of the D!ZONE boxes which I never did find any definitive info on.  I guess with the reputation D!ZONE had it's possible no one applied or something, or they decided Doom was no longer relevant by that time.  (I guess another possibility is that it's what led to them scouting the authors for Perdition's Gate and Hell 2 Pay but I've never seen anything stating something to that effect)

[Endless]

8 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Interesting.  Unfortunately it doesn't look like the cover CD for PC Zone issue 19 is archived anywhere, and the big stack of CDs on my shelf that I had a momentary hope for are PC Gamer instead.  Might be worth watching eBay for?

 

This also reminds me of this flyer from one of the D!ZONE boxes which I never did find any definitive info on.  I guess with the reputation D!ZONE had it's possible no one applied or something, or they decided Doom was no longer relevant by that time.  (I guess another possibility is that it's what led to them scouting the authors for Perdition's Gate and Hell 2 Pay but I've never seen anything stating something to that effect)

 

Those are some considerable prize pools. First time I see this. I imagine that if this was just packed inside the D!Zone big boxes, then its reach would have probably been minimal compared to magazine like PC Gamer, for example.

[thestarrover]

8 hours ago, Endless said:

One of my main duties in the Doom Wiki, is finding and playing WADs from the 90s to upload screenshots to their pages. While scouring the archives, I found out about TMP, a WAD with an unknown author. It is usually rare for such thing to be in the wiki, so that caught my attention. I went down a rabbit hole and read the .txt, finding that TMP was supposedly the winner of a magazine competition from PC Zone, and the author name is Gary McAndrew. I did more digging and managed to found the issues where the event happened!

 

PC Zone 15 (where the event was announced)

PC Zone 19 (where the winners were announced)

 

 

It was an awesome find and I decided to preserve it our history and made an article for it on the Doom Wiki. This happened some months ago already.

 

Today, I was able to find the compilation of the 25 finalist WADs, which to my surprise, were archived on /idgames.

 

Sadly, the remaining submissions seem to have been lost, but according to the article, they existed as part of the compiling CD-ROM back when the event ended. Probably lost to time, but I think it is worth a shot asking if someone knows any of the remaining missing WADs, and maybe they can be somehow rescued.

 

A total of 120 submissions were sent, but only the 25 finalist (plus the winner) were archived on /idgames.

 

Anyway, hope you guys enjoy this little piece of forgotten Doom history. If you know of other similar events, would be awesome to read about them :)

The wads seem to be here

[DavidN]

I loved PC Zone, it was fascinatingly strange in its sense of humour - the precursor to irreverent game critic personalities like Yahtzee and so on :) What a great find!

[Endless]

5 minutes ago, thestarrover said:

The wads seem to be here

Incredible! It does exist still. The .ISO files seems to have all the submissions sent to the PC Zone competition, plus a few hundred random zip files, and hundreds of other items for other games I assume.

 

Here's Temple by David Harvey.

 

E1L1 by David Moore

 

Abraxis by Nick Lee

 

Canals by M. Booth

 

Searching his name in /idgames doesn't yield results, and the same goes for a lot of the WADs and authors for this competition. Either they are not on /idgames at all, or maybe under a different name or title.

 

Is there any way to possibly upload these levels to /idgames? @Grazza I've always wondered exactly how the process goes for uploading lost-and-found levels. I think you've uploaded many throughout the years so you were the first person that came to mind.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

4 hours ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

This also reminds me of this flyer from one of the D!ZONE boxes which I never did find any definitive info on.  I guess with the reputation D!ZONE had it's possible no one applied or something, or they decided Doom was no longer relevant by that time.

I wonder what Doom II PWAD is depicted on that screenshot.

[Murdoch]

1 hour ago, thestarrover said:

The wads seem to be here

 

Wow I remember the disc design too. Likely that very disc is where i got the version of DEU updated for Doom II.

[thestarrover]

Competion entries in the october 1994 issue... I am not at home and I can't check the disc, but if I remember correctly the wads included are the same of the december issue...

[Zilch]

On a separate note, doesn't it annoy anyone that the Doom Fandom also uses the "Doom Wiki" title and an extremely similar icon (right hand side facing Cacodemon)?

 

It happens more than once where sometimes I click on a link and only when the site loads I realize it's the Doom Fandom.

 

This example below is an incredibly rare case where Google seems to have placed the actual Doom Wiki first, probably because they're sensing my anger and frustration!

 

[Grazza]

1 hour ago, Endless said:

Is there any way to possibly upload these levels to /idgames? @Grazza I've always wondered exactly how the process goes for uploading lost-and-found levels. I think you've uploaded many throughout the years so you were the first person that came to mind.

First of all, you need something from the author of each wad granting the right to distribute them in some way. In the absence of that, you are SOL.

[deathz0r]

I always loved how the winner of the contest didn't even bother to give a proper filename and just used the default output of BSP.

 

Good to finally see the scans from the contest itself! I've owned the Dec 1994 cover CD which has the contest entries ever since my dad bought that magazine issue, and I don't remember much about playing them back in the day (I preferred the sheer stupidity of DMINATOR.WAD which was also on the same CD, or was it the April 1995 cover CD?) so it'll be good to give them another spin now that there's an archive of the names associated with the WADs.