COLUMBINE.WAD

It doesn’t exist. At all. Everything you’ve heard about it? It’s the bullshiest of bullshit (you probably heard about it on the internet anyway) Don’t even try to look up for it. Give up. Eric Harris never had the skills to achieve the kind of architecture and planning that a building like the Columbine school would require.

Let’s go back in time and imagine ourselves at April 1993; the most prominent Doom modding works at the time were Hell Revealed, Requiem, GothicDM, the Memento Mori series, Eternal Doom and even Dwango5 (ZDoom as a port was just born in March in that year, and it was in its second stable version ever before April 1999), and while said WADs they featured structures that were arguably bigger than any alleged “real-life” building that was ever attempted to be mimicked in Doom, every work I mentioned previously took MONTHS, almost YEARS to get done, and let alone get conceived thanks by the skill acquired by each person who developed said wads. These weren’t any first-map-ever works by any means, each author took at least 3 years to get good at Doom mapping.


Let’s go deeper and check the kind of editors Eric Harris used, let’s take his most well-known wad, UAC Labs, as a sample. Let’s look at the readme.

    Editor(s) used          : Edmap, BSP, and WINTEX

Edmap. Okay, let’s give a quick look at the /idgames database and check for prominent WADs done with Edmap BEFORE April 1999. We end up with stuff like VENOM.WAD and even an older version of Mordeth. And once again, the persons involved in these projects had a previous background already established.

Eric never used any other editor for the 6 wads of his that are out there in A Columbine’s Site’s webpage; he used other WAD compiling tools like WinTex but that’s about it (everyone used WinTex at the time). ALL of them, by judging the date from the files, were done between March and September of 1996. Six months.

Do you want me to believe that an 18-year old with only 6 months of palpable mapping skill could outdo the mapping quality of Yonatan Donner (Hell Revealed), Ola Bjorling (Venom) and TeamTNT (Eternal Doom, and Final Doom itself) that were refining their mapping skills while he was dealing with the shit at school?

Now hold on, don’t even try to take REALDOOM.ZIP as an excuse and a plausible evidence of Harris doing the whole high school in Doom. What is known so far from the evidence out there is that “REALDOOM” was Eric’s Doom “patch”…

Okay now, let’s define “patch”. First of all, let’s take into account that stuff like DeHackEd was already a thing by 1995; DeHackEd, simply put, gives the user the chance to edit EVERY single “thing” in the game, modify it, and create different stuff (even new monsters) by recycling stuff such as the game’s own sprites; it is vanilla compatible and nowadays it is exploited to death by most modern vanilla mappers out there with surprising results (an example). Eric Harris never used DeHackEd in his works, so that’s out of the question.

 Let’s take a look at his WADs again, what we can find outside of the levels themselves? Custom sounds, and even custom sprites that some people claim that Eric added "extra gore" to them (up to this day, I’m still looking for any actual changes to the sprites, they all look the same to me compared to the vanilla ones)

EVERYONE and their mothers added sound replacements to Doom back in late 90s (And when I say EVERYONE, I MEAN EVERYONE). Some of the stuff hosted at /idgames still has copyrighted sound bits from TV shows, movies and whatnot. And come on, don’t get me started on stuff like Simpsons Doom and “OHHH, WHY DID YOU DO THAT?”

And, I dunno man, have you guys ever thought that, maybe, JUST MAYBE, REALDOOM.ZIP was just another random silly sound/graphic WAD replacement that Eric Harris just made in his spare time as the die-hard Doom fan that he was? When I read that “KILL EM AAAALLLLL” bit in one of his wad’s textfiles I don’t see a psychotic teenager with a serial killer instinct, I just see yet another classic 90’s Doom fan like any other kid at the time was as much of a Quake fan as everyone were at the 90s. It’s just your typical 90’s teenager behavior, that’s all.

"B-b-but Eric never wanted to share REALDOOM and the rest of his works with anyone! That means that REALDOOM was the Colum—"

Once again, made up bullshit. Go read UAC Labs’ textfile again.

          -note  Ask for my awesome PATCH called, REALDOOM.zip!!!!

He wanted the thing to get known by the community. And I mean, he wasn’t that much of a dumbass to include something in the veins of "heyyy, this is my high school and I hate everyone so much that I’m planning to kill everyone and blow the shit out of the building itself. Have fun, Doom rocks, mang"

Once again, up to this very date, I find illogical that people STILL believe all the shit about the “Columbine WAD”, and truth be told, it annoys me a little bit that some people still ask us Doom fans about the Harris levels and that stupid little urban legend that often gets fueled by certain people which I won’t mention but they may be probably reading this post since this is the same day that the shooting took place and, well, they feel like “commemorating” this date by playing Doom “as they used to do”…

What’s there to commemorate, you little shits? two kids got bullied so hard at school they massacred other kids’ lives and put the whole country in jeopardy, and you’re all here with your raggidy-ass bullshit and made up crap about them planning the shooting in a 20-year old DOS game? Fuck off with that shit, keep your weirdness off of our community; and while you’re at it, stop adding unnecessary fuel to stuff like this stupid urban legend, stop whatever the fuck you think it is worth of being worshipped from those poor messed up kids, and help others to prevent more dreadful events like the one that happened in April 20th, 1999 so that another school shooting never happens ever again and unrelated stuff such as videogames like Doom get the blame

I’m so done with everything related to this specific date. Oh, and thanks for reading this rant of mine, I just wanted to get this off of my system. Peace.