Corporate Clan on Top!

Get your pot of coffee on if you're going to read this; it's gonna be a long-winded one!

I'm a bit of a Doom historian. But I'm an odd Doom historian. See, I don't really concentrate on the original Doom history dating back to before the first shareware release in December of 1993. Nope; my interest is in the time I jumped onto the expanding universe of online deathmatch Doom and when the various modern-ish ports took off. Why here? Well, this is the point in Doom history where I got sucked into what can only be described as the Cult of Doom. I think the bug started to hold on me when I discovered the Doom Legacy port. I was raising children about this time and these boys were really into their video games. They had both a Sega Genesis and a Sony Playstation.

They also had a personal computer which was an underpowered, for that time, Packard Bell 286. They spent some time on the computer but that paled in comparison to their console usage. It just so happens that at this particular point in history, I had a computer repair business which I tended to part time while working other part time delivery jobs. If you want a sure way to acquire a bunch of computer equipment for free, go into business fixing computers. Many of my clients would upgrade or replace their computer stuff and then give me their old junk. When I closed my computer shop for good in December 2010, after over a dozen years in business, I still had all this refuse.

Anyhow, back in about 2003, I had a Packard Bell 486 motherboard which fit the same case as the boys' computer and I upgraded them then and there. Before this upgrade, the best game their PC could muster was Wolfenstein 3d.

I have a certain fondness for this specific point in Doom history, say 2003-2005-ish. When I'm not actively developing a new deathmatch map for Doom, I spend a certain amount of time scouring the Internet Archive for old Doom-related websites of the period. In general, I actually miss the Internet/World Wide Web of this age. I feel that Google was best when they originally started their Image Search feature and they've been sliding downhill ever since. This is also before Facebook if I'm recalling correctly. I actually remember when the kids started their own MySpace pages. This is one of the reasons I link to Internet Archive rememberences towards the bottom of my Other Doom Sites portion of this website.

Well, over the last year, I discovered among my many downloaded but not-yet-reviewed by me wad files, something called slcfdhq.wad. It's a map by a Doom clan in France called Secteur-Lambda. I found the map to be absolutely fascinating and a great lens back into online Doom history. Later on, I ran across a Doomworld post response stating something to the effect of "there used to be tons of clan headquarters maps out there". After I finished up my last map revision, I decided I'd peek into the past some more and actively search for other HQ maps. Upon my first iteration of this process, I found quite a mixed bag in the quality department. If there's one thing I don't understand about the mind of some Doom mappers, it's the creation of toilets/bathrooms in a map. I just don't get it but many, many of these headquarters maps have them.

Now this past week, I decided that I'm going to make my own modern rendition of a headquarters map. I don't have any interest in putting restrooms or toilets in my creation, however, but I'll probably put in the tropey disco floor, a la Club Doom. What I'm working on is barely started as of this writing and tonite I thought I'd take a break from the actual mapping and resource assembling for this project. While on this recreational break, I engaged in a little additional search for others' HQ maps when I came across this part of the Zandronum Wiki: "Yep, there's Secteur-Lambda, there's MAG HQ, what else?..." And then WHOA!
Corporate HQ: Yup, you guessed it. Yet another Headquarters for the Corporate Clan.

I challenge you, my dear reader, to find this Corporate Clan. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. In fact, I'm pretty sure it never existed. How can I be so sure about this? The map linked to on this page is a map that I personally made! It was not an HQ map. It's a deathmatch map I released back in April of 2014 as a preview of what would become my next Chap DM project. Corporate Headquarters was just a name I chose for this map as I like unique names for my maps, rather than some permutation of UAC Labs or Techbase Infection. There were two maps I released back then. This map became map01 of Chap DM 3 and the other map, Altar of Terror, became map04. Now it took me until October of 2021 to finish and release Chap DM 3 and I'm sorry about that. Unfortunately, I have had a busy life and don't get to map for Doom as much as I would like. It's also the reason why since Chap DM 3, I've been releasing maps as soon as they're made instead of bottling them up for release as a multi-map wad file.

Wish me luck getting my new headquarters-style map finished by Christmas of 2024!

Pages:

Downloads: