Amid the maelstrom of things happening last week, the original Doom blasted out the candles on a big cake commemorating its 32 years of demon destruction. As part of those celebrations, the shooter which can be played on (inhales) human test, lawnmower, electric toothbrush, tractor, the bad social media place, pregancy test, and gut bacteria – it’s gained another way in which to be appreciated. There’s now a website called DoomScroll which lets you dive into a bunch of fan-made level WADs via browser.
As spotted by Pewpew Caboom Gamer, DoomScroll‘s the brainchild of software engineer James Baicoianu and internet archivist Jason Scott. Fire it up, and you’re served a list of DOOM levels folks have created over the years. You click into one, such as “Where? The Warehouse!” – created by Giant Bomb co-founder Jeff Gerstmann over 30 years ago – and there’s an info blurb about it presented via Doomified laptop screen. From there, you click the map’s spinning outline, then play, and the demon blasting commences.
Other levels on offer include Christmas Doom, Yet Another Doom Level, and Missouri Rat Light, just to pick a few at random. As you can imagine, the word hell crops up rather often in the list.
“Our goal was to make decades of work from one of the most creative communities in gaming history more accessible and visible to everyone,” Baicoianu wrote in a BlueSky post. “There’s so much stuff here – everything from simplistic maps made by kids just learning how game development works, all the way up through full total conversions with all-new music, textures, and sprites, made by volunteer teams that went on to become full-fledged game studios.”
It is worth noting that at least one of the WADs included in the site simply serves you with a black screen, rather than loading properly. This is the case with Army of Darkness, as Doom modder and YouTuber Major Arlene has pointed out in a reply to Scott’s BlueSky post announcing the site.
Major Arlene also raised the matter of whether all of the included modders’ permissions in terms of redistribution of their works and/or proper credit being given are being stuck to in every instance. Having scrolled through some of the entries, a number of the ‘read me’ files with info about each map do include guidelines on redistribution and written out web addresses detailing places you can – or at least could – get the WAD. The addresses aren’t hyperlinked up, and I’ve been greeted with a webpage that wouldn’t load in trying to test out following the one listed by Gerstmann’s level.
So, DoomScroll currently looks to be relying on the level of detail the old creators included in their old text files to do the legwork, which isn’t ideal. Baicoianu has said in a reply that he plans to add in “a ‘flag this wad’ option if you turn up anything that’s not supposed to be there” soon.
I’ve reached out to both Baicoianu and Major Arlene for comment.
Now, back to the less blasty form of doomscrolling.