One of the last of the Id Software old guard is parting company with the studio soon. Tim Willits wasn’t part of the original team of founders, but was there early enough to be credited as level designer on 1995’s Ultimate Doom and have a credit in almost everything since. After working as a designer and creative director on the likes of Quake, Doom 3 and Rage, and acting as studio director through the release of Rage 2, he’s left a mark on the FPS genre as we know it. After QuakeCon next week he’ll say his goodbyes and announce his plans for the future.

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Time to pencil in another week of sick days and sleepless nights, as the competitors and games for this year’s Summer Games Done Quick have been announced, broadcasting from Bloomington, Minneapolis. The charity speedrunning marathon kicks off on 5pm BST on June 23rd, demolishing games at record pace around the clock until June 30th. As with their other summer events, they’ll be raising fat sacks of money for M decins Sans Fronti res. While there’s still time for last-minute changes, the show schedule is here, automatically adjusted to your local timezone.

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Here is a riddle for you. When is Doom not Doom? Why, when its open-source code has gone through countless iterations and become a modern development platform in its own right!

Sometimes a Doom mod outgrows its old home and breaks away as a completely standalone game. This week I’m bringing you an all-you-can-eat buffet of free, full games (and some demos) that are the best to have flown Doom’s nest. The list includes platformers, horror, racing, deathmatch and plenty of old-school FPS fun. Some of them have even settled down to raise their own mod scenes and their own spin-off games. Isn’t that sweet?

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Doom 2 is more than just Doom> these days. Some modern levels for the 90s classic FPS feature thousands of enemies, fiendish traps and difficulty beyond anything Id Software dreamt of. Eviternity, released yesterday, runs the gamut. It’s a 32-level campaign split up into six episodes each with a fresh look and some new monsters. You’ll start out in gloomy gothic tunnels, plinking away at zombies with a pistol. By the end, you’ll be screaming through the vast halls of heaven itself, cutting through ungodly-huge swarms of demons with BFG in hand. It’s rather brill.

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Hocus Pocus Doom a dangerously potent cocktail of nostalgia. Doom 2 modder “Ravage” has been working on this since 2014, adapting an old 2D DOS game into a GZDoom-based (but kid-friendly) FPS. If you grew up playing DOS games in the 90s, you may remember Hocus Pocus, or at least the shareware version. Honestly, it wasn’t the greatest – a simple platformer published by Apogee. Hocus Pocus Doom, on the other hand, is an enormous, polished game and (as of a new release yesterday) finished, in need of only the gentlest of polishing up before being considered ‘done’. Grab it here.

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Doom turned 25 last month, so it can do whatever it wants over the holidays – that includes turning into a golf game or converting the hazy memories of robot vacuum cleaners into hellish arenas. While I was away from my news-desk, programmer Rich Whitehouse cobbled together DOOMBA, a system for exporting the memories of your house’s layout from a Roomba and filling it with demons. An impressive bit of weird Doom one-upmanship over modder TerminusEst13, who just one day prior released Hellshots Golf – a multiplayer golf conversion set across eighteen holes of hellish relaxation. Give both a look below.

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It’s Doom‘s 25th birthday, and Id’s classic FPS has grown up along with me. While I’ve enjoyed modern iterations such as 2016’s reboot, the original’s ever-mutating open source foundation and lively mod scene just won’t let me go. When John Romero announced he was releasing a nine-level Doom episode built to 1993 spec, I shrugged, because that pales in comparison to what the Doom community have built this year. Let’s dig into the winners of the 2018 Cacowards, Doomworld’s annual mod ceremony, including some standalone, freeware games – no Doom mod experience needed.

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We’re just shy of Halloween here and the stars are aligning, allowing unholy powers to warp Doom into strange, near-unrecognisable forms through the powerfully dark act of modding>. Out tonight is Total Chaos, a survival horror mod so grand in its ambition that it leaves almost nothing recognisable as ‘Doom’, with detailed 3D environments and modern horror style. More traditional but still impressive is an early demo of The Crimson Deed, a vampire-themed dungeon crawl. Check out trailers for both below, plus some Quake-related surprises from 3D Realms. (more…)

October is Skeleton Appreciation Month, and few people appreciate skeletons quite as much as Doom modder Marphy Black. Through his mastery of Agitating Skeletons, he has posed deep philosophical problems, made us contemplate infinity and sometimes just punch a whole lot of skellingtons. His latest is the most fiendish by far – he’s probably going to make some poor Twitch streamer hate Doom, because this is basically Desert Bus, but more evil. You probably shouldn’t play Revenant Bus, but you’re not going to listen to me, are you? Below, a warning in trailer form.

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Leather-clad raiders with neon green mohawks roam irradiated monuments to capitalism, their acid-spitting lizard-dogs in tow. Ashes 2063, by modder Vostyok is about as 80s an apocalypse can get, even after filtering it through a 2018 iteration of a 90s game engine. It’s a free post-apocalyptic FPS (or total conversion mod, if you’re old-school) built on the ever-popular GZDoom engine. Its first episode launched yesterday.

While 98% new, Ashes 2063 still requires some manner of Doom data file to fill the gaps. Fortunately, the (free) Freedoom will suffice, if you don’t own Doom 2. Below, a launch trailer.

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