Who are your favorite ID software mappers?

I'm kind of a Romero guy. I have great appreciation for the attention to detail and the amount of thought he puts into his work. From reading Masters Of Doom, it seems to suggest that Doom wouldn't be the fast paced exciting and revolutionary game it has become without him in charge. He was responsible for the final word on what Doom levels should look and play like. It was his idea to trash all the alpha Doom stuff which I think was a pretty bold move, because I imagine that probably bothered Tom Hall quite a bit.

But if we got Alpha Doom instead of regular Doom it just wouldn't be as revolutionary. The game would have been too focused on detail and too close to realism that it wouldn't have opened our imaginations enough to make the Doom community what it is today. I really don't think anyone would have made Deus Vult for Wolfenstein 3D, Gothic Deathmatches for Duke Nukem 3D, Combat Shock for Blake Stone, or Ancient Aliens for Heretic.

Good point. Commander Keen is a very imaginative game, and Tom Hall is nothing short of brilliant when it comes to being creative. I do think Tom Hall's Doom would have been a pretty amazing game for the time period Doom was released in. Based on what I've read in Masters of Doom, Tom Hall was getting increasingly tired of the realism associated with Wolfenstein 3D and early Doom, and was more interested in a silly playful atmosphere. He was given instructions (from who, i don't know) to design levels based on the blueprints of actual military bases and bunkers. Now that I think of it, Tom Hall not being able to exercise his creative freedom in Doom probably has much more to do with his environment and his state of mind rather than his creative potential. Other games he got to work on where he had more control were always really fascinating. I guess he just wasn't really interested in the direction id was moving in anymore, so Doom just wasn't his best work.

That said, I distinctly remember a few pages in Masters of Doom where it is said that after many hours of programming, Romero played what levels had already been made so far. He said it sucked, then spent the next several hours in his office with the door closed. When he was done working on a level himself, he brought everyone into the his office to see his creation, where you'd start in a large room, go through wavy dark hallways into brightly lit bigger rooms with tall ceilings and ledges that imps could throw fireballs at you from, windows so you could see the outside, etc. Everybody was really impressed and agreed that this kind of style would be the design model for the rest of the game.