The Butterfly Effect
This is Armageddon 2 Invasion, an old Doom mod from 2008. It adds a lot of new enemies, some of which are from other FPS games, like Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, etc. I had to cheat a little for my playthrough since this is meant to be played on cooperative survival lol.
This is one of the most nostalgic Doom mods for me. I saw a video of this being played on youtube around 2008 when it came out and it introduced me to Skulltag, which was a sourceport made for multiplayer Doom (it has since been replaced by Zandronum). I didn't know english very well at the time, so I was completely out of the loop on sourceports and stuff like that. Prior to that I'd only play Doom on Doom95 because that's what came bundled with my pirated copy downloaded off of the internet lol.
This is the epitome of 2000's Doom moding on advanced sourceports. It just packs the maps with several monsters from several different sources, art style consistency is in no way a concern. And honestly, that's very charming! It was a more innocent time, when just being able to bring stuff from other games into the doom engine was novel enough to elevate a mod on it's own. You see a similar modding philosophy in stuff like Knee-Deep in Zdoom, and Aeons of Death, where it just bloats the mod with a billion custom enemies, and weapons because that was new and exciting.
But back to Armageddon 2 Invasion, I give it 100% credit for getting me into Doom modding, which became a big hobby of mine for a long time, though I severely slowed down nowadays, due to lack of time and also focusing more on other creative pursuits (and also a heightened ambition to make full on indie games instead of just mods). It also had a domino effect in my life! Through skulltag I met my first long-standing circle of online friends, and eventually my girlfriend! Life is funny like that. You see a cool mod on youtube that has all these crazy monsters in these Serious Sam-like invasion maps, and several years down the line you can trace you meeting your soul mate directly to that seemingly innocuous moment in your life. And that's not even mentioning everythign else that happened in between and since either. Friendships blossomed, and some died, several skills I've honed due to becoming a modder, dreams of making my own game, many a drama came and went, an interest in learnign more about programming and 3D modeling grew within me, and even more personal matters, like experimenting more with my sexuality and gender, since I felt much safer toying with those concepts around my rowdy friends than around my stick in the mud, conservative family.
It just goes to show, sometimes the most banal moment can completely flip the script. Maybe you're watching some random video on youtube (or tiktok nowadays for the younguns), or reading a post or fanfic, or anything really. Maybe it shows you something so cool, so amazingly kick ass, the literal coolest thing ever for your developing brain, that it completely changes the course of your life.
And that dear reader, is the beauty of life.
