Doom Musings: The Community Chest Dilemma

The Doom community as a whole is responsible for all the great creations out there, but of course all are different. Lone authors can author single maps or full megawads, or do crazy stuff with dehacked and other such nonsense. But for the most part, a great, great chunk of user-made levels tend to be in the form of a community project. There were projects that were made with limitations and gimmicks being center-stage for just about all the maps, but what about the Community Chest series? A series of megawads themed after Monopoly perhaps? No, not really.

All I know, and all anyone else really knows, about Community Chest is that it is 32 maps delivered by the Doomworld community. This is of course according to the wiki. Now, what's interesting is that this is only the Doomworld community providing these maps, no other community does this thing with Community Chest.  Of course, other Doom communities have their own Community Chest variants. Newdoom managed to create two community projects, one being at the tail end of the website's time, while the newly created Doomer Boards has been churning out community projects, albeit not being of megawad status. Then there's the communities in the Czech and Russian scenes, both offering their own megawads like Zones of Fear and A.L.T. You then got all the speedmapping sessions, the NOVA wads, the Plutonia and TNT sequels, the DTWID wads, the Mayhem wads, Doomworld Mega Projects, and even the timeless classics like the Memento Moris, Requiem, and Alien Vendetta (well these were select teams, but they have some sort of community at least), and what's interesting is that ALL of these megawads were made with some sort of community backing them up and multiple mappers participating. So long as you're a member of Doomworld during the time these were in development, then you can make a map for a hypothetical Community Chest though, even if you're a member of another community.

So what exactly happened with Community Chest after the fourth release? Did people nowadays just go for all those gimmicks and Doomworld Mega Projects, basically making the veins for a fifth Community Chest moot? Do I have to look back on each of the four wads to see where they failed?  There's perhaps not a lot of motivation to make another Community Chest wad. But what could have caused it? Is it because newer mappers aren't of the highest quality that Community Chest offered? Was it because of preferred source ports or mapping styles. Is it because Andy Leaver had to make MAP17?* Even I'm not sure what it could be. The community has evolved significantly since Community Chest 4 hit the idgames database shelf. More gimmicks are introduced, more partnerships are formed, but collectively the community gets together for newer limitations and more fun stuff. Might as well look back at the Community Chest wads.

Community Chest:

What's interesting about the first Community Chest is that it's the only one in the series to be made for limit-removing ports. Other than that though, we've got 32 mostly fine maps. Not a whole lot to be remember by the community, with the exception of Magikal's maps. Now Magikal actually died before the release, and his two maps were kept in, yet they are also the biggest puzzlers, and in particular, MAP29, a map so bloody infamous with its twists and turns, not to mention requiring wallrunning. Several other authors had generally high profiles, such as Kaiser, but even their maps aren't as memorable here.

Community Chest 2:

Here we have the first Boom-requiring Community Chest, and arguably the buggiest, despite having much more memorable maps. MAP15's crazy city with timed encounters, MAP22's extremely difficult combat, MAP23's ode to Legend of Zelda, the god damn Mucus Flow level, what's not to like? Well for starters, I notice a number of reviews were not fans of Gene Bird's maps. They're okay, and the mapper was in the last set as well, but they're just not as memorable. The issue lies in a number of bugs, like MAP20's secret that requires an arch-vile jump, but cannot actually be reached in certain ports, plus issues with MAP32 and MAP24 not being compatible for Boom. Regardless, the quality is a little better overall and the gems stick out easily.

Community Chest 3:

This had an interesting origin as a ZDoom project, before Andy Leaver revived it and became the third Community Chest and the second Boom-compatible one. A lot of the more modern mappers nowadays have made levels for this, like Dutch Devil, Green Herring, lupinx-kassman, and Rottking, and they tend to have fairly notable levels. In fact, the quality once again got much better, more custom music was used, a few new textures were also in place, and Rottking's MAP12 is a very sizable adventure. MAP29 is a very precedent map basically providing a penultimate map that is a slaughterfest in some form, actually quite annoying for a map too.

Community Chest 4:

Starting development after the previous one was finished, it took five whole years to basically finalize, giving players the experience of a brand new texture set which will find use in lots of other projects, testing up the ass on every level to ensure every bug is eradicated, with more and more hotfixes to consider. This isn't taking into account the drama that nearly killed the development, as the original project leader left the community after something happened with a different project, and many enthusiastic mappers somehow lost their hopes and didn't finish their own maps or failed to reach a deadline. That being said though, 2012 saw this thing released with the highest caliber of quality a Community Chest wad should have, high-profile maps that were fairly large, but gave as much entertainment as they needed, modernized design styles that conformed to neat Boom tricks, it was all there and it worked wonders, giving many players the experiences that they were glad to have. The showstealers that are lupinx's maps are fresh in our heads, yet they don't detract the attention away from all the other maps, as even CC4's weakest maps aren't that bad by comparison to other bad maps in the franchise.

So perhaps the biggest issue with Community Chest wads is lack of motivation and problems with project leads disappearing from the Community. The latter only really applies to CC4, but then again, the more modern something is the more likely it is relevant, and Death-Destiny's leave of the community is still talked about in small spades. Lack of motivation is something I can relate too, as I've failed to either meet a deadline or didn't feel motivated to making maps anymore, which is basically why I stopped completely. Of course, this could be a problem with many mappers, for multiple reasons. Regardless, I don't think the Community Chest dilemma is something to be concerned about. I don't necessarily have hopes for a fifth Community Chest, as we have plenty of other great community projects to play in that could very well be considered Community Chest-lite. I hear about NOVA 2, a project I made a map for, as one for instance, and strange as that may sound I can perhaps understand that sentiment a bit.

*Made that joke a while back, but what's interesting as far as Community Chest goes is that in all four iterations Andy Leaver made a map that managed to be in the MAP17 slot, every single Community Chest has one. Since Andy has basically left mapping the joke is that there wouldn't be another Community Chest without him making the MAP17.