MyHouse.pk3 - @Veddge

Doom 2, GZDoom, 1 map?

Doom is old now, and it follows that even as fresh new blood joins in, the community has gotten old as well. The carefree follies of youth have decayed into the swamplands of paperwork, careers, parenthood, aches, and, yes, the constant reminder – especially in recent years - of one’s own mortality. Which brings us to MyHouse, a lightly remastered version of a childhood project, restored by a friend of its recently-deceased author in their honor. Somehow, this modest shard of history, this newbie wad by an outsider, grabbed a lot of attention for inadvertently bringing together so many pieces of what this community is, and has become… and more importantly, how it came together.

Or at least, that’s how it presents itself. Nothing is ever simple.

Nobody making mods, or really, any creative work, starts fully-formed, as Walt Stanchfield’s old line about 10,000 bad drawings attests. As much as we all start with grand visions of making massive 64-map TC masterpieces, our lack of grip on the fundamentals forced most of us – especially in the innocence of the mid-90s – to start by recreating the places we knew best. Schoolyards. Workplaces. The local mall. Our homes. Something to wave in front of the faces of our real-life friends who also knew those places to get some encouragement before starting our first fully-invented gameplay spaces. And from there, the nascent internet, to learn from the encouragement and occasional scorn of strangers thousands of miles away who were also walking next to us on the same path.

Maybe we’ve just all gotten a bit sentimental with the years, but MyHouse, at least on the surface, feels like an encapsulation of everything about why the journey started for a lot of us. The joy of putting stuff together for the simple goal of making a couple of the neighbor kids smile. Personally, it took me back to my early teens, haphazardly drawing poorly-scaled mazes in BUILD.EXE to swap on floppies with the few classmates I’m still friends with today, decades on. Enthusiastic discussion of how to turn familiar surrounds into strange sector-based traps for our occasional LAN sessions over sandwiches near the basketball court. A time spent chasing the simple joys without understanding of, or care for, concepts like gameplay design or map flow.

The light “remastering” work done by Veddge could have been disastrous, but it manages to stay on the side of respectful, adding some minor UDMF features like translucent glass without plunging into full GZDoom gaudiness. Given that a good chunk of the community’s veterans have become involved with either remastering the games of their youth for a new audience or recreating the feelings those games gave them with original games, it feels a bit like a summation of the full journey, from humble origins to the present day in all of its complexity.

And then… you look at the provided supplementary material. And you see the reactions on the first couple of pages of the Doomworld thread. And then you run the PK3 instead of the WAD. And then you realize, all too late, what everyone’s actually going nuts over.

MyHouse.pk3 is a lot of things, and a tidal wave of ink has been spilled about its many intricacies and themes (In a Doom mod! Perish the thought!) over the last year, but where it stands out and makes its mark in history is in how it uses modern source port functionality not as a means to an end, but as an essential, indelible part of the story and the experience. From corridors switching destination on the return trip to basic gameplay functionality changing and subverting itself, the entire adventure is a seemingly-endless queue of clever magic tricks set up not to wow or amaze but to keep the player second-guessing themselves, doubting their own memory, and fearing that they have dug too deep, all without knowing that they have merely scratched the surface.

With mods like this, where half the fun is in the surprise, it’s hard to give a definitive response about where to start, especially now that the surprise is all over the internet and even being forwarded on by its very inspirations, but probably the best way to approach things is to go in as blindly as humanly possible. Sink your teeth in as deep as you can and find what you can find while resisting the urge to look at walkthroughs or spoilers. Make mistakes and see where they take you. Then dig up those spoilers and see what you missed. Once you’ve had your fill, look up those lengthy technical analysis videos that reveal all the magic tricks, cards up sleeves and hidden compartments. Then take another look with a fresh appreciation for the logic behind the chaos.

MyHouse.pk3 is a lot of things, but above all else, it's a complete demonstration of just how far we’ve come over the last thirty years.

- @Kinsie

Odyssey of Noises - Best original soundtrack for a Doom project

memory=entryrrrr///// - @esselfortium

It might have been the first indicator that something was off about this place. Maybe GZDoom stuttered for a second; perhaps you misheard an extra cymbol crash, or was that note just plain wrong? Running From Evil, better known by its internal filename D_RUNNIN, is a hallmark of a newbie mapper's first foray into the game. It's the default song, the standard; it takes more effort to replace than to leave it in, so hearing those iconic bass notes when entering a map isn't anything out of the ordinary. MyHouse.wad begins with a masterful manipulation of D_RUNNIN (by musician James Paddock, who needs no introduction), which sets you on edge just as much as the level itself does. It's just plain wrong in a variety of subtle, unsettling, and uncanny ways. As you push further into the enigmatic house, the music accompanying you changes as well, which is where memory=entryrrrr///// comes into play.

It isn't easy to separate the song from the map it plays on because memory=entryrrrr///// serves as an excellent analogy for the average MyHouse.wad experience: It's a powerful representation of your previous expectations to reality. Beginning with a (somehow) even more corrupted version of Running From Evil, the song almost sputters like a car struggling to start, lingering on the opening bass note of D_RUNNIN, barely hanging on as it's stretched and manipulated. The scattered pieces of what was once a familiar song waver in and out in the distant soundscape; disassembled fragments of barely recognizable drum loops play out like broken machinery. It complements the player's journey particularly well, uncovering new versions of the house while everything seemingly inwardly loops into twisted versions of itself over and over again.

As the remaining components of the piece sprawl out, any semblance of a conventional song structure begins to fade: ethereal, spacey pads have taken root, guiding us further on our travel through the different permutations of the house. It feels bizarre and unfamiliar, dotted with static echoes in the unperceivable distance. This middle section of the song builds towards a discordant, buzzy synth section that feels like being caught in the middle of a storm of clouded thoughts and hazy memories. As we escalate towards what could only be an anxiety-inducing conclusion, everything becomes louder and noisier until, all of a sudden...it fades out.

The last two minutes of memory=entryrrrr///// are hauntingly beautiful and stand out as one of my favorite ambient pieces of music ever created. The melody in this portion is simple on the surface but built on an almost unnoticeable bed of noise; it's the perfect accumulation of everything that came before it. The unsettling manipulation of prolonged samples and splashes of distortion are long gone, and what's left can only be described as "contemplative." It leaves you curious, wondering what puzzles and mysteries await you in this strange world, but as with everything concerning this map, it all loops back to the beginning. esselfortium has crafted a masterful, brilliant piece of music that effectively complements the player's journey. Much like the map it's featured in, I wish I could go back and experience the whirlwind of emotions I felt listening to memory=entryrrrr////// for the first time. 

- @Cardboard Marty