Show this guy a chalk scribble of a cow, and he’ll point out its mothership.
If you’ve not seen the Ancient Aliens TV series, it features a wild haired man (immortalised via a meme) theorising how alien lifeforms are responsible for all ancient technology. Inspired by the History Channel programme of the same name, Ancient Aliens is an award winning, kaleidoscopic medley of delightful WAD nonsense. While A.L.T is perhaps the most unhinged of the Doom WADs I’ve come across, the gorgeous Ancient Aliens WAD is the most accomplished.
If A.L.T was a person, it would be an unknowable shadow, pointing out with one crooked finger into the void, smiling "Go." Doom Ancient Aliens mod
With some mods this might feel like amateur incompleteness, with A.L.T, it’s definitely a design choice. It doesn’t care if you don’t complete all its content or unravel its secrets. You see, A.L.T is not afraid to screw with you. This comes less from the abundance of sacred geometry flung about the place and more its overall tone. A mysticism surrounding the cycles of death, rebirth and oblivion.ĭoom's occult aesthetic, replete with flaming pentagrams and torn up bodies, is somehow more convincing in A.L.T. There is an uneasiness to A.L.T, that lingers after playing.
Familiar assets are repackaged as mis-shaped shadows of their former selves throughout a series of increasingly disjointed and disconcerted levels.Īt the end, your character opens the door back to the beginning: the realisation of an eternal cycle dawning on him, as he prepares himself to live it all once more. The safe and familiar is turned inside out in a nightmarish attempt to break your understanding of the game. From here-in, you transport between worlds, that flash of black a signifier that you’ve teleported through.įrom glimmering disco hellscapes to strange floating voids, A.L.T takes the iconic aesthetic of Doom and transforms it into something far more unsettling.Īs you loop between realities, you see your doppelganger die, time and time again.Ī.L.T also subverts the unspoken rules of Doom WAD design, which emphasise compelling design within a certain predictability fitting with the Doom gameplay theme. There's a quick flash of black, and inexplicably you land on solid ground. Later on, you watch yourself fall out into deep space, buoyed on by turbulent flames. If you look in the right place, you’ll see the Hell portal itself, carved out of lava rocks, the words “Absolute Life Transformation” scrawled in fire. Starting on the plane, you are immediately greeted with a dead visage of yourself. A brief readme.exe at the start of A.L.T informs you of a “strange portal in the cargo compartment". Take for example, eerie Russian community spawned megaWAD A.L.T - which stands for ‘Absolute Life Transformation’.Ī psychedelic odyssey straight into the heart of darkness (and then some), it's set in the aftermath of a plane crash. The sheer vastness and madcap vision behind these games sometimes straddles that space between utter mess and deftly realised artistic creation. While how effective they are at communicating the deeper themes troubling humanity is questionable, one thing is certain though: exploding giblets are not always the main draw in Doom WADs. Creepy, wild places that couldn't exist anywhere else except inside Doom's blocky, cursed architecture. It’s also the only game I know of where explosive barrels skip gleefully in and out of your line of fire.Ĭonversely, there are Doom WADs that may cause you to question the very nature of reality. Watch helplessly as your bright blue projectile shots grow legs and hightail it across the plains. The whole absurd setup adds mechanical novelties, too.
Other creators veer more toward outrightly insane offerings, like ‘Run For It’: in which in-game objects sprout thin, pale limbs and and promptly dash away from you. Pop culture mods tend to be the most well known outside the fan-base, such as ‘2002: a Doom Odyssey’, or games based on the likes of Seinfeld and Pokemon. For many, Doom served as a surreal initiation into game design. Some build for the sheer creative thrill of it others to push at the limits of a classic game engine more still, just want to pet the dog. This community has multiplied over the years, and continues to create via the original Doom titles.
Known as Doom WADs (Where’s All The Data?), they heralded the dawn of PC game modding as we know it. Back then, the community traded floppy discs containing all new, selfcrafted game packages. When Doom effectively invented the first-person shooter genre in 1993, it also served as a canvas for legions of tenacious modders. Existing some place between Hell and the pitiless void beyond Mars, its occult planes have always been lonely and surreal. Doom is an unholy trinity of trash sci-fi, jagged Eldritch landscapes and sorcerous, blood soaked beasts.