Every time December rolls around, I always feel a compulsion to write about a Christmas-themed video game. There’s some pretty okay ones, but there’s one that’s always been on my mind and have thought about writing about it, but just felt there wasn’t enough material there to justify it.
That game was Duke: Nuclear Winter, an official expansion for Duke Nukem 3D by Simply Silly Software, and while it has a decent Christmas theme to it, really feels slapdash and hastily put together. Hell, the first two levels are literally just Red Light District and Hollywood Holocaust from Duke 3D but with snow all over them. Compared to the other official expansions – Duke Caribbean: Life’s a Beach and Duke it Out in D.C., respectively – it feels like the black sheep of all the Duke expansions. Hell, Alien Armageddon, a mod I covered on this site previously, has pretty much ignored its existence yet given the other Duke expansions a complete overhaul.
But Simply Silly Software didn’t spawn out of nowhere. Its founder and head honcho, Joe Wilcox, was making middleware for games like Doom, where stuff like DOOM/Master were his big claim to fame. Of course, he dabbled in Doom mapping as well, making one map for a small Christmas-themed mapset called “Xmas Doom,” which eventually got a bigger, badder sequel in December 1995. H2H-XMAS.WAD is that followup.
This was made by several members of the Head 2 Head Gaming Network, a community of Doom fans where one could dial up to a network and play Doom multiplayer with others online, similar to services like DWANGO. And like DWANGO, H2H-Xmas was made as something to promote their gaming service. To commemorate Doom‘s tenth anniversary, H2H-Xmas was put on the “Top 100 WADs of All Time” on Doomworld, basically a precursor to the modern-day Cacowards.
Wilcox was one of several folks who spearheaded this project, as well as contributing one map, which is… quite mediocre. H2H-Xmas definitely has the vibe of what would show up in Duke Nuclear Winter a few years later. Though Duke is a vastly different beast from Doom in terms of design and gameplay.
The plot is simply silly: After returning from vacation, Santa Claus finds Doomguy bruised, battered and bloody, with Martha Claus being kidnapped by the demons. Unable to finish his mission, Doomguy gives Santa Claus his trusty pistol and tells him to rip and tear those demons like unopened presents.
If you’ve played Doom, you know what to expect. A pistol, 50 bullets, kill demons, find keys, exit, repeat. Except now there’s a lot of snow and Christmas music to get you into the holiday spirit. Weirdly, the monsters look the same as they do in Doom II, which is odd to me, considering Xmas Doom changed the sprites of the monsters to have santa hats, Cacodemons look like christmas tree bulbs, and Imps throwing snowballs instead of fireballs.
I thought I might’ve botched something in the install – this was made in the days when you had to run batch EXE files to create the WAD to play it in Doom II, a more complex process compared to the drag-and-drop usability of today – but other videos and images I’ve seen of this WAD seem to match my experience with it, so maybe that was just how it was back then.
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