STONES.WAD

Michael Kelsey

GZDoom turned twenty years old this weekend. I don't remember exactly how I'd heard of it -- my own recollection was that it was mentioned as a source port not to use with Suspended in Dusk, Esa "Espi" Repo's incredible four-map barn-burner released in late 2005, as GZDoom's "accelerated" graphics messed with the mapping trickery that Repo used to achieve certain visual effects, but I can't actually find any mention of GZDoom in either the wad's text file or the Doomworld news roundup that covered it. Regardless, it fairly early on became my go-to source port for all things Doom, Heretic, Hexen and Strife. While as of late I've been experimenting more with the likes of Nugget Doom as GZDoom is a long way from an authentic Doom experience these days, twenty years of development is nothing to sneeze at. We've gone from a simple fork of the venerable ZDoom with better graphics to the engine powering Selaco. The state of Doom modding, and the history of the little engine that could, must have been beyond most community members' wildest dreams back then. With such an auspicious anniversary, I thought it an appropriate moment to do a little Doom archaeology.

Brighter minds than me have done their best to dig through the sands of the past and find the earliest artifacts of Doom mapping history. We can fairly confidently point to ORIGWAD as the very first user-made Doom map, released in early March of 1994, but it's little more than a demonstration, two rooms with some baddies in it, and some of its functionality had to be written by hand. There's been a lot of discussion about what wad out there might qualify as the first "real" map; we can use the release of DEU 5.0, a landmark release of an influential map editor, as a rough turning point for when maps stopped being simplistic demonstrations and mappers were able to create fully-fledged adventures just like their heroes at id Software. Of course, with file timestamp corruption and the yawning chasm of three decades, there's likely just no real way to be sure, but we can make some educated guesses, and circumstantial evidence suggests that STONES.WAD is the first, or one of the first, "real" map. While file timestamps suggest it was released prior to DEU 5.0, it's mentioned somewhere on Usenet that a beta release of DEU 5.0 was used in STONES.WAD's production.

The usual mod disclaimer: This was played in Nugget Doom. In spite of my gushing over it earlier, I'm attempting to move away from GZDoom for some of my future plays, but that doesn't mean I have to play vanilla. DEHEXTRA and DSDHACKED have really expanded the modding capabilities of more traditional source ports like Nugget Doom, and with that in mind, I used Skelegant's excellent One Hell of A Marine mod complete with Gorenuggets and the provided darker palette, and Craneo's Milguy reskin. That's it tho!

Michael Kelsey might be better known for his later Return to Phobos, which, while certainly not the first attempt to recapture the magic of "Knee Deep in the Dead" is probably the most well-known full episode replacement released in 1994. But before Return to Phobos, he was doing some early experiments, and STONES.WAD was the first fruit of his labors.

On first loading it up you'll probably be struck by how primitive it is; most of the level is wallpapered in STARTAN, and there are few doors actually marked as such. Weirder still is that you can actually reach the exit fairly early; but a huge portion of the map is hidden behind a series of secrets. The opening room is at least fairly architecturally interesting, with the lights hanging over the twin steps; the central pit is inescapable, so don't fall in. If you can find the secret door beyond the imps, you'll be able to move on to the area beyond, which contains what I suspect to be the root of the map's filename, a shallow nukage pool with a series of stepping stones that sink into the muck. You can grab the hazmat suit to help, but combat is pretty basic. At this point if you explore the curved corridor nearby you can find your way into the other side of the map, where zombies and imps throw shit at you from above. The final room that needs to be cleared is possessed of a rather striking marble archway; while it's still ugly with misaligned textures, it's nevertheless quite neat to see this early in Doom mapping history.

STONES.WAD won't wow anybody at this point. It didn't make Doomworld's 100 best wads list (published all the way back in 2003!) and it's not likely to show up on anyone's Top Missed Cacowards list anytime soon. In a lot of ways it's an embodiment of the halting, tentative nature of 1994 mapping. But it's an interesting piece of Doom history and worth the five or ten minutes it gives you.

 

-June<3