Top 10 Infamous WADs

The Top 10 Infamous WADs article was created by Andrew "Linguica" Stine and Mike "Cyb" Watson for Doomworlds celebration of Doom's 10th birthday. It was created as a counter-article to the 100 best WADs ever.

The List

 * 1. The Sky May Be - Doug the Eagle and Kansam
 * Released in 1997, The Sky May Be is known for being referred to as "the strangest WAD ever made". Playing it is an annoying and frustrating experience, with the level being a series of massive, open rooms with strange architecture, many of the sounds being replaced by audio clips from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and a DeHackEd patch that completely changes the core gameplay of Doom in bizarre and amusing ways.


 * 2. Wow - Paul Thrussell
 * Paul Thrussell's sole contribution to the Doom community was released in 1999, which has become infamous for being one of the most primitive levels ever to be submitted to the /idgames archive, consisting of a square room with no exit and a small pit that is missing lower textures, resulting in a giant HOM effect. The futility of the map is made even worse by the author try to pass off this glaring error as an intended "illusio-pit", in which resides a cyberdemon.


 * 3. UAC Labs - Eric Harris
 * A WAD created in 1996 by Eric David Harris, one of the two instigators of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. When authorities discovered his levels, it was rumored that a level made by Harris was modeled after the school so that he and Dylan Bennet Klebold could practice the shootout. It was later concluded, however, that none of the Harris levels resembled the layout of Columbine High School, and the fact that the two shooters played Doom had nothing (or very little) to do with the massacre.


 * 4. Nuts - B.P.R.D.
 * This WAD (excluding its two successors by the same author), released in 2001, possibly has the level with the highest monster count in Doom history (10,617 total). The map itself consists of two gigantic rooms with massive crowds of monsters covering almost every part of the level. The player is given a BFG, a plasma rifle, invulnerability spheres, and gratuitous amounts of cell ammunition, but even so, few have completed this map legitimately, partially due to the fact that the sheer number of monsters slows the framerate down to a crawl, making it nearly unplayable.


 * 5. Evilution - TeamTNT
 * Following the announcement that TeamTNT had accepted a packaging deal from id Software to package their TNT: Evilution WAD alongside The Plutonia Experiment as the second half of Final Doom, a flamewar erupted within the Doom community, splitting it into two sides: those that supported TeamTNT for going pro, and those that branded TeamTNT as "sellouts".


 * 6. Gothic99 - Matt Dixon & friends
 * Undoubtedly the most failed release made by the Gothic team, this WAD is a showcase of fervent abuse of trim textures to create quite ugly, over-detailed maps with equally poor gameplay. The amount of detail gone into the first level alone is enough to lag a deathmatch game to a crawl.


 * 7. Imp Encounter - anonymous
 * This WAD is nothing more than a cutscene that quite graphically depicts a marine copulating with an imp, and has hence gained a reputation as an infamous WAD.


 * 8. Mockery - Scott Cover
 * A primitive 1998 map deliberately made with several flaws to showcase the simple but glaring mistakes that all mappers can make. However, the concept of making deliberately poor quality levels caught on, resulting in the production of a Mockery megaWAD, and hence, this WAD is believed to be the basis of all joke WADs.


 * 9. Slige maps - Dave Chess
 * The release of this map pack triggered a concern over authors who willingly released levels generated with SLIGE, falsely passing them off as their own work. Since then, uploading SLIGE maps to the /idgames archive has been forbidden.


 * 10. Mordeth E2 - Gaston Lahaut
 * Since the release of Mordeth in 1997, the Doom community has been eagerly awaiting the sequel to this groundbreaking WAD for decades. It has become infamous for being the WAD with the longest development time ever, so much so that a "Mordeth Award" section in the Cacowards is awarded to the WAD of that year that has taken the longest amount of time to develop. Mordeth E2's hefty delay is down to a number of reasons: team members leaving, engine changes, and a thief actually stealing the computer on which the files resided.