My House | myhouse.wad
Veddge
I'd been waiting for the right moment to talk about My House and now that Doom II: Hell on Earth is 30 years old as of this week and Halloween is just around the corner, I can't think of a more appropriate time to talk about My House.
Doom and its community has been around for over three decades
now. In that time, the community has gone through several phases. Every
couple of years, something happens in the community that breaks containment
and someone in the wider gaming press (or, heaven forbid, the mainstream
press) picks up on it and blasts it to the rest of the world. Sometimes it's
more negative, such as when the news broke that the Columbine shooters were
fans of the game. Sometimes it's whimsical, like when Andrew "Linguica"
Stine's InstaDoom and its selfie-stick tool got covered in
Huffington Post for some insane reason. Brutal Doom got so
much coverage it drew in a horde of new fans and forever shaped the way the
Doom reboots would play. And then there's My House.
I don't think anything has broken containment from the community so completely as My House did. Even Brutal Doom was only ever presented as a massive overhaul of the base Doom gameplay. My House is something else entirely -- presented as a rather simple, charming recreation of someone's house in the Doom engine (albeit with using a few advanced GZDoom features.) And sure, you can play it as that -- once you have the blue key, you're perfectly free to leave out the front gate. But explore a little bit and the enormity of the thing begins to reveal itself. If you're going in totally blind, it's shocking just how much you can uncover. No wonder this thing took off as it did -- it joins peoples' love of mystery with the more recent internet cultural fascination with liminal spaces, while at the same time being both extremely metafictional and heavy with symbolism. At a time where indie horror has flooded the market to pick up where Silent Hill left off, My House fits easily into the zeitgeist. It was pretty much designed to blow up as a media darling.
To fully understand My House you have to understand that it is composed of a few different layers. Let's start from the beginning.
In September 2022, Veddge logged into Doomworld and posted a few screenshots from a work-in-progress map based on a house, describing it as an old unfinished "my house"-style map from 1999 begun by a recently-deceased friend. It was common in the late 90s/early 2000s for beginner mappers to recreate their house (or school, or other place they were commonly at) in whatever game they were mapping for -- Doom is particularly common, but I've seen examples in Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and of course Half-Life and Counter-Strike. So far, this checks out. It's a sweet gesture, and of course promises to be a cute look back at a bygone era of Doom mapping.
So, okay, we run the .wad. Just a simple house map -- shoot the monsters, get the keys, leave, hear the opening bass hits of "The Healer Stalks" as Doom II's MAP02: "Underhalls" loads up. Nothing to see here. But we're not done yet, are we? It's time to load up the .pk3. Other than the lengthy load time, it's the same thing as the .wad, just a simple house map... but we can see a soulsphere sitting on a pipe out in the yard through the windows. That wasn't there in the .wad! The design plays to a couple assumptions about how players will approach the map -- you can't see the pipe from where you start, and most players will naturally be drawn to explore the house first, and see the soulsphere from within. But when you go back out to find that soulsphere, it's not there... but as you circle around the house you'll see that the monsters you killed are back, and something seems... different. The house has had some upgrades, making more use of GZDoom and UDMF features -- there's more detail to the house, the cute little PlayStation by the TV is now an XBox One, doors swing open rather than raise up. Your weapons are better animated, too -- almost as if you're playing using Smooth Doom. The music, the perennial classic default MAP01 song, "Running from Evil," the one that we've all heard a million times playing these user maps that don't replace the music, has by now begun to sound a little strange -- notes playing wrong, or at the wrong time, or doubling, or being skipped outright... It's still the same song, at first, and you think maybe you just imagined it. There's some hints that everything is not as it seems{}. seems{}. seems{}.
From here there's a bunch of ways you could go. If you had simply left the level before coming back in the house, you'd transition to "Underhalls." I did this the first time I played and I wound up quitting, thinking that was all there was to see. But then I was told there was more to it, and there was. What's more, "Underhalls" is a great way to reset the map -- you can shoot your way through it in a couple minutes and wind up right back in MAP01: "My House."
The proper way to continue, however, is to find your way into the mirror-verse. The mirror in the hallway bathroom is a portal to a reverse version of the house. It's not merely just the regular house but mirrored -- the monster sprites are flipped, all sound effects play in reverse, and so does the music. You can even leave the level from here and go onto PAM02: "sllahrednU", a reverse version of the original Doom II map that is incredibly disorienting if you're used to the original like me.
And it only gets weirder from here. There's a lot of different layers to this thing. Fool around in the tub and you'll eventually find your way into the Bathhouse, reminiscent of the popular "poolrooms" genre of liminal art. At one point, there's a roughly one in ten chance that one of the bedroom closets will open into a mysterious, dark grey maze that doesn't offer anything except creepy noises. Follow the plastic balls on your way back from the mirror house and wind up in a creepy daycare, structurally reminiscent of the house's basement, presided over by an even creepier Shrek painting. At some point you'll wind up in the Brutalist House, a large, featureless concrete facsimile of the house reminiscent of the community's brief fascination with brutalism; surrounding it is row upon row of windows, some of which are lit, but nobody seems to be there... maybe. Aesthetically this "apartment void" you're in is quite reminiscent of a famous liminal photograph (the indoor courtyard of a hotel in London.) What appears to be an exit teleport sits tantalizingly across the way, but there's no way to jump to it... There's a dog here, a friendly German Shephard who follows you around with cute little barks. If you poke around, you'll eventually find yourself in a double-size version of the house, and you don't want to meet the double-sized version of the dog...
* Fall into the void here at any point, or open the right door, and you'll wind
up in the endless stairwell. Each floor has a door, but two of these
will only open from the other side, two are actually connected to each
other, one opens into a sunny sky (you land here if you fall out of the
sky area in the Bathhouse)
and the third opens into a brief section marked by the infamous FIREBLU
texture at the other end of which is a door leading you back to the
last version of the house you were at. If you noclip in the wrong place, you'll wind up in the Backrooms -- and you're not alone. It is
possible to escape the nigh-invincible entity that stalks you in
here and back into the stairwell... unless you made the mistake of noclipping in the reverse
"Underhalls." So don't noclip in the reverse "Underhalls." And if you happen to die? Don't be so quick to reload your save -- wait a bit and you'll wake up in a hospital, allowing you another chance to get back to where you were, at full strength. This can only happen once, though!
The airport is another place with a curiously liminal feel. It's actually rather cramped compared to your average terminal, but you're really only here for two things: one, to get ambushed in the women's bathroom, and two, to board a plane that you will then crash and jump out the back, which will send you back to the house. Where you go from here is dependent on if you found all the artifacts. Fail, and you'll land in an empty version of the house; it feels curiously depressing, as if the occupants had moved out. There's nowhere to go from here but out, and when you step outside, the house disappears, leaving an empty lot managed by Navidson Realty.
Towards the end of your journey, you'll likely spot a hint about something in the backyard by the soulsphere pipe. Open the right spot in the fence and you'll find yourself on a lonely country road late at night; no matter which direction you go, you'll eventually find yourself at a crashed car, a hauntingly familiar song blasting on the radio, the headlights shining towards a path through the woods. Beyond is a lone gas station and nearby bus stop that reminds me quite a bit of Afraid of Monsters or Cry of Fear, in part due to being built a little more realistically than is usual for Doom through use of 3D models and real-time lights. I'm also reminded of one of the fan sequels to Ghoul's Forest, which had you running around collecting gas at a seemingly-abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere while a monster chased you down.
When I finally finished My House my head felt exploded. I had played through it last year when it was relatively new but I didn't dig too deep -- I kind of burned the house down by accident and figured that was the end of it. This time, I was determined to uncover as many of its secrets as I could, and I think I succeeded. It's kind of the perfect mod, as these things go; on one hand, it's a love letter to not just an old game, but a bygone era of modding for that game, with all the little tells and foibles that only really make sense if you lived through it. I remember playing all those user maps with the default music and the default textures. I remember that they all went on to one of the stock maps when you finished. I remember how common it was for beginners to make recreations of their homes, or their schools, or even their workplaces sometimes. (In a pre-Columbine world it was a different, more innocent era, though the practice did continue for a few years after.)
On top of all this, it's a deeply symbolic story about love and loss that is never fully explained -- even Veddge's real name, "Steve Nelson," isn't actually his real name as far as anyone knows. All these weird spaces we wind up in -- the Brutalist House, the airport, the gas station -- have their own meanings. Even the stuff that is clearly meant to be a tribute to something else -- like the Labyrinth from House of Leaves -- is up for debate. Like a lot of stuff in this vein -- Silent Hill, for example -- this is all up for interpretation, and people will probably be arguing about it for the next couple decades. I wouldn't be shocked if it eventually made it into textbooks. Hey, if Tay Zonday can become college course material, why not a weird Doom mod?
If you don't like My House, I get it. This kind of stuff isn't for everyone. Maybe you don't like the premise. Maybe this kind of experimentalism isn't your thing. Maybe you just don't like GZDoom. But I do think you're missing out on the experience of the decade; the Doom community is boundlessly creative, but something like this, with all its intricacies, its stepping away from a traditional structure towards something else entirely -- in short, making the kind of critical indie darling that sells like hotcakes on Steam as a free mod for a 30 year old game -- that's a rare thing indeed. Getting all the many moving parts of this to function together correctly -- I can't imagine how much work it took. I took a look at the map in SLADE and there's something like a dozen different copies of the house just to make all the variants and their basements work together properly.
I'm a big fan of using existing engines to make horror games -- some of my greatest Halloween gaming experiences has been via Half-Life and Thief mods, and I think there's a lot of room in the Doom community for stuff like this. They can't all be MBF21 slaughter maps using totally stock textures, right? And with GZDoom having grown into a powerful game engine I think we'll be seeing more of this kind of thing. I just hope we don't have to wait another thirty years.
get it on Doomworld
getting ambushed in the woman's restroom feels oddly poignant to me, especially given how the bathroom signs swap after the sequence is over. the trans reading there is unmistakable but it's a hard line to trace - just another bump in the roughshod life being portrayed level by level, scene by scene.
ReplyDeleteanyway, genuinely one of the most creative wads I've played in a while, glad you liked it too. also hoping that we get similar quality horror type maps in the near future! been considering a few myself... and check out Eraser if you haven't already!
god, I think you're on to something there.
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