There's a quick flash of black, and inexplicably you land on solid ground. Later on, you watch yourself fall out into deep space, buoyed on by turbulent flames. If you look in the right place, you’ll see the Hell portal itself, carved out of lava rocks, the words “Absolute Life Transformation” scrawled in fire. Starting on the plane, you are immediately greeted with a dead visage of yourself. A brief readme.exe at the start of A.L.T informs you of a “strange portal in the cargo compartment'. Take for example, eerie Russian community spawned megaWAD A.L.T - which stands for ‘Absolute Life Transformation’.Ī psychedelic odyssey straight into the heart of darkness (and then some), it's set in the aftermath of a plane crash. The sheer vastness and madcap vision behind these games sometimes straddles that space between utter mess and deftly realised artistic creation. While how effective they are at communicating the deeper themes troubling humanity is questionable, one thing is certain though: exploding giblets are not always the main draw in Doom WADs. Creepy, wild places that couldn't exist anywhere else except inside Doom's blocky, cursed architecture. It’s also the only game I know of where explosive barrels skip gleefully in and out of your line of fire.Ĭonversely, there are Doom WADs that may cause you to question the very nature of reality. Watch helplessly as your bright blue projectile shots grow legs and hightail it across the plains. The whole absurd setup adds mechanical novelties, too.

Other creators veer more toward outrightly insane offerings, like ‘Run For It’: in which in-game objects sprout thin, pale limbs and and promptly dash away from you. Pop culture mods tend to be the most well known outside the fan-base, such as ‘2002: a Doom Odyssey’, or games based on the likes of Seinfeld and Pokemon. For many, Doom served as a surreal initiation into game design. Some build for the sheer creative thrill of it others to push at the limits of a classic game engine more still, just want to pet the dog. This community has multiplied over the years, and continues to create via the original Doom titles. Known as Doom WADs (Where’s All The Data?), they heralded the dawn of PC game modding as we know it. Back then, the community traded floppy discs containing all new, selfcrafted game packages. When Doom effectively invented the first-person shooter genre in 1993, it also served as a canvas for legions of tenacious modders.

Existing some place between Hell and the pitiless void beyond Mars, its occult planes have always been lonely and surreal. Doom is an unholy trinity of trash sci-fi, jagged Eldritch landscapes and sorcerous, blood soaked beasts.

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