Doom Musings: The legacy of Congestion 1024

The early days of Doomworld were rife with inspiration, something that surprisingly holds up to this day. One of the more notable pieces of inspiration was the Exquisite Corpse project. The idea behind it was that one author created a 1024x1024 pixel-sized area, gave it a design and monsters, then the others who wanted to participate had to create their own 1024x1024 pixel-sized area, give it design and monsters, and have a small amount of space as well as have an assumption of just how the previous region looked and played like. It was only one map, but the idea of creating something within a box of 1024x1024 pixels then moved on.

And as such, Congestion 1024 was born, drawing heavy influence on Exquisite Corpse but instead, every map will be playable in the boundaries of 1024x1024 squares*. Now note I said playable, as the player mustn't ever be outside the boundaries, but there can be design, as well as monsters coming in, outside the boundaries (so in theory you can make a city map but confine the player into a square, for example). The designs of Congestion 1024 were done fairly well, but not over the top. But it's because of the limitations of the community project that it showed up on the Roots of Doom Mapping.

And it's entirely because of Congestion 1024 that the idea of making a megawad with limitations took off. Congestion 1024's gets a complete spiritual successor in the Claustrophobia 1024 megawads (yes, there's two of them), a jokewad in Congestion: 64, and the number of 2048 megawads out there (MAYhem 2048 and 2048 Unleashed, both of which I participated in). And the limitation gimmick never really ended there. There were such megawads such as 1 Monster (limiting to only 1 monster type), 100 lines and its many derivatives (these projects deal with making serviceable maps within the limit of certain lines, naturally), ones that involved using only a specific grid size to map, and pretty much any sort of speedmapping competition that uses these gimmicks and/or makes new ones. That's what the Doom community does these days for community projects, as it is far too simple to just have a community megawad without much in terms of limitations or restrictions (the Doomworld Mega Projects for example have no themes at all to speak of).

All this means that each and every community project is tied together in some way other than just being projects done by the community. Yeah, that sounded quite redundant didn't it? Anyways, despite its age (yes, 2005 is that old, people), Congestion 1024 still remains a blast to play, despite the authors of those maps mostly moving on. Nowadays, you probably will remember the names Ian "The Flange Peddler" Cummings and Ray "shitbag" Schmitz just by playing the maps in this megawad, yet the mappers themselves are pretty much moved on from the community.

In my last Doom Musings post I explained how much H2H-XMAS basically had a little of everything, from the imperfections of the level design to the generally guttural gameplay that it gave players. In a way, Congestion 1024 is just like it, heavily imperfect but gives serviceable gameplay usually speaking. Of course, there was some quality control, and the actual difficulty scales up quite nicely. Example below:

Pictured is Lutrov71's Caco District. This is MAP11, and actually it comes right after a death exit (for those unfamiliar, you exit a level by teleporting onto a Romero Head, as well as barrels so you basically die) after MAP10, forcing a pistol start. But it also places players into a quite a bind as the level itself is quite uncomfortable from the get-go. The rocket launcher is behind some barrels, and you don't get the viable super shotgun until you at least make your way to the southwest portion, which will take a while. The hitscanners are in daftly annoying locations and you get a baron of Hell nearby to deal with too, not to mention the cacos who are bound to show up. One of the nastier moments happens when mancubi make their way into the level as well. Furthermore, a lot of people probably don't pay attention to what happens as you go in this level. You see those squares on the outer boundaries of the map layout? These are buildings. Blink and you can easily miss it, but as you go through the map these buildings crumble. This is honestly an extremely cute touch, something that makes the map a lot more interesting.

Caco District, in my opinion, is perhaps an inspiration PWAD level, as it is a really difficult level coming from a forced death exit, and it is quite the challenge. Other types of forced pistol start levels, such as the ones in Unholy Realms, most likely followed this example, giving players quite a challenge from the get-go of a death exit, meaning players will more than likely have to try it multiple times in order to even survive. Of course, not all is set in stone to make actually interesting maps like this one though. As the next examples show...

Pictured are the layouts for MAP07, MAP27, and MAP16. When you play them, they are completely made as arenas, which I'm generally not a fan of. MAP07 even pulls the player directly into a Dead Simple clone that no one really likes all that much in the community these days. MAP16 tries to segment each particular setpiece, offering the four central columns as triggers while the cages to the outside sometimes having monsters. MAP27 is my favorite of these, a dangerous arena where falling means instant death plus four spider masterminds in the four outer towers, which yes you can crush with the outer switches, and it's done well enough. Of course, these are arenas, so there's waiting. Maybe there's some things for the next Doom musings, who knows.

These two maps are Zyklon B (MAP24) and Nullspace Junior (MAP32) both of which are easily the most challenging levels. Zyklon B has a rough opening with an arch-vile in the middle room, where you start, but it's even nastier outside, even culminating in a cyberdemon somewhere in the north end in one of Congestion 1024's nastier levels. You can barely see much in the screenshot above, but Nullspace Junior is done fantastically with teleport ambushes and the sense of danger pervades damn near everything.

Of course, there are others too, especially given what you might experience in the latter half of the maps. One other thing I'm pretty sure Congestion 1024 innovated is a way to make the death exit foolproof. You see, I often play quite a few WADs on the lowest difficulty setting, not because I suck at Doom but rather because I want to see how well things were made difficulty-wise, which includes missing things or what not. An example of what I'm talking about is Scythe 2's first episode. The last level has a strange death exit, but if you were presumably at 200/200 health and armor, and you're on the lowest skill setting, you can survive it. The death exits that are present on MAP20 and MAP29 of this WAD though decide to pull away from the classic "Romero head in a black room with barrels" by adding a voodoo doll. This ensures the player will die, even with God mode on, and this is the most foolproof way to utilize a death exit.

Community projects owe quite a lot to Congestion 1024, but I often think that they owe quite a lot more than they realize. The creative prowess of some of Doomworld's oldest community members still prevails despite the age of these maps.

*There were a few exceptions, which may or may not have been accidental, but those maps with the exceptions were still kept anyways.