#the mod was 'myhouse' by the way. apparently you should play it first and play the wad file before the pk3 file

[skyllion-uwu]

*Comes out of the computer with a thousand yard stare* I played Doom 2.

[thothxv]

In the spirit of this:

Some of the mappers that are well-known enough that people accused them of making myhouse.wad

Not, mind, because you should assume one of these people made myhouse.wad (please don't, a number of them have already explicitly confirmed they didn't), but because they're all really talented mappers with a long history in the community. I'd love to highlight some more obscure people, but I don't really know most of the more obscure people (I'm a filthy casual who has historically gone for whatever won the cacoward that year, so I've generally missed out on a lot of really amazing stuff done by cool people that you can find with even the slightest amount of digging into the Doom scene. Which you should do). As such, I'm not going to be talking about these people in the context of myhouse.

mouldy. mouldy is one of those mappers who hasn't put out a lot of content over the years, but what he has put out has been hugely influential. In particular, his 2014 megawad Going Down (which places Doomguy into an increasingly-twisted office building) has been cited as an influence by a number of other mappers. mouldy's general aesthetics are all about seemingly normal places warping and twisting and mutating into something strange and chaotic. Which is only fitting if you're familiar with his non-doom work. And I'm talking about him first because honestly you might be. mouldy's real name, see, is Cyriak Harris. Yes, that Cyriak. Who you might know for GIFs like this:

Skillsaw. Erik Alm's Scythe series of megawads were known for relatively short, hard-hitting levels and for really good pacing. It's a style that has been imitated quite a bit, and Scythe was massively influential across the board, but Paul "Skillsaw" DeBruyne is probably the most widely praised mapper who works in that particular style. I'm bad at Doom, so I've never beaten one, but I did play a bit of Ancient Aliens, widely considered one of his best, and it's really, really good. It's brutal, it's intense, it's challenging, it's fun, it's got great level concepts, and even the ones I recognize has having been done before have their own interesting spin. He's done other kinds of maps, and he's experimented with everything from Vanilla to Boom to MBF to Eternity to ZDoom in terms of mapping formats, but it's safe to say it's what he's most known for, and he's very good at it. He also has a nice eye for aesthetics. I mean... just look at this screenshot from Ancient Aliens: it's pretty.

Xaser. Xaser is the opposite of Skillsaw, in that while Skillsaw has a reputation for having a very distinctive style, Xaser has a reputation for doing so so so many things. Like, a stupid number of things. He writes music, he writes code (he's actually contributed to several Doom engines), he's done hugely influential gameplay mods and other heavily custom ZDoom things, he's made creepy horror-ey wads like dead.wire, jokey meme wads, he's done vanilla mapping for Back To Saturn X, Doom the Way id Did, and No End in Sight, he did work on Adventures of Square, he's got a credit on SIGIL, all kinds of wild stuff. But because we started from myhouse, though, I'm going to take an image from dead.wire for the picture.

FishyClockwork. I was honestly not really aware of FishyClockwork until now. They're apparently active in the ZDoom community and make script libraries and things, but they've also done a few maps, and they're by far the most known for The Quirky Domain, a map that is famous for its heavy use of GZDoom portal trickery to construct a decidedly non-euclidean environment. I haven't finished it yet (I tried it for the first time... uh.. now, actually), but it's a pretty damn neat map if I do say so myself.

Tarnsman. Richard "Tarnsman" Frei is... around a lot? I'll admit I haven't played much of his stuff. He's apparently got a bit of a reputation for being a bit prickly and a little strange (but then, with that username you'd almost expect that). He's contributed to a number of projects I've already mentioned (having made quite a number of levels for Back to Saturn X 1 and 2, for example), but more recently he's put out some weird, jokey projects of his own which might explain why he's landed here. Most notably, Doom 2 in Spain Only, a... weird joke megawad of vanilla compatible maps which I think are in the vein of the Doom the Way id Did series? The entire thing is a really dumb pun on the previous project "Doom 2 in Name Only", where mappers were asked to make original maps based on the names of maps from Doom 2, but instead of name only it's Spain only? I have no idea, but there was 100% commitment to the bit here (even announcing the maps using a fake account) so I can appreciate that. I'll put in a picture from that announce.

As a bonus, another horror-themed GZDoom wad centered around a house is Unloved, which I have not tried, but I hear good things.

Don't consider this list to be super representative of the Doom community as a whole. Because of how it was compiled it's mostly some Super Well Known Mappers and maybe one or two Slightly Less Well Known But Still Extremely Well Known Mappers. The entire gameplay modding community is totally unrepresented here, as is a lot of other stuff and a lot of other people. Doom is so so many things.

This is more of a "hey since myhouse is popular right now, I want to use it as an excuse to shine a light on more of the community as a whole, and this seems like an easy way to start doing that."

myhouse.wad-adjacent facts and blatant shilling for the musicians who soundtracked it

As has been largely disseminated, new mappers making levels based on their own houses are a common trope in the doom community, and they are often referred to generically as "myhouse.wad". The earliest myhouse maps are actually some of the oldest Doom maps in existence, predating Doom 2 (also at least one Doom 2 map was based on Sandy Peterson's house...)

A lot of people are impressed with myhouse.wad's room over room. I'm more impressed that in the first house myhouse used a boom-style silent teleporter to implement room-over-room sloppily so that the illusion very easily breaks (just step back up the stairs while one of the basement doors is open: it will snap shut because you are being teleported back into the version of the house with an upstairs, and thus there can't be an open door there), just like an inexperienced mapper might in 1999, before using modern GZDoom portals to do it more convincingly in the second house.

There's been a lot of theorizing about myhouse's author, probably because veddge is a very very competent mapper and also because everyone who does know who the author is has stonewalled inquiries at the author's request, implying that the author has a meaningful identity in the Doom community. Or maybe they're just shy. However, DavidXNewton noted in his analysis series on myhouse that it does a lot of things in a ways that are unnecessary using modern UDMF and ZScript but would be familiar to someone coming from a less advanced mapping format like Boom or Old ZDoom. This is indicative of Veddge being more along the lines of what he says he is: either someone truly returning after a long absence, or at the very least someone who isn't terribly familiar with modern GZDoom mapping. Either that, or the entire map was mapped in character. I genuinely don't know which I'd find more impressive.

"doomcute" is a term used to refer to maps that recreate real-world items or environments in doom (usually because the immediate reaction from players is "oh that's adorable!"). Myhouse maps are invariably trying for doomcute, but another early doomcute map was Shamus Young's Doom City from 1995 (yes, Shamus Young of DM of the Rings fame. I discovered while researching that he actually died last year. Rest in peace). Doom City recreated a couple of real-world looking buildings, but the thing everyone seems to remember about Doom City is its recreation of... a gas station. Food for thought.

Hilariously, myhouse almost got lost in the shuffle on Doomworld, because most people weren't looking for a myhouse.wad to play. Several of Veddge's collaborators posted in the thread to keep this from happening.

I believe Veddge's confirmed collaborators on myhouse are Kevansevans, esselfortium, and Jimmy. I don't know much about Kevansevans, but I believe he helped with the scripting and some of his scripting work from other sources made it into the wad because he's officially credited (as is everyone whose work was used in the map: it's all inside the PK3). Essel and Jimmy are credited only in anagram form because they are responsible for the music, which is actually wholly original (also Jimmy gave no indication he was involved until it was revealed by players unscrambling the anagram, which was very very funny).

I'm actually going to talk about Essel and Jimmy in detail over the next few bullet points, because I feel like it. And they're both really neat.

Sarah "esselfortium" Mancuso is responsible for memory=entryrrrr/////, the piece the plays in the burned house and various other places throughout the wad. She's composed professionally for video games and has several albums, but in the Doom community she's probably best known for creating and managing the Back to Saturn X project, a trilogy of megawads (only two of which are presently released) being developed by a massive team of modders, with custom assets, a custom palette, a complete original OST, and some very impressive maps... all intended to be playable with a vanilla doom2.exe. Which is insane: Vanilla Doom is brutal to map for, on account of harsh limitations that it's hard to be confident your map or project falls within. Back to Saturn X was so ambitious that it found previously undiscovered ways that Doom can crash. Of course, in addition to running the project, Essel also mapped for it, made textures for it, and composed a significant portion of the soundtrack. And because that was not impressive enough apparently, Essel also (with some help from a few others) created Knee-Deep in Knee-Deep in ZDoom, a joke wad that takes the (in)famous Knee-Deep in ZDoom, a mapset designed to show off the features of ZDoom, and recreates as many of its tricks as it can entirely in vanilla. A feat I can only describe as black magic of the highest order. She also went out of her way to say Trans Rights during her bethesda interview, so that's cool too.

James "Jimmy" Paddock is responsible for the increasingly glitchy and messed-up version of D_RUNNIN that plays in the second house. Which figures, because Jimmy's music is everywhere. He takes commissions for music, he's contributed free music to the community, and his music is very very popular. Notable wads he's contributed tracks to include Plutonia 2, Speed of Doom, Reverie, Back to Saturn X Episodes 1 and 2, Eviternity, and Doom 2 In Spain Only, and the MIDI soundtrack to John Romero's SIGIL, which some consider to be even better than the Buckethead soundtrack. He also is the project lead and mind behind The Adventures of Square, a standalone, free game made in GZDoom, he's done texture work, he's made several award-winning doom mods (cacowards, that is), mapped for numerous other projects, and had just done a whole ton of stuff. The doom community gave him an award for lifetime achievement. Oh, and he did an alternative MIDI OST for Prodeus? Genuinely didn't know about that.

While researching this I learned that Jimmy is going to be evicted in a month, so now's a great time to check out his music online and see if you're into it. I'm not a super fan of his vocal delivery, but I really like some of his instrumentals and MP3 versions of his MIDIs.