SUNDER (PART ONE) - DEAN OF DOOM - S4E1

Welcome to Dean of Doom, the show where we give grades to classic and contemporary Doom wads. Why? Because ranking things is fun. Today’s episode will be dedicated to Sunder, specifically its first fourteen maps released in 2009 by Insane_Gazebo. Two thousand nine. It’s hard to believe, but, Sunder has now been around for more than half of Doom modding’s history. If we exclude its progeny, it would be very difficult to name a more influential wad released after Sunder’s original fourteen maps. To say that Insane Gazebo changed the trajectory of Doom mapping is no exaggeration. Slaughter mapping was unfashionable when he started out, and between the Hell Revealed imitators and Nuts clones, there was no reason to expect it to suddenly become popular. Although its impact in challenge-seeking circles was immediate, it took many years for Sunder, its derivatives, and its design philosophies to percolate into the mainstream: for the few who possessed the skills required to conquer it and who had mapping aspirations of their own, there was no unseeing Sunder. So great was Gazebo’s gravitational pull that several of his disciples became legends in their own right during the ten years that he vanished from the community. The tale of Insane Gazebo’s departure and return is beyond the scope of today’s episode, but I can only imagine how much more power these first fourteen maps must have had when their author was still a ghost. I have never known a Doom community without him. Now more widely appreciated, tamed by speedrunners and lets-players of all stripes, Old Sunder is considered almost docile by today’s standards, but it rewrote the definition of enormity, brought prestige to a long-disparaged mapping style, and showed us what we talk about when we talk about ‘Doom.’ Link to the megawad: https://www.doomworld.com/vb/thread/4... Patreon:   / mtpain27