MAP20: Breakdown (Doom 64)

MAP20: Breakdown is the twentieth level of Doom 64. One of the most desolate and brooding maps, large regions of this level shift and change completely, disorienting the player and making navigation difficult. It uses the music track "The Rotted Foul" by Aubrey Hodges. The music stands out for its significantly disturbing feel. Consisting of sounds of demons, twisted human moans, with haunting orchestration - the player is left with the overall feeling of an impending breakdown.

In the Doom 64 TC, a shrine of Scuba Steve can be located. The console version was alleged to contain an extremely difficult to find secret which only a select few had supposedly discovered. An interview on Doom Depot revealed that this level was meant to contain an easter egg involving the red key room that even its creators could not remember how to activate.

Many players have searched for this secret, however, no player has ever successfully found it, and according to Doom 64 TC creator Samuel Villarreal (Kaiser), the egg seems to have been removed, with useless fragments of its activation (specifically, a number of mysteriously tagged walls) scattered around the play area. In Doom 64 EX, a Doom 64 clone that loads its data from a copy of the original ROM, it is possible to use standard Doom II cheats like IDCLIP. In doing so, you find that this easter egg does not, in fact, exist.

However the Doom 64 TC version of this level still contains these hidden switches, and super secret rooms, or shrines. There are a total of four secret shrines.

Items

 * 1) Getting the Megasphere: Go to the little grey area within the red maze room that is mentioned in secret #3. Proceed past this room until you come to a door. Open the door, and the first wall to your left is a fake wall. Go through, follow the path, and make the leap of faith to get the Megasphere.

Secrets

 * 1) After opening the blue key door/switch at the beginning of the level, take a right. Walk forward and you'll see and offset texture on the wall ahead of you. Open the wall and you'll find a Soul sphere and a Baron of Hell.
 * 2) Again, after opening the blue key door/switch, this time take a left. You'll come to a large square room with 4 pillars and a switch hovering in the middle. Kill everything here, activate the switch, then as you head up the stairs in this room, you'll notice a Mega armor that has just been revealed. After grabbing the armor, look behind you and down the stairs, and you'll see that another room has opened up. This room counts as a secret, and contains a backpack and some rockets.
 * 3) After opening the red bars and hitting the switch behind them, a staircase will open up behind you. Go up it, then go through this hallway, and you'll find yourself at the opening of a large, red, maze-like room. First, find the switch that lowers the two bars blocking your path in the middle of this room, then proceed past them. Right after going past the lowered bars, take a right, head up the stairs, then head down this path. You'll find a door that has a switch behind it. Hit the switch, begin heading back, stop just before you go back down the stairs, you'll see a gray portion of wall off to your right with two metal strips on each side of it that serves as a passageway. In this little gray passageway is a secret area, that is opened via timed switch. The switch is located just up the set of stairs that can be seen to your left. So go up those stairs, hit the switch you find there, then run back (you have to be really fast here) into that little gray hallway, turn to your left, run into the secret room and pick up the BFG.