Do you think that Wormhole was originally made for Icarus?

[Jaws In Space]

Due to a recent conversation on another thread I went back and read a few interviews form the 5 years of Doom article. It got me thinking, both Ty Halderman & Dario Casali say that Id rejected at least 4 maps from the original build of Evilution that was going to be released on October 24, 1995.

 

Ty Halderman:
There were decisions made by id about what they wanted done, including several levels that were replaced as well as some major hacking to some.
Dario Casali:
This team started on a megawad of its own called Evilution, and Milo and I contributed about 8 levels to. This project was eventually snapped up by ID and some changes were made to which levels were included. Four of ours were cut and a lot of changes had to be made to the ones that stayed (a lot of my levels were simply too big to play on 8 meg systems).

 

Then from this quote it's pretty clear that near the end of Evilution's development Icarus was already underway.

Ty Halderman:
As soon as Evilution was done, which was really in October '95, we already knew we wanted to do more.  TNT2, as we called it initially, was being discussed before Evilution was done because the final part of working on Evilution was the usual tweaking, packaging, etc. (done by a small "punch team") and level authors were bored already.  So I'd have to say there's not much time between and you could almost say they overlapped.

 

Once ID rejected the 4 Casali maps, Team TNT would have needed to quickly find 4 replacement maps. Now it's hard to speculate what those 4 last minute maps were, but I think Wormhole is a strong contender for one of them. Ty was probably underway with Wormhole as one of the weird Simulation maps for Icarus when Shawn Green told him some Evilution maps needed to be replaced. Wormhole really is an outlier among Evilution, it's the only big gimmick map in the whole wad, but it would fit perfectly into Icarus. What do you think?

[Memfis]

Icarus already has an alternative reality level though (Map20). Or maybe it's more like reversed so it doesn't count...

[RjY]

15 minutes ago, Memfis said:

Icarus already has an alternative reality level though (Map20).

Could still make sense: the original level Wormhole having been poached for Evilution, a second, more elaborate alternate reality level for Icarus was made, in the form of WarTemple.

 

Edit: come to think of it, it also has the upside-down map, Flipside. They were all obviously into this kind of weirdness!

 

Edited September 11, 2017 by RjY : remembered another relevant map

[GarrettChan]

14 minutes ago, Memfis said:

Icarus already has an alternative reality level though (Map20). Or maybe it's more like reversed so it doesn't count...

May they made Wormhole first, then because of this, Wormhole was moved to Evilution, and they made a replacement for that to be Icarus Map20. The reason I said this is that Icarus Map20 requires more design and details in it because the one part is up-side-down. However, Icarus was finished first messed up my brain and I couldn't really think straight about this.

 

Actually, Map23 and Map24 of Evilution feel like last minute maps to me.

 

[40oz]

1 hour ago, RjY said:

Could still make sense: the original level Wormhole having been poached for Evilution, a second, more elaborate alternate reality level for Icarus was made, in the form of WarTemple.

 

Edit: come to think of it, it also has the upside-down map, Flipside. They were all obviously into this kind of weirdness!

 

Those are sweet maps. I also like the MC Escher stuff in Plutonia 2's Arch Violence. Are there any more backwards/sideways/upsidedown type maps?

[RjY]

1 minute ago, 40oz said:

Those are sweet maps. I also like the MC Escher stuff in Plutonia 2's Arch Violence. Are there any more backwards/sideways/upsidedown type maps?

Essorg, a map made for a Compet-n contest.

[Impie]

6 hours ago, 40oz said:

Are there any more backwards/sideways/upsidedown type maps?

That one stretch of Mayhem Mansion turns the house upside-down. That's all I can think of.