Origwad



Origwad is a very early user-created Doom level, dated March 1994. It does not have an official name, and is stored with the filename Origwad.pwd, which must be renamed to Origwad.wad before some source ports will play it. The level was designed by Jeffrey Bird of the James Cook University in Northern Queensland. It is notable for being perhaps the very first user-created map. Although there had been level editing utilities before March 1994, they were incapable of creating new maps entirely from scratch. The first editor able to do so was DEU 5.0, which was released at the end of March 1994, several weeks after Origwad.

In his readme, Jeffrey Bird stated that: "This is an experimental PWAD file for use with DOOM. It is rather simple since I cannot generate the nodes structure for anything much more complex than this. This level has been generated entirely by hand. No editors were used to produce it."

The level is E1M1, with no support for difficulty levels. It consists of two rooms joined with a door. The first room contains a shotgun and a shotgun guy. The second room contains three imps, two Barons of hell, and the exit switch. There are no power-ups or ammo caches. This makes achieving 100% kills problematic, as the second Baron requires several dozen punches to kill even if the player uses his ammo wisely, and forces infighting amongst the monsters.

Origwad was followed four days later by Cross.wad, which was also produced by hand, by Alistair Brown at Bradford University in the United Kingdom. With the release of DEU 5 a torrent of user-generated levels followed.

Jeffery Bird released no further Doom levels. As of January 2006 he still worked at the James Cook University, as the CSO System and Directory Administrator, and used the same email address included in Origwad's readme file.