Doom's portal to hell opened in University of Wisconsin-Madison on December 10, 1993, when id Software uploaded the shareware version to an FTP server. Eager players crowded the portal—so many, in fact, that the admin asked everyone to log out so the id guys could give them what they wanted. More portals opened from there, across university campuses and office parks and homes around the globe. Doomworld was one of the earliest, and continues to widen by the day.
Fans from around the world converge on Doomworld to discuss and share custom-made levels (known as WAD files), share tips and tricks for building maps, and debate its annual Cacowards ceremony honoring some of the best levels and total conversions from the past 12 months.
Andrew "Linguica" Stine is one of the gatekeepers of Doomworld, and has been since the beginning, though he didn't plan it that way. I spoke to him about how Doomworld started, the differences between hosting a website then and now, and the ongoing experiments into "vanilla" Doom's code that keeps him excited about id's hellish classic.
Doom World has been active since 1994, and shows no signs of slowing down.
What was your introduction to Doom? Why has the series stuck with you?
I first played Doom as an impressionable teenager in the summer of 1994 and it was, of course, the most amazing thing in the world. There's an old Onion article that goes along the lines of: "Experts Agree: Pop Culture Reached Its Peak When You, The Person Reading This, Were 13 Years Old." I think that's probably basically the sort of impression it made on my psyche.
However, there was the added wrinkle of that it actually was one of the greatest games ever made and continues to be celebrated as such to this day. Most of the time you look at whatever you were obsessed with as a teenager with a more jaded eye later on and think, Wow, I can't believe I was so into Digimon or whatever and basically move on with your life, but I've been cursed by the fact that the object of my teenaged obsession has turned into an evergreen cultural touchstone and ongoing franchise. So that's fun.
How did Doomworld come about?
Doomworld arose as an offshoot of Telefragged.com, which was one of the players in the big groundswell of Quake-oriented websites following the game's release—others including Blue's News, Voodoo Extreme, Stomped.com, and a little site called the Shuga Shack.
After John Carmack at id Software released the Doom source code in late 1997, the admin of Telefragged decided it would be a good idea to create a Doom-centered website in the same vein as the Quake-centered websites. At the time, I happened to be working on a really dumb Doom mod project which never went anywhere, but which had a website hosted on the Telefragged servers. I had gotten bored with the mod and was spending more time updating the site with the latest Doom-related news I found from my web browsing, so I was the first person he thought of to head up the effort.
The domain name doomworld.com was available and seemed decent enough, so I started cobbling together the site in early 1998 before opening its doors that March.
Do you create mods, or is your interest in Doom and modding stem more from curation, which Doomworld provides?
I've dabbled in mod making from time to time, but nowhere to the extent, both in time or in craftsmanship, as scores of other modders out there. I've made a few minor things I won't bother mentioning, but the one thing I made that saw some wider impact was Selfie Doom, which I put together as a joke back in 2015, and which received a frankly baffling amount of media attention.
I don't know how much interest in curation I personally have, really, since I honestly don't play enough of the Doom mods out there to feel like I have a good grasp on everything. But Doomworld as a whole has sort of gravitated towards becoming a curator for Doom mod content in a few ways.
There's the forums, of course, where the majority of the action happens: people discuss the game, come up with idea for projects, etc. There's the /idgames Database, which is our frontend for the network of FTP servers that have hosted Doom files since 1994. It used to be that if you wanted to play a new Doom level, you had to log in to a FTP mirror and browse around until you came across a text file for a file that looked interesting. We put together a database to sort of overlay atop the FTP directories and let people more efficiently browse and search the files, as well as rate them and give feedback.
And then there's the Cacowards, which are Doomworld's yearly awards ceremony on the anniversary of Doom's release. This is the most obvious sort of curation the site does, where we have a team of dedicated Doomers who sit down every November and hash out what they feel are the most exemplary new project releases from the last year and compile it into a bunch of writeups and fake statuettes—and on rare occasions, even real ones, too.
Doom World celebrated Doom's tin anniversary by packaging hundreds of the best mods released over its first decade of popularity.
What were your responsibilities on Doomworld early on?
I was the original webmaster of Doomworld, so I did pretty much everything on the site: I oversaw the original design work, compiling information for databases of utilities, editors, and Doom source ports writing news updates, etc. Back in the very early days everything was basically done in straight HTML in a text editor. For the first year or two of the site's existence, I—and several others who were editors for the site—did all the updates entirely by hand, editing the raw HTML with no scripting language on the backend or any content management system whatsoever.
Mordeth was one of the other original founders. He also had been working on his own Doom mod, which was more successful than my early efforts in that he actually released his, but he had also gravitated towards turning his page into more of a general Doom news site by late 1997 and the Doom source release. I asked him to join as another admin and he assisted in getting everything up and running, including doing much of the grunt work for the databases of Doom editors and utilities.
[Author's note: Mordeth could not be reached for comment.]
What was it like running a website in those early years when the Internet was still uncharted territory for most people? How would you contrast Doomworld then and now?
For anyone under the age of... uh... for anyone who can still reasonably consider themselves "young adults," it's hard to describe just how different the internet was in those days. Comparisons to the wild west are often thrown around, but it really was like a new frontier with no particular rules of what you could do or indeed what you should do.
The web today is a far more organized and useful place, but in being tamed, a certain ineffable quality has been lost. I don't want to wax nostalgic too much about the early web in general, but Doomworld in particular has certainly changed a huge amount since the early days. Back in the beginning it was primarily a one-way medium: Except for feedback via email or IRC or newsgroups, it was mostly just putting things out there because you got some sense of satisfaction from it, and then you moved on to the next thing you wanted to do.
Nowadays with social media having basically consumed the web, *everything* you consider doing is primarily viewed through the lens of not just if you like it, but if readers will like it and engage with it and comment and like and subscribe and so on. Right now I'm in the middle of wrestling with Doomworld's first major overhaul in 15 years, and I actually threw up my hands and bought a whole web community-oriented software suite to base it around, since there's not much use in trying to do anything else.
Doom World's Cacowards celebrate some of the best mods released over a calendar year, ushered in by a themed logo.
Your profile says that you left the site in 2003. What prompted this departure?
In 2003 I was in college and couldn't afford to keep spending a lot of time on a hobby, so I tried to make a clean and "official" break from the site. This was doomed (heh) almost from the start. It's difficult to give up any long-lasting hobby cold turkey, especially when your hobby is hopefully continuing on without you.
I didn't "leave" in 2003 so much as just give up my official title as webmaster, and continued puttering around and occasionally working on the site for years. I "left" more permanently circa 2008 when real-life job and education responsibilities made it difficult to spend any time at all paying attention to Doomworld.
I should mention of course that the site wasn't left rudderless. Another staffer, Bill, who goes by "Bloodshedder," had taken on a lot of responsibilities by that point and was elevated to become the de facto webmaster, and the site continued on more or less smoothly in my absence. I "came back" in 2014, with sort of a gradual re-immersion in the website and the responsibilities therein.
What are those responsibilities?
Nowadays I'm the webmaster for Doomworld once again. After returning I had started doing things for the site like fixing bugs with the forum software, and by the time mid-2015 came around, Telefragged finally—finally!—decided to wind down operations and stop providing us with the free hosting we had enjoyed all the way up to that point. Faced with the prospect of the site going defunct, I decided to officially (re)take up the mantle of webmaster by reacquainting myself with all the vagaries of website hosting and management and moving the site onto its own independent server.
Since then I've tinkered around the edges to provide some new features and upgrades, but hopefully fairly soon I'll be able to roll out the first major revamp the site has seen since 2003.
Aside from areas within your purview, what do you enjoy doing on Doomworld in your spare time?
A lot of my more recent Doom-related activity has been centered around studying some of the most seemingly pointless and minute aspects of the Doom engine, and more specifically, the original, "vanilla" Doom engine. With modern source ports like GZDoom, which expose huge numbers of features to a modder and encompass entire Turing-complete scripting languages, making weird Doom mods has sort of migrated from being "cool hacks" to being basically like any other amateur game development effort, just with a game engine that happens to be centered around Doom.
I'm typically more interested in figuring out what the Doom engine could have done back in 1994 in its original state. My Selfie Doom mod actually arose from some research on how to display certain kinds of HUD graphics onscreen, and I've recently done other silly stuff like creating vanilla Doom levels with non-Euclidean portal-type effects, experimented with an ersatz "megatexturing" technique, and writing a big "movement bible" that attempted to explain every strange movement and physics quirk including documenting one that had never before been isolated or explained.
I'm currently off-and-on working a new vanilla Doom "map" that will show off another little-used avenue of exploiting the Doom engine, and I have various other ideas in store for the future. I think I enjoy deconstructing Doom more than actually playing it, to be honest—which might have once seemed super strange, but nowadays with the big speedrunning and TAS [tool-assisted speedruns] communities, and people figuring out stuff like total control hacks to program Tetris inside of Pokemon or whatever, I feel like it's not such an unusual interest.
Cacoward judges supply detailed analyses of winning mods, along with links to downloads so readers can try them.
What do you believe has kept Doom and Doom 2's modding community—and Doomworld—active decades after their respective releases?
That's really the million-dollar question, I suppose. The Doom modding community originally arose due to several twists of fate. It was a viscerally exciting and technologically groundbreaking PC game which just happened to be released right at the moment when the internet was starting to take off, and caught the attention of a lot of university students who were looking for a cool game to play on their PC and who also knew how to program.
It benefited from a real sort of "first-mover" advantage where it got lots of early attention and lots of smart people tearing through its guts and reverse engineering tools for it, and then more people got interested in using those tools to create new things, which interested even more people.
Why it still has a measure of popularity today, though, is more baffling. I think that it boils down to the fact that Doom modding is, relatively speaking, quite easy, and you get a lot of "bang for your buck." Obviously things like Mario Maker are easier and more straightforward, but they're also pretty limited in their scope of what you can create with them. Something like Unity lets you make anything your imagination can dream up, but that comes at the cost of massive complexity and having to wrangle lots and lots of art assets.
With Doom, it's not hard to bang out what is essentially a 2D blueprint for a level in an afternoon, and it can be any sort of level you want—within the available Doomy constraints, of course.
