Doom development levels

[,,,]

In 2015, John Romero released source data for Doom 1 and Doom 2. These contained many unseen pieces of Doom content. Among these were uncompiled .dwd sources for all Doom 1 and Doom 2 maps, along with .dwds for unreleased maps such as E5M1, MAP36, SHAWN2 etc. Apart from E5M1 which was mentioned occasionally, these were mostly overshadowed by other discoveries in the source data such as unused textures and partial data for a Doom 2 July 29th, 1994 build. I'm not sure if maybe people have taken notice of these before and were quickly forgotten, but as these contain things such as the fact that The Spirit World was originally designed for Doom 1, I assume most people have not seen this, so I have built these .dwds and combined them all into 1 .WAD for everyone to play. I hope this is okay and not considered as sharing IWAD content, as John Romero has shared this content for free; I'm just distributing it in a more accessible format.

 

I have not edited these maps other than to add a player 1 start to COMM5 as it was missing player starts. I also added textures that Doom 2 is missing to the .WAD. Some of these could be found in Doom 1 or Doom 1 prototypes, however some were not able to be located and had to be replaced with a placeholder texture. I have tested this with GZDoom and this is intended to be played with the Doom 2 IWAD, however it should work in any port that allows loading maps with arbitrary lump names and does not crash when encountering actors that were removed from the final version of Doom 1 (namely, the artifacts.). MAP33, randy1, COMM3, and COMM4 were omitted as they are completely empty.

 

Some notes:

• E5M1, SHAWNMAP, MAP36, SHITMAP, COMM5 and COMM6 are simple test levels. Some of these are just small rooms while others resemble Fortress of Mystery, which leads me to believe that map was a test map that was included in last minute.
• MAP34 is a version of v1.8 Underhalls. I did not check if this had any differences from any released version.
• MAP35 is a version of IDMAP01. I did not check if this had any differences from any released version.
• SHAWN2, COMM1, and COMM2 pre-date the release of Doom 1. COMM1 is an alternate version of MAP22 from the Doom 2 July prototype, which part of was later used for The Spirit World. COMM2 is an alternate version of Refuelling Base.

 

DEV.zip

Edited June 4, 2023 by Individualised

[Doomlover77]

@Individualised  I’ve Just had a look at those maps. They were really good. Comm2 was in an alpha version of Refuelling Base in Doom. It didn’t half look weird compared to the doom2 version we know. The others were good as well. Thank you for the upload. @Doomlover77  

Edited June 4, 2023 by Doomlover77

[thestarrover]

17 hours ago, Individualised said:

I have tested this with GZDoom and this is intended to be played with the Doom 2 IWAD

Sorry for the question but when I load DEV.WAD with Doom 2 IWAD, GZDOOM (4.10.0, Mac) loads the regular Doom 2. Am I doing something wrong? Thank you!

[,,,]

45 minutes ago, thestarrover said:

Sorry for the question but when I load DEV.WAD with Doom 2 IWAD, GZDOOM (4.10.0, Mac) loads the regular Doom 2. Am I doing something wrong? Thank you!

I should have made it more clear in the original post. I did not change the map lump names or add a MAPINFO, so you will need to use console commands to access them (i.e. "map SHAWNMAP"), or launch arguments (i.e. "gzdoom dev.wad -iwad doom2 +map MAP36") . I listed all of the map names present throughout the original post. Or you can use SLADE to see which maps are present.

[Rudolph]

I believe that two of these unused maps served as basis for a couple of maps in Xaser's excellent The Lost Episode.

 

Like you said in another topic, it would be a good idea to use the unused geometry to create new maps, à la "Altar of Extraction"!

[,,,]

3 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

I believe that two of these unused maps served as basis for a couple of maps in Xaser's excellent The Lost Episode.

As far as I know the two prototype levels included in that .WAD are not ones found here. I thought The Lost Episode had a version of Refuelling Base (even though it already made it into Doom 2) but it looks like I was wrong. I don't think SHAWN2 has been seen before but I could be wrong.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Imagine one could make a restoration project for the cut Doom levels from the Alphas and Romero's released source data, similar to the DNF 2001 Restoration Project.

[Doomlover77]

@thestarrover to play the levels in Gzdoom launch the console and type any of these maps. 
 

map xxxxx where xxxxx is map33, map34, map35, map36, e5m1, Comm1, Comm2, Comm5, Comm6, Shawn2 & Shawnmap. Happy playing. @Doomlover77  

Edited June 4, 2023 by Doomlover77

[RjY]

4 hours ago, Individualised said:

As far as I know the two prototype levels included in that .WAD are not ones found here. I thought The Lost Episode had a version of Refuelling Base (even though it already made it into Doom 2) but it looks like I was wrong. I don't think SHAWN2 has been seen before but I could be wrong.

 

Yes as Rudolph says SHAWN2 is E1M11 of the v0.4 alpha. Some older threads I recall: Cut Doom Levels?, Doom 0.5 Map Ports

BTW many thanks for putting this wad together. I don't think I had seen the Hall-Graybase version (to coin a phrase) of Refueling Base before. And while the bar{on,rel} trap in E5M1 may be silly, the moody lighting is delightful.

I think COMM5 ended up as the inside of one of the baron closets in E1M8. COMM6 does not remind me of much -- maybe the staircase down to the storage bay on E2M7, given the way it closes itself off -- but the shapes of SHITMAP (two rooms separated by a door) and MAP36 (a central square with four side alcoves) struck me as resembling respectively ORIGWAD and CROSS.WAD, the two earliest third-party PWADs with hand-calculated nodes. I expect that is just an overenthusiastic pattern-match on my part but a funny coincidence if you can see it yourself.

[,,,]

16 minutes ago, RjY said:

 

Yes as Rudolph says SHAWN2 is E1M11 of the v0.4 alpha.

Indeed you're right but possibly an earlier version?

 

Glad that this .WAD was useful to you though. Honestly I just wanted to bring more attention to these maps. Especially the fact that MAP22 from the Doom 2 prototype was originally a Doom 1 map, as far as I know that's completely new info.

Edited June 4, 2023 by Individualised

[,,,]

44 minutes ago, Doomlover77 said:

@thestarrover to play the levels in Gzdoom launch the console and type any of these maps. 
 

map xxxxx where xxxxx is map33, map34, map35, map36, e5m1, Comm1, Comm2, Comm5, Comm6, Shawn2 & Shawnmap. Happy playing. @Doomlover77  

I didn't include MAP33 because it was completely empty (in fact the original file was removed; I only knew it existed at all because there was still a backup of it). You can check the .dwd (rather it's backup) out anyway here: https://github.com/chocolatiers/RomeroDoomDump

[thestarrover]

@Individualised & @Doomlover77 Thank you very much for the upload, the info and the help! :)

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7 hours ago, thestarrover said:

@Individualised & @Doomlover77 Thank you very much for the upload, the info and the help! :)

Glad you like it!

[Devalaous]

It was a fun little diversion, the previous Doom 2 build only included maps up to 32 so I never got to see the 'E5M1' map. The even earlier version of the original Catacombs was neat, albeit totally broken.

 

Clearly we need a 'Lost Episode 2' or 'Lost Episode Deluxe' which has 'Xaserified' voidy maps formed from all the beta versions of maps, can even cheat and have the 'map fragments' like E5M1, SHITMAP, COMM5/6 etc all take up one map with pieces of development floating in a void, heh.

[,,,]

Appears there are more maps that I missed. Some of the map backups (*.dwd~) are different from the normal .dwd files - just did a diff on MAP01's two files. If there's anything interesting I'll make a new .WAD but I suspect these differences may just be different post-release versions of the maps.

 

EDIT: Did some more diffs and it seems that MAP35 (a.k.a IDMAP01, included in my original release) has actual differences between its final and backup version. Definitely will release a new .WAD even just for that, given IDMAP01 being a good little part of Doom's history.

 

I think they may have originally wanted to include deathmatch maps with Doom 2 as MAP33-36. Wish MAP33 wasn't deleted so I could see what that was (only the backup file survives and it's empty). I'd guess MAP34 (included in my original release) was supposed to be a deathmatch modification of Underhalls but they didn't end up making any changes. MAP36 (again included in my original release) looks like it could be the start of a deathmatch map as well.

Edited August 5, 2023 by Individualised

[Faceman2000]

Great find!

 

On a related note, does anyone know what happened to the levels pictured here? I’d be very interested in the first one and the extended 0.5 E1M1.

https://tcrf.net/Development:Doom_(PC,_1993)

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They're not in the source data release, I assume they're being gatekept which... come on. Do Bethesda care that much? I get asking Romero to knock it off since he's a public figure (he was also applying copyleft licences to things he wasn't legally authorised to do so) but I can't imagine they actually care about the contents of the leaks, there is nothing there that is important to Bethesda's history, it's not like Nintendo and the leaks that were happening a few years ago.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

4 hours ago, Faceman2000 said:

Great find!

 

On a related note, does anyone know what happened to the levels pictured here? I’d be very interested in the first one and the extended 0.5 E1M1.

https://tcrf.net/Development:Doom_(PC,_1993)

We should remake the eight maps that have a images on TCRF for the development section of Doom and Doom II rather than wait forever for those maps to resurface.

[Faceman2000]

The actual lines wouldn’t be hard to replicate, but it’ll be an approximation at best as we have no idea of the heights, textures, or things. The things can be guessed a little - we at least know their categories - but that’s it.

 

That being said. . . I think I might try anyway.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Also, there's this unseen Doon alpha map found in a Slovenian magazine that probably also isn't in Romero's released assets either.

[,,,]

Doesn't seem this room exists in the version found in my .WAD, but given that it uses the exact same texturing scheme as one of the rooms in it (even the floor), this is likely a version of The Spirit World/COMM1.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

There's also these set of screenshots that were released by id Software during the early development of Doom.

[Faceman2000]

That first set is intriguing - can anyone identify what map they're in? I don't recognize them at all from the various alphas.

[ludicrous_peridot]

On the postmortem video with both Romero and Hall they go through these screenshots with explanation, but I don't remember if they mention the concrete map.

 

EDIT: also a funny thing, the lbm files have a date of Feb 2nd for the first few screenshots on the first page. There's also an LBM viewer for DOS by Romero and Carmack also with same timestamp. Other files have Feb 15th date, and the other two packs have Feb 28th and March 3rd.

[Maximum Matt]

Nice coincidence, there's a guy who's going through all the beta versions of the Doom II levels, and he just did the levels that turned into The Spirit World today:

 

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I commented on one of his earlier videos about the Doom 1 version as well but doesn't seem that he ended up featuring it (it's not completable so I can see why though)