"E1M1.wad"

This is a rewrite of 7869.wad, an infamous Doom creepypasta that contained real life gore and NSFW imagery. If you want to check out the original creepypasta, do that first before reading this (or do the opposite, I really don't care lol)
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It’s been over 30 years since the original DOOM came out and paved the FPS genre as a whole. The early 90’s was a blessed time for video games as a whole, and several dozen catalysts were solely responsible for shaping what we play nowadays. I like the DOOM reboot, 2016 and Eternal respectively, but I’ve always had a softer spot towards the classic trilogy for various reasons. One of these reasons is that the game’s modding scene is still thriving. And with how easy it is to create your own maps or whatever you please, it’s astounding how a game franchise, far older than I ever was, manages to hold such a strong and active community filled with talented people making just about anything.
And I do mean “anything”.
For the record, when making custom content for Doom–more specifically, Doom 2, all the stuff that’s within a game is called a “WAD” file. Doom 1 and 2 at its core have what are called “IWAD”s, or “Internal WAD”s as it’s called. WAD files usually help with loading in data from the game as effortlessly as possible, and the average file size is about as big as a floppy disk. That makes sending and containing WAD files easy on sites with little bandwidth back in the day, and the range would get larger over time as mappers and modders find new ways to make classic DOOM complex and non-”Vanilla Friendly”.
With all that being said, I’d go on Doomworld’s “idgames archive” page to see if any recent WADs had been posted for me to play, and as I scrolled to the latest files section on the main page…something caught my eye. “E1M1.wad” by Anonymous. I haven’t seen a wad posted by anyone without an identity in a very long time, but the sight of the WAD name piqued my interest.
Clicking on it sent me to the WAD’s info page, with the title, author’s name, and description laid out in front of me. It said the following:
Title: “E1M1.wad”
Filename: “levels/doom/Ports/d-f/e1m1.zip”
Date: “8/22/24”
Author: “Anonymous”
Description: “my attempt at recreating E1M1 from memory! requires the ultimate doom iwad. DO NOT RUN THIS WITH GZDOOM. I dunno why but its buggy and i havent fixed the issue with it. :(” 
Credits: “N/A”
Base: “from scratch!”
Build time: “2 hours”
Editors used: “Ultimate Doom Builder”
Bugs: “GZDoom being unable to run this wad for some reason”
When I downloaded the zip file, it gave me the WAD file and a README.txt, where it read the following:
“Thank you for downloading my wad! 
this only works on vanilla friendly source ports so use crispy doom, prboom, or woof if you havent already! GZDOOM IS BUGGED AND I CANT FIX THE ISSUE WITH IT SO DONT USE GZDOOM FOR THIS WAD
if you have any questions or changes you want me to make, comment and rate it if you can!! every comment means a lot to me :)” 
When I tried to load the WAD on a Vanilla source port, it gave me an unknown error message. I don’t use GZDoom too much, but I don’t wanna call myself a purist at heart. I just prefer the more Boom-centric wads than anything. I downloaded the latest update of GZDoom, got ZDL as it was my first time using it, inserted my IWADs, selected “The Ultimate DOOM” per the description’s instructions, and loaded up “E1M1.wad” on GZDoom.
It…surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) worked.
The Ultimate Doom title screen pops up and blares the intro theme into my headphones as the starting volume was way too loud to my liking. With a couple of setting adjustments (alongside turning off that god-awful texture filtering that was on by default), I’d get to starting the WAD and playing on Ultra Violent, Doom’s second hardest difficulty.
The first level starts by landing me at the start of E1M1, “Hangar”. The iconic song from the game plays like normal. As a matter of fact, the whole level played like normal. It was just E1M1 made with plenty of differences in mind. Some of the rooms seemed larger or smaller than the original, with the main area where you get the shotgun from looking vast and lacking some decoration surrounding the window. No barrels to explode, unfortunately.
If I had to describe what the level looked like from a visual perspective–the texture work was nearly on par with the original level. Take for some slight offsetting and some lighting being inconsistent sometimes, it’s not bad for a good-looking Hangar recreation.
The enemy placement was a bit much, as it gave me a couple more pistolmen that nearly depleted my health. With nearly all my pistol ammo down, the room was clear and I’d collect the shotgun. Checking for the Mega Armor secret, the button that opened the door wasn’t there as…it was already open? It was from memory, so I’ll take the author’s words pretty lightly. I’d skip the next room in favor of getting that 200 bonus armor before taking the wraparound to the slime room. The room where the imps first show up and the bonus health secret alongside it.
It was a bit tricky, but I’d clear out every monster leading up to the computer room from behind, which had a slight claustrophobic aura to it that I can’t describe better than that. The tight cornerways made it hard for me to swifty hide for cover, and there wasn’t that much health left on the map aside from the Mega Armor I picked up earlier. The computer room would quickly be cleared too, and I’d go get the second secret on the map: the one with the shotgun alcove and the fake see-through wall with health bonuses.
As I open the door to the last hallway, the alcove would be open as I’d go to get more shotgun ammo and extra health…that is if there was some extra health, but the hallway was there just to be a secret path and not much else. At least the ammo helped out, surprisingly there were boxes of shotgun ammo instead of pellets, which helped out in the last fight with one barrel that I blew up and some of the monsters completely gibbed. The imp in the exit door would die from one shot from my shotgun, and I’d clear the level.
It’s just a simple, usual, easy to do UV-Max run of E1M1, just clunkier and slightly unfamiliar.
The level screen transitions to the next map.
“Hangar”
…didn’t I already beat this level?
As I was about to quit out of the WAD, one thing really threw me off guard. The drums for Hangar were faint. The snare sounded far and distant, with the lead guitar being the only one that’s unaffected by the change. The bass had a slight boost to it, too. With curiosity biting my back, I’d get back to playing. It was just the same “from scratch” map from before, only having less decoration from before and a slight desaturation on the enemies. Speaking of, there were less hitscanners than last time, so clearing them out wasn’t too big of an issue. 
The lack of Green Armor at the top of the stairs was one thing I’ve yet to mention up until now, as in this level? It appeared. The first level only had Mega Armor, but it seems like they swapped places by the next. I almost forgot to mention that the look of Hangar slowly grew more…well, would ”minimalist” be the word here? The offsetting got a bit worse, but the gameplay seemed fine. Monster clearing was faster, I got to pick up some extra health, even if it means that there were less this time, and the computer room only had a couple of shotgunners rather than a slight horde of them alongside pistolmen. I checked for the Mega Armor, and like I said, it was nowhere to be found. Not even the pathway to the slime room had all that much in terms of enemy placement, and neither were items existent to begin with.
The health bonus secret was already open, and I didn’t need to get into the last room to perform the secret. Only this time, I didn’t get extra shotgun ammo. I didn’t get anything out of that secret either, not even an imp. The last room only had one shotgunner that died as soon as I one-shotted him, and the exit had the imp’s dead body already laying on the ground. The enemy count remained the same as the last, but I only had half to deal with. Checking the map for more monsters: I could barely find any, and would prohibit me from getting a UV-Max unlike last time.
I still didn’t get why Hangar sounded like this when I got here, but I wondered what happened next as I clicked the exit button. Notice how on the intermission map, the circle never changes to the next area? It stayed on Hangar and never moved an inch. The next level would transition in.
“Han Gar”
It’s more of the same, except this time there was less detail throughout each room, and the vertical leveling seemed…flat. That meant I could go in and out of the courtyard from spawn at any time, and the platforms weren’t sticking out of the slime either. The monsters grew drab in color, the noises they made got deeper and slower in tone. Their sprites also had half of their animations cut, so they only had two-frame walk cycles or attacks. The items were growing more and more scarce.
And that’s only talking about entities and texture work.
The rooms got larger.
Flatter and larger, I’d go and run around the map, finding whatever’s on the current version of Hangar. The music had its tempo drag to a slow crawl, some of the notes sounding off key and having this weird chord progression in the back. It’s like if you mixed At Doom’s Gate and Running with Evil’s instruments to make this ungodly mashup that felt miserable to listen to.
It’s not exactly a sickening experience, but a melancholy feeling that only got worse over time. The computer room had one hitscanner that didn’t do much aside from stand there stuck in a wall. He was easy to kill, and the slime room had…already dead demons on the ground. The shotgun alcove was blocked off, and the cliff was cut entirely. The hallway leading up to the last room was shortened to just a door with a repeating vertical texture that opened pretty slowly. As it was opening, I couldn’t move my character.
But suddenly, I’d be greeted with a still, but detailed image of a dead Sergeant monster lying on the floor with his head facing the camera on the side. It was in the signature Classic Doom artstyle, only upscaled to suit the image. Some of his teeth were missing as his mouth drooled with some green-ish liquid, dripping on his rotting skin. His eyes were missing, only sockets can be shown and his hair was shedding. All sound would be cut as soon as the image showed up. Only the sound of a quiet, low-quality shudder panning on my left ear. It easily startled me when it shouldn’t.
It stayed for a couple of seconds before sending me back to the now fully-opened door. The lack of dead bodies and only a barrel that I hesitantly blew up seemed to set my skin crawling, as I could only dread for what’s to come further past this level. The imp’s carcass was gone. I’d exit the level.
“hAnGrr”
The camel-case on the level title got worse. The music in this level had a constantly quiet snare repeating on time with the tempo, which was a complete drag. It’s still Hangar, only the guitar lead being replaced with the stock MIDI piano instead of the guitar. Everything was sounding more and more off-key, and the timing was pretty off at worst. The textures got darker in color, and the enemies shifted into a gray-ish hue. Only this time…they seem fatigued. They couldn’t do anything other than get shot and die. I didn’t want to waste any ammo on some monsters that acted like fodder, so I ended up using my melee to punch them to death. I went scavenging to see if I could find any health pickups or bonuses.
Not a single one.
The courtyard secret from spawn was completely blocked off, only accessible if you went from the slime room. Getting to that room also greeted me with another still and silent image. It was an imp crawling for dear life as its hand reached out for…something. The imp’s jaw was left hanging, and its body felt skeletal as it was starving. Its other arm was pulled apart as the flesh felt torn and broken apart. In the back, there was an object that tapped the imp’s head. It was a shotgun.
A deep, muffled sound of the imp getting hurt reverberated before cutting me back to gameplay, with the music coming back and the computer room being filled with dead monster bodies. Imps, Sergeants, just completely piling onto each other. Going into the slime room surprised me as…there wasn’t a bridge. No secret, no bridge, no slime. Just me, the door leading to the final room, and the secret going up to the courtyard. The path was pitch black before going outside, which made it hard to navigate without loading up the map.
The courtyard secret gave me one health bonus in the middle. And it didn’t count as a secret either, despite it telling me that there were two.
Opening the last room door gave me the exit door. No barrel, no three cornerways, no more demons, not a single sight to see other than the button right in front of me. Clicking the button didn’t cut to the intermission screen, but cut to black before popping in another image. It was of the shotgunner’s head getting its brains blown out, with blood splattering everywhere and chunks of flesh squishing the wall behind him. This was paired with an echoing sound of the game’s gib sound and the shotgun firing simultaneously. The thud from when you kill a Pinky can be heard after a couple of seconds. Another thing to mention in that image is the shotgunner also had a torn up hole in the center of his chest, with the lack of any organs inside it.
The implications of these demons getting brutally torn and shot apart had me confused more than scared. Wasn’t the quote-unquote “lore” of Doom being that UAC gets invaded by demons and Doomguy goes in to try and kill them all because they killed his pet bunny? I could care less about the game’s story anyways. It was onto the penultimate level.
“HNGR”
The rooms had gotten wider. Sparse and vast, and the music would be replaced with low pitched, breath-sounding instruments like gunshots, wave crashing, and the repeating tone of an organ playing a single note every once and a while. It was playing the note Hangar’s key is in, which is E. Moving around makes it feel like you’re playing a map larger than it should, as it was like playing Hangar from a rodent’s point of view. There was at least one, non-functioning demon with a full-on black colored fill in each room. And by non-functioning, I mean you couldn’t kill ANY of them no matter how hard you tried. They aren’t even animated anymore.
The spawn window was completely covered, with every texture also containing the default gray, metallic sprite all over each room. No matter where you went, it’s like being stuck in a Brutalist building. Every window was pretty much covered by the blue and white checkered “error texture”, and you couldn’t see the courtyard anywhere. When I got to the computer room, the game slowly lagged on as there were HUNDREDS of dead monster corpses all over the place. My frames felt unbearable as I moved around, tanking below 30 fps at worst. When I got to the slime room, all was well. It remained the same as last time, only the secret door was gone from the side, replaced by the same error texture from the windows. I couldn’t open the exit door, so interacting with the error texture gave another still image.
It wasn’t a monster dying, but a black and white, pixelated, angled view of the courtyard from the ground up. Silence cut back once again. Only this time?
Text from the center of the screen showed up.
“IT’S PEOPLE LIKE YOU THAT WE RUN FROM EVERY DAY”
“IT’S THE SAME THING, OVER AND OVER AGAIN”
“CAN’T YOU GET ANY CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE?”
“HAVEN’T YOU DONE ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE THAN COMMIT THE USUAL, HEINOUS ACTS ON US?”
“WE DIE IN THE SAME WAY, THE SAME OUTCOME, AND AT THE SAME TIME” 
“ALL FROM PEOPLE LIKE YOU”
“IT SICKENS US THAT WE HAVE TO GO OUT OF OUR WAYS TO TRY AND STOP YOU JUST LIKE THE REST”
“IT’S NEVER THAT EASY”
“AND IT NEVER WILL BE”
The game cuts back to where I left off, and the exit door opens up like normal. I go in, click the button, and it transitions into the intermission screen once again.
The final map would begin.
“HANG”
It starts off with the map’s texture work returning and the darkness brightening up. There was no music. The map itself was narrow and cramped at a straight line. Interacting with some of the door textures didn’t do anything. It irked me how long this went for, as it was a minute’s tops before going to the final room. Walking up to it had a growing pile of monster carcasses that were grayscale. When opening up a new door, the camera would pan me to the courtyard from the perspective of…someone. It was where the Mega Armor is, but clearly it led to some significance. The door opening faintly gets closer and louder each time the camera pans back to the courtyard. The exit door would soon be replaced with the same error texture from the last level, but this time…it was the only way out.
Interacting with it led me back to the courtyard camera. The door opened up to the secret pathway, and in the corner of my eye…my player character would move up and around the area. It’d walk all around and face away from the camera before slowly turning to look directly at it. My character walked up to it, and the sound of a gradual, shaky breathing sound hit my headphones. The camera slightly jolts with each breath. My character gets up close to the camera, and just before he’d shoot his gun…a unique, loud, bit crushed, human-ish scream can be heard before cutting off and crashing the game, sending me to the developer console with an unknown error.
And that…was “E1M1.wad”.
At first, I didn’t know what to think of it. I couldn’t tell if this was some sorta troll that’s looking to make a weird message about Monster Sympathy, or if this was some secret art project made to lure players in without a second thought. I guess it goes without saying that “E1M1.wad” was made by an anonymous author with no other experience outside of making an esoteric, strange, oddly unsettling WAD that gave me more questions than answers. I was debating on whether or not to rate it and give a comment about what it was actually about, but that’s up to everyone else as I’ll be leaving a mirror link for anyone to download in case idgames archive takes this down. There’s no category labeling outside of a couple of exceptions, but I hope that by all means, everyone can see what I’m talking about.
It’s no stranger than any other Doom WAD I’ve ever come across…but it’s good to learn one thing from this whole experience.
This author really loves E1M1.
Category:DOOM
Category:Video Games
Category:Retake
Category:Remake