Doom Musings: Tom Hall's Design Gimmicks

Here we are in another Doom Musing. Once again, I'll look at the original designers, this time with my personal favorite map author in Tom Hall. Now, Tom's work with Doom was actually finished and finalized by others in the group (notably Sandy Petersen, but E1M4 was finished by John Romero). This post will more or less deal with the way Hall designed his levels, as well as one gimmick in particular.

So for those that have seen the level's Hall designed, they are E1M4, E1M8, E2M1, E2M2, E2M3, E2M4, E2M7, E3M3, and E3M7 for Doom, and MAP10 for Doom II. Notice how most of these levels look in an automap? Yep, on the grand scale or scope of things, they seem to be rectangular in shape, as if Hall was trying to fill out as much space as possible. Contrast this with Romero's design, which doesn't make as many attempts to rectangularize the sectors as much but attempts to keep things compact for the gameplay to be better. Hall seemed to favor making plenty of locations have some sort of feel to it, gameplay may or may not be withstanding in those cases. But at the same time, these levels that Hall had designed favored a lot of exploration and accessibility, and players don't have any trouble reaching key locations due to their easy accessibility, which combines well with the overall nonlinearity of each of these maps in general. Go left or right, your choice, you'll be finding the key at one end and other cool stuff at the other but the paths converge quite easily.

There is one particular gimmick with Hall and his design though, and this is seen on E2M2. In the beginning area with crates, there's two yellow key doors. Where would the yellow key be? Oh it's across from some sort of blood puzzle. While that's neat, and not difficult to figure out, the other two keys are the only ones required to beat the level, one retrieved after the other. The yellow key is only for those specific rooms, and in those cases the player is well-rewarded, a chaingun in one room, and the rocket launcher and more ammo in the other. These are actual secrets, but not only that, they provide extra challenges. Yet another major thing to note about this particular Hall gimmick is that the key is far away from the optional areas that need it. This is where the gimmick is.

Oddly this gimmick is more prevalent in his Wolfenstein levels, so this blog post may end up being more of a Wolfenstein 3D musing in the end. I think Hall designed all (or at least most) of Episode 2, and E2M8 is the first example of this, well sort of. The silver key is first to be acquired, but that door nearby requires the gold key, which is found later. But here's the thing, the room itself just has six mutants so in reality this room is a red herring. Then there's E3M6, which has the gold key in an optional maze so the player can get some good goodies at the starting point. But then there's the god-awful starting map of Episode 6, which the gold key is in a secret pushwall right near the exit, and the secret room of goodies is behind another pushwall that's easy to miss in the officer corridors, that needs the gold key as well. It's incredibly spiteful. This is practiced again in E6M3 just to get to the secret level, where the gold key is behind pushwalls near the exit, then you get the key and have to go back to the goodies behind the gold key doors (although I'm sure you can lure an enemy to opening them which is a bit better). All these levels are designed by Hall (well E6M3 was mostly done by Robert Prince himself, but Tom Hall had a hand with it).

The weird thing about Hall's "get optional key in hard-to-reach location, go back to previous area to get good stuff" is that it's somehow still practiced by lots of WAD authors to this day, even if he only used it in like one Doom map. I could name several WADs and levels that do it, but I can't remember any for now. Still, it's nice to know just how much Hall's influence with this gimmick had on mappers.