Lost DOOM Mods: Beavis and Butthead DOOM

I was impressed with the level of detail in this, but there's no way this backstory for the wad is real.

When I read this line:

"Just unzip in your doom directory"

I think this kinda casual throw around of "Just unzip in your doom directory" in a text file's installation instructions I think is a little too ahead of the curve for people in 1995.

also lines like:

"Then we released version 2.0,"

I don't think people in 1995 ever labeled their own little mock projects "releases" with the properly labeled versions. There might have been a few readme textfiles in 1995 that did this but this was rare. Keep in mind, not a lot of people had easy means of talking to each other these days so people were a bit more explanatory in their written speech because they never knew how someone else on the internet would perceive it, and they wouldn't be able to answer follow up questions. Communication over the internet was kind of a big deal and everyone had their own way of doing things. Calling uploading a container with with an installation package to modify your doom game a "release" is just way ahead of its time for 1995. I think even the TeamTNT guys, who were as popular as you probably get in the Doom universe, didn't ever really refer to their serious 1995 stuff as a release, akin to marketing it like a video game promoter company would.

Remember, in as late as the 2000's people on the internet were still writing on the internet like this: www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/77758-good-stuff-ling/

There's a level of "I know how ridiculous this is" when someone from 1995 puts something like "Beavis and Butthead Doom" onto a BBS server for other people to download and play. To claim it as a release even as a joke would go way over people's heads.

I'm not a '90's computers' historian, but I've played enough 90's wads to know a bit about what the level of quality was usually achieved in projects like this. I think you would need superior art tools to get the graphics looking this "clean." Most tools used for image editing, converting to the correct format, and importing them into the wad file usually had some "loss" in the image quality resulting in a gritty jpeg-like film grain that even some of the best 90's PWADs couldn't escape.

Mad respect for adding the INSTALL.DAT and FILE_ID.DIZ with the zip file. That was a nice touch and almost had me convinced this was real. The fabricated story is also really good. Nice job!

Interesting. I remember hearing about this a long time ago, but don't recall the mod itself. I do remember some old sounds floating around in various WADs in that timeframe.

Same story told as of 2002

The graphics do seem suspiciously good; for reference here is an authentic "Beavis and Butthead" mod for Wolfenstein circa 1994. Judge for yourself the differences in quality there.

However! The ByteBrothers do have a surviving release called X-MAS NIGHTMARE which includes graphics of a very similar style and quality, as well as the phrase:



And:



A major.minor version number for the release:



A README!.TXT with the same exclamation mark at the end.

And even a reference to this "lost mod" by name:



So while I always find skepticism warranted in general, I think this may indeed be legitimate. Plus in the YouTube comments there are several people who seem to remember this WAD which, in itself is not compelling evidence (human memory is notoriously faulty), but taken together with the rest suggests it may in fact be real.

This is indeed genuine. I started playing Doom somewhere in the mid-ninties and got into modding during the second half ('97 or '98). I'm that old. No internet, that didn't come until later and among the first Doom-related places I visited were the /idgames archives and doomworld.com. My access to other mods pre-internet were through demo and shareware discs that came with magazines. I did come across this mod somewhere back in the early days, then it was lost and I couldn't find it anywhere anymore. I am familiar with the Bytebrothers and their mods, this one in particular always stood out for obivious reasons. Their artstyle was very cartoonish but surprisingly clean and of high quality for the time, compared to something like the old Simpsons WADs which were from around the same time.

Clearly drawn by hand in some paint program of the time. Crude and simplistic, but this method does result in a clean or crisp look. Many DOOM/DOOM II sprites were also drawn by hand, but more professionally. Other popular methods of the time were graphics made from real-life image scans, this method however came with a whole slew of issues.

I think it's not so hard to believe myself. I remember that similar things happened in that timeframe like "Simpsons Doom" being blocked by Fox and an "Alien v. Predator" Quake mod having a similar issue.

Also, it appears around the same timeframe they did have video games based on the same IP, which may have given them incentive to "protect" it.

I'm looking for the Beavis and Butt-head Doom I took them from and the original creator of the graphics is unknown, but here's two player skins I compiled in 1998.

Beavis (renamed to Idiot)