It Took 300 Hours to Build This Incredible ‘Doom’ Map

It's 2016 and Doom is still one of the best first person shooters around, even compared to all the big budget games that will release this holiday season. First released in 1993, id's cultural touchstone has remained relevant thanks to a modding scene that's still thriving today.

Usually it's the mods with a funny gimmick or arty angle that get attention, like this mod that adds Duke Nukem 3D's weapons to Doom, an autobiographical Doom mod, or this mod that let's you play Doom with the powers of the PlayStation 2 cult classic God Hand.

But sometimes all you need is a really amazing level, which is the case with Ben Mansell's "Foursite," a sprawling, hour-long map he spent 300 hours making.

"The overall concept of the four circular quadrants based around a single horizontal corridor I originally thought up in a particular dull Accounting lecture at University in 2004," Mansell writes on the mod's ModDB page. "I was building the occasional Doom 3 map at the time, and originally envisioned it as a level for that. Unfortunately with school-work piling up, I only got as far as creating a single room before the project was abandoned."

11 years later Mansell decided to finish the job, and 13 months, 1,062 monsters, and 300 hours later, we got another great reason to play Doom.

"It ended up being so big because it just felt like it had to to live up to the idea I'd been carrying around for so many years," Mansell told Eurogamer.

Overall it has a simple design, but the effort that Mansell put into it shows. It's an underground military base with one large corridor that leads to four distinct sections. Each feels like a different level, with different visual and gameplay themes. Beating one section will open the next one, and once all sections are complete a final boss room will open.

I just played it for a bit and got my ass handed to me near what I believe was the end of the first section. I played the map with the addition of the Brutal Doom mod that makes the guns feel more powerful and enemy deaths more brutal, and I recommend you do the same. It just makes every Doom mod feel more modern.

The mod is free to download (here), but you need Doom 2, which is currently $2.50 on Steam,in order to play it.