cordlessmodem

A very good worker

  • He/Him

Vat born mech pilot from the year 3050


Bezdarbor
@Bezdarbor

This game refuses to die. This December, Doom will turn 30 years old. Even in this geriatric age for a videogame, after sequels, reboots, and hundreds of other first-person shooters it heavily influenced, this game refuses to die. Booting Doom on every digital device possible has become a discipline in itself, but people still play Doom for sheer pleasure. It’s just that good—simple as it is. With a vast and still thriving community that creates a mad amount of user-made content for the game, Doom has become an amalgamation of all that is good in PC gaming. There’s a poetic beauty in the fact that the game, focused on brutal anger and destruction, serves as a perfect conduit for pure creation. And this stream seems everlasting.

MyHouse is a new Doom level that caught a spotlight outside the fandom. It’s a peculiar creature—captivating not merely by level design but also by how it was presented to the public. On March 3rd, user Veddge created a thread on the Doomworld forum, stating that he’s releasing the myhouse.wad map as a tribute to his childhood friend, Thomas, that passed away recently. It was a map found on a floppy drive among Thomas’ belongings. As stated in the post, Veddge hadn’t touched an editor for almost 15 years but decided to polish up the map and make it public. “1 map: Not much of a challenge and roughly 10 minutes of play time.”

It’s not a lie. And yet…

A Google Drive folder, linked within the post, contains several subfolders with old photos, a couple of sketches, screenshots, and myhouse.wad itself. But there is also a text file called Journal and the file called myhouse.pk3. PK3 is an alternate extension for ZIP files used in the Doom community to distribute mods, in addition to WAD.

Myhouse.wad is a simple map of a house stuffed with monsters. You kill them all, get a blue key, and leave. That’s it—roughly 10 minutes of playtime and not much of a challenge. Myhouse.pk3 is a whole different matter. As stated in the Journal, it’s a file seemingly uploaded by mistake and stayed on the Drive despite the author’s intentions to delete it. Before diving into it, it’s worth examining this Journal a bit.

Written in the format of a personal diary about working on myhouse.wad, it begins with an entry about the news of Thomas’ passing (dated August 4, 2022) and ends with an entry regarding the mysterious PK3 file (dated March 9, 2023). Between these entries, we witness how the creation takes control over the author, who eventually shows glimpses of madness and probably lacks understanding of how digital writing works (you don’t need to cross out the text when you can simply delete it). For people who spent some time online in the golden age of the internet, Journal will bring back the vibes of chilling anonymous creepypastas of old. Hold on to it because it’s a significant hint of things to come.

If you haven’t yet played MyHouse, continue reading this at your own risk—it’s impossible to talk about this map without spoiling things. You’ve been warned.

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