DEAN OF D.O.O.M. - S4E8

On September 5th, 2024, word reached the Doom community that Drake ‘Numena’ O’Brien had died. O’Brien created the 20th, 21st, and 27th levels of TNT: Evilution: Central Processing, Administration Center, and Mount Pain. In life as in Doom, he was an artist. He worked with leaded glass. It was this online gallery that lead to the discovery of his passing. For two weeks after I heard the news, an urgent sense of purpose seized me. I made a map. I wrote a proposal. I did some recruiting. On the seventeenth, I announced the Drake O’Brien Ovational Megawad, a memorial community project in the style of THT: Threnody, a silly hypothetical no longer. D.O.O.M. is our way of honoring Drake as an artist and community influence, a tribute to his foreboding slow-burners which always end in disaster. Drake O’Brien’s signature move was something I called “the terrible revelation.” In each of his three maps, you emerge from a small, manageable space into a large, daunting one, and must sink or swim. Each person who submitted to DOOM was expected to incorporate a terrible revelation into their map, with leeway for creative interpretation, but love and reverence for our subject was the only real requirement. On June 17th, 2025, Final Doom’s 29th birthday, The Drake O’Brien Ovational Megawad was finished. It’s impossible for me to talk about Drake.wad without bias or directorial commentary, but I owe this to my project mates and to the man we share a common love for. This is a collection of stories, impressions, memories, and expressions of gratitude to everyone who gave it life. Link to the megawad (RC2 is virtually the same as the final version of the wad, not yet uploaded to idgames): https://www.mediafire.com/folder/glfo... Patreon:   / mtpain27