I. Love. Doom mods. Out of all the things I’ve written about over the years, it’s the one thing I consistently come back to writing about. What folks have done to push that 32-year-old game and its engine never ceases to amaze me. This one in particular was one I wanted to write about as early as last year, and I think it’s time.
When id software released the Doom source code around 1997, little did they know what folks were gonna do with that “old” engine. From expanding the vanilla limits like Boom, to the more complex scripting that GZDoom brought years later. While there were still levels being made for Boom and vanilla Doom around the 2000s, source ports like Doomsday and ZDoom pushed the idea of expanding beyond what vanilla Doom could achieve, with a myriad of gameplay and levels projects released around that time. One of these in particular was a ZDoom-focused mod that would change Doom into something more like its contemporaries of that time: System Shock.
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The mod is RTC-3057, a creation ran by “Team Future,” a handful of Doom modders lead by one Jacob “Shaviro” Kruse. Initially, the mod was released as a single-level demo in 2002, and would end up being considered as part of the 10 Best WADs for 2003 to commemorate Doom’s tenth anniversary. (This would be a precursor to the later Cacowards, which started the following year.) The final version consisting of the first hub, codenamed Blue, was released on the /idgames archive that same year.
The RTC-3057 in this case refers to you, a human-cyborg hybrid. Awakening from a bunch of unexplained nightmares, 3057 discovers something has gone incredibly wrong in the spaceship he’s occupying. Armed with the standard pistol and 50 bullets, 3057 must fight their way through all the foes that have invaded the ship.
