Master Levels for Doom II
In talking about Final Doom, I mentioned how there’s more user maps dumped on the Internet than there are stars in the sky. Making this not just possible, but wildly successful, was Doom‘s forward-thinking data structure. By downloading a single new .WAD file, you could temporarily overwrite one level or all 32, drop in new enemy art or new effects, and generally have endless different Doom experiences. The small file size made it friendly to dial-up speeds, while running new levels just required some extra text in the command line. Plus, these WADs were all given freely – put together just from fans’ (literal) love of the game.
Hosting and sharing such levels originally fell to various university servers, until admins noticed and kicked them all off. By 1995, most everything had consolidated to ftp.cdrom.com/idgames. BBSes, Usenet, and early forums could point you in the direction of the hottest new levels, or you could just scrape the most recent /idgames uploads. It was a treasure trove of content that extended Doom’s replayability into the stratosphere. Well, Doom II at least – the timing here meant that most modders skipped over the original game in favor of the sequel’s extra beasties and minor engine improvements.
Unfortunately, mid-90s Internet was still a flaky thing. Your average WAD was going to take around 10 minutes to download. You probably weren’t paying per-minute charges anymore, but you were tying up phone lines. You were downloading a handful of new WADs a night, with the excellent chance that one or all of them were some new map designer’s one-room equivalent of a “Hello World” program. If you didn’t get tipped off to a level by a effusive BBS post, it was pretty much just the readme that came with the WAD and your best guess if it “sounded cool.”
Enter WizardWorks, among others. There were no restrictions under Doom’s user agreement about collecting WADs, stamping them onto a CD, and selling that disc in stores. WizardWorks took great advantage of this, selling at least six collections of Doom maps to reasonable popularity and success. If you were seriously into Doom, slapping $30 down for one “D! Zone” compilation might be worth it in saved download time alone. If you were id, or publisher GT Interactive, watching another company get money off your product for doing fuck all work was apparently starting to stick in your craw.
Enter The Master Levels for Doom II. This was a boxed expansion in two major parts. First, id used their corporate bandwidth to vacuum up the largest collection of user WADs yet released: over 300MB of 1830 WADs, for 3201 total levels. Almost twice the size of competing sets, it would have taken your high-end 28.8k user almost 26 hours (and a lot of luck) to download themselves. It was a naked attempt to beat WizardWorks at their own game, with the added legitimacy of an official release. This collection is called “Maximum Doom,” per the disc, and we’ll look at it separately later.
To lend additional value to the package, id also commissioned the Master Levels. This is a group of 20 new maps (plus one secret) created by some of the most notable authors on the Web. It’s important to point out that there’s nothing particularly special about these maps themselves. They’re not pitched as the pinnacle of challenge for the hardest Doom-heads. They didn’t win any competition, they weren’t hand-picked by id out of the thousands on /idgames, and no one’s claiming they represent the “best of Doom.” The designers are the Masters here – not the levels, and not you.
These designers are indeed a glimpse at the next class of pro FPS creators. Tim Willits would go on to join id, build levels for the Quake series, and was the Lead Designer on Doom 3. Tom Mustaine would co-found Ritual Entertainment and work on the 2016 Doom reboot. Sverre André Kvernmo would contribute levels to Redneck Rampage and KISS: Psycho Circus. Christen David Klie had worked on The Lost Episodes of Doom (one of those unofficial commercial packs that Master Levels is trying to show up) and would later work on Outlaws. John “Dr. Sleep” Anderson would design for Blood, Unreal, and Daikatana. Only Jim Flynn wouldn’t work outside of Doom; instead contributing to the Boom source port and many more Doom campaigns.
To organize both the Master Levels and the giant wad of WADs, the disc also includes a commercial release of Chris Badger’s “Doom-IT” program. This handy tool lists all available .WADs in a given directory, shows any accompanying readme in a window to the side, and auto-sets the command line flags needed to make the particular level work. Select a WAD (or a group of them, if the level numbers they replace don’t conflict) and it will automatically run Doom II and jump to the particular level. It’s a fantastic program that couldn’t make navigating this collection any easier – at least considering DOS restraints.
Starting the Master Levels through Doom-IT – the original way to play them – you’re presented with an alphabetical list of the 20 maps. The associated readmes can be viewed, all following the agreed-upon format of these things for the time. Some of them have elaborate plot setups that in no way come across within the game – like playing as a former Cyberdemon against his betrayers, or levels based on Dante Alighieri’s guided tour through Hell. And it’s pretty nostalgic to see CompuServe IDs and <G> for “grin” in these files. We also wore onions on our belts, as was the style then.
And so, you pick a level and you go. This is not a continuous campaign, even though recent re-releases have organized it as such. The original Master Levels experience is starting a map of your choosing with the pistol and 50 ammo. There’s no designated order, nor any progressive scale in difficulty. Some levels are bastard hard, while others generally balance well. I stress that this was common for the time and matches the experience of downloading a random new level off the Web. It also gives the maps a “drive it like you stole it” feel, as there’s no point holding back on any of the weapons you collect. You can’t take them with you.
Graphically and technically, this is just Doom II. These are all some brown-ass levels, with no new music or enemies. Two levels use a new starry skybox, but that’s it for new art. One fault of the WAD structure is that level music was hard-coded. You couldn’t change the order the tracks played in, so a lot of these maps repeat the music for Doom II’s first level “Entryway.” You could get around this by setting your level to replace a later-numbered map – some of these levels do that to play something else from Doom II’s soundtrack. Most of them don’t bother, so I’d turned the music off entirely by the 4th map.
Since these levels were all made around the same time, themes start to appear. A big one is asking the player to traverse teeny-tiny ledges with teetering precision. “Catwalk” (naturally) exemplifies this, with an area of branching ledges that require steady crossing while under fire. “Subspace” has a similarly tricky tightrope section over toxic goo. For what it’s worth, I remember this being much more difficult to do with keyboard-only controls. Mouse and keyboard makes quick work of the task, but it makes sense why narrow ledges keep repeating throughout these levels.
Puzzles are another common theme. “Subspace” starts out with an OG John Romero-style setup, teasing you with a red key inside a locked room with no obvious way to get in. “Virgil’s Lead” features lots of switch-locked doors with no apparent way to open them – pay attention to the wall textures. “Subterra” has a group of teleporters near the beginning and asks you to find the right order to take them. There’s nothing you can do to figure this out beyond trial and error.
Many levels use extreme darkness to hide enemies. “Bloodsea Keep” even completely blacks out sectors to create neat-looking “shadow Imps.” I don’t know if it’s fair to say that a lot of these maps are poorly lit, because it seems an intentional choice used to good effect. But it does mean you get torn up by essentially-invisible Chaingunners, or enjoy the great surprise of a Revenant’s rocket appearing from nowhere. The hardest levels aren’t hard because of this, but you definitely find yourself squinting through the darkness in them.
There’s also an overall trend to push mid-game monsters into early encounters. I think you notice this more because of the pistol start, but you’ll often find yourself fighting Barons and Pain Elementals without the right tools (or stored ammo) for the job. I don’t know how much of this is in the spirit of a challenge, versus how much is just trying to cram everything from Doom II into one level – Cyberdemon battles are also common, while two levels reuse Doom II’s Icon of Sin finale. You’ll also see a lot of BFGs and Plasma Rifles thrown in toward the end of levels, maybe for deathmatch. Thanks? I don’t need them now.
Level design can very roughly be divided into those trying to expand on id’s style, and those trying to subvert expectations. “Attack” is probably the poster child of a level that could replace an official one from Doom II and wouldn’t feel out of place. It has a very familiar balance of enemy and item placement and doesn’t try to push its challenge into the red. It’s well-lit, you get nearly every weapon by the end of the level, and all the mid-tier enemies (Revenant, Mancubus, Baron of Hell) make a single appearance. Middle of the road, no complaints. “Combine,” “Nessus,” and “Geryon” are similarly solid levels.
The others revolve around breaking traditional Doom habits and tricking veteran players. At least half of them try different ways to intentionally block you from backing away – be it from a surprise enemy, from trying to grab a key and run out of the room before the trap triggers, or from using a doorway to try and funnel enemies into your line of fire. They do this through new triggers introduced in Doom 1.9; monster-only teleporters, instant doors that snap open or closed, and just some good, old-fashioned locking the door behind you. The monster-only teleporters are particularly vicious, letting an enemy charge toward you, hit the teleporter, then immediately reappear behind you to finish its attack.
The hardest levels take this to extremes. “Trapped on Titan” starts with you looking at a shotgun. When you go forward to pick it up, two platforms immediately drop Chaingunners beside it, who quickly shred you. Reload, and now you try to pick up the shotgun and run backward – only for the floor to drop underneath you, bringing you down to two different Chaingunners, who quickly shred you. It’s the start of a level out to trick you throughout, using all the mean setups I talked about earlier. The worst is probably lining up a careful jump to the yellow key, when a barrier snaps down mid-flight and deposits you next to – you guessed it – two Chaingunners who quickly shred you.
Sverre André Kvernmo offers up the pack’s most notorious levels. “Black Tower” has you travel up the looming monolith, with teleporters used to fake a tower much taller than the engine can support. After some darkened floors and Cacodemons floating in through the windows, you eventually hit a floor littered with monster-only teleporters, causing demons and Barons of Hell to blink around the entire room constantly. It’s a… unique challenge. You then have to fight a Cyberdemon on the on the tightly-packed roof, only to have to make your way back down the entire (repopulated) tower.
“The Express Elevator to Hell” or TEETH does this in reverse, building a interconnected pit of eight floors that play into each other in interesting ways. The titular elevator drops on its own and you start trapped in it. Barons and Chaingunners crowd onto the platform or snipe down at you from doorways, while you panic under 360-degree attacks in a big circle with no cover. Pickups meant to last you the whole level start getting eaten up as you run. If you survive, you’ll find a series of puzzles that link sequentially from the 8th floor back up to the top. Maybe the most devious is a cage of Chaingunners covering a hallway, with an Arch-Vile in a connected, protected room. If you grease the gunners, the Arch-Vile just brings them back. You can’t break this trap until you can access a back-way path from a higher level that lets you finally waste the Arch-Vile.
It’s really creative stuff, though I think you have to be a Doom veteran to actually appreciate it. These are tricks and traps you’ve maybe never seen before, almost to a fault – “Vesperas” famously hides its yellow key at the end of a pixel-length invisible walkway. The tricks may be annoying, but the traps at least caused me to pause, impressed, and really ponder how to break them. If you’re not familiar with Doom, or just not interested in its subtleties, this is going to seem like senseless ass paddling. You’re getting attacked as soon as the level starts, or tossed into pitched arena battles. It’s not going to be fun. So, as much as the Master Levels weren’t sold as exclusively for twitchy Doom “masters,” some of its levels definitely are.
This tracks with online discussions today. Lots of people really hate the Master Levels, and these super try-hard maps seem why. A lot of that hate feels like it’s missing context. This pack, like Final Doom, is meant for players that have been downloading WADs for almost two years now. You’ve learned familiar loops, expectations, and predictable behavior. You’re not falling for a lone key in an empty room anymore. These levels were out to acknowledge that experience, challenge it, and offer something new – same as Final Doom and Ultimate Doom would to follow. That’s the direction Doom was going in 1995. As much as I, personally, don’t love “gotcha!” game design, I understand why it’s in these levels. Plus, Doom maps are generally short enough that I don’t mind learning from my mistake and a restart is just a space bar away.
But, I’ll also admit I don’t like replaying platform game levels over and over until I “get it right,” so I may just be a big ol’ hypocrite giving my favorite genre a pass. I’m also no Doom master. As a self-imposed challenge, I prefer to play on the second-highest difficulty (Ultra-Violence, for the maximum enemy count) with no mid-level quick saves. The hardest of the Master Levels absolutely had me pulling lots of save-scumming just to get by. It may just not be a pack for you, but its difficulty level makes sense. Only people who are pretty good at playing Doom are going to be invested enough to go and make maps for it.
Some contemporary flaming also came because many of these authors were releasing Doom II projects already, dropping interconnected campaigns sequentially on the FTP sites. Instead of making completely new maps for the Master Levels, they just handed over the next one in development. John Anderson’s levels are the next ones in his “Inferno” series, Jim Flynn’s were marked for “Titan,” and Sverre Kvernmo’s came from “Cabal.” It’s awfully similar to how Final Doom bought Evilution’s release and essentially stuffed it behind a paywall; except in that case, no levels from that campaign had been released yet. This setup actively interrupts series that had been free up to that point.
My favorite of the pack? Probably “Titan Manor.” It’s a puzzle box level, which many think is against the spirit of Doom. “Puzzle” in Doom-speak still means you’re fighting ungodly amounts of enemies in bad situations, you just have some locked areas that put the brakes on the action until you solve them. You start in a darkened outdoor area, absolutely swarmed by baddies. Like Resident Evil, only the mansion ahead offers some sanctuary. Once inside, you’re avoiding getting sniped through the windows by Arachnatrons as you do equal parts of exploring the rooms and manipulating switches for keys. There’s even a “working” light switch, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in Doom before. It reminds me of Doom II’s “Monster Condo” and I think it’s just a really neat setup and execution.
My least favorite is “The Catwalk.” Decoration and lighting are pretty routine, with isolated pockets of middling combat. To the left and right of the start are pointless Confuse-o-Stairs that raise and lower in sections. They do nothing except to slow you down. There’s a section of craggly walkways you have to keep crossing to hit a series of switches, then the long catwalk to reach the end. As said earlier, I’m sure keyboard-only controls would make your butthole take a bite of your underwear, but these sections feel outdated and effortless these days. It’s not a bad level, just not that impressive when set against others in the pack.
Indeed, the Master Levels feel like a science fair. Everyone’s here showing off their best, but someone’s solar system model stands to lose out to someone’s actual, goddamned rocket. There’s a reason you hear the same four maps get talked about, even if that talk is mostly negative. They are certainly unique and certainly memorable. But it’s not correct to say that all the levels are an uber-pack of balls-stomping hardcore torture – that’s Plutonia Experiment in Final Doom. These are just some “cool levels” that don’t always turn out that way.
Per the Master Levels for Doom II FAQ, Chris Klie worked 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, and gave himself pneumonia making 12 maps for the Master Levels. Six of them didn’t even make the cut. That’s the level of commitment and obsession we’re enshrining here, for both designers and players. It’s a sign of how popular Doom mapping really was at the time, and a snapshot of a period where everything about the very concept of user maps was just new and cool. Every level isn’t a winner, and again, no one ever said these were meant to be the best Doom maps ever made. But it is a great big feast if all you really wanted out of Doom in 1995 was “more!”
The Good
A time capsule of Doom modding in 1994-1995. Some confusion over what these maps are supposed to represent (who’s the Master here?) but some definite examples of level design talent. Some real challenges and new tricks for fervent Doomers.
The Bad
A bunch of disconnected pistol start levels of varying quality and difficulty. Some of these giant and/or packed maps were real system hogs at the time. Obviously, every level in here is quaint compared to what Doom modders have built since.