Hell Revealed

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Hell Revealed
Title screen, created by Yonatan DonnerTitle screen, created by Yonatan Donner
Authors Yonatan Donner, Haggay Niv
Port Vanilla Doom
IWAD Doom II
Year 1997
Link Doomworld/idgames
Top100.png This mod was one of the ten 1997 mods to feature in the Top 100 WADs of All Time on Doomworld!
1997
  1. Requiem
  2. Eternal Doom
  3. GothicDM
  4. STRAIN
  5. Mordeth
  6. The Talosian Incident
  7. Dawn of the Dead
  8. Hell Revealed
  9. Hell's Eventide
  10. Chord NG
1994 - 1995 - 1996 - 1997 - 1998
1999 - 2000 - 2001 - 2002 - 2003

Cacowards

Hell Revealed (HR.WAD) is a 32-level megawad for Doom II, released on May 2, 1997. It was created by speedrunner Yonatan Donner and his friend Haggay Niv. This megawad was designed with full skill level support to allow unskilled players to complete it, and yet also provide "extreme challenge" for the best players.[1][2] The latter is the best-known feature of Hell Revealed, with the result that it has had the most speedruns recorded of any PWAD. Thus, it is one of a few PWADs that are legal for competition in the Compet-n. A sequel, Hell Revealed II, was released in late 2003, created by a new team with Yonatan Donner's approval.[3]

The megawad also includes a custom soundtrack in a separate file, HRMUS.WAD. It was compiled from music in Rise of the Triad that was written by Lee Jackson and Robert Prince, although the megawad's text file suggests Donner and Niv planned to release an update with original music.[4] Levels 20-26, 28 and 30 reuse the music from Doom II.

Infopack[edit]

The welcome screen of the infopack.

Like Memento Mori and Memento Mori II, Hell Revealed has an "infopack" available separately from the WAD, contained in hrinfo.zip. Like that of its later contemporary Requiem, it is a 16-bit Windows application, meaning it will not run in 64-bit versions of Windows without emulation or the use of a virtual machine. It was created by Yonatan Donner using Astound, a then-popular presentation program by Gold Disk Software; a splash screen advertising Astound appears when the application is closed.

Because of the program used to make it, the infopack takes the form of a slide show presentation. It takes up the entire screen, with the space not covered by the graphics colored a solid black. The user is shown a section header, a screenshot, a big text box, and four clickable buttons: one to quit, one to see the table of contents for the slide show, and two to go to either the previous or next page of the presentation. The first page is a welcome screen, followed by an introduction to the WAD, gameplay information, credits, information on the demo pack, the story, and individual pages for all 32 levels. It concludes with a humorous "Behind the Scenes" page quoting conversations between Donner and Niv, and a "Thanks" page that includes thanks to two people "for disturbing us all the time and not letting us work". While the program runs, Lee Jackson's arrangement of Henry Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary" for Rise of the Triad plays in an endless loop.

Story[edit]

The WAD's story is tongue-in-cheek and only five sentences long. The marine wakes up with a visible status bar along with a pistol and 50 bullets, put in an infested "jumpgate" lab by "two mad WAD creators." The marine must use the jumpgate, discover their mission, finish every level and "send a letter of complaint to the madmen who sent [them] here." Reading the rest of the story requires one to "send $500 to us" or "enter a nuthouse." The last sentence explains that "This is Doom, man - just go in there and kill!"

Content[edit]

The main menu open on MAP01: Into the Gate. Note the custom status bar.
MAP15: Gates to Hell

Built-in demos[edit]

This WAD features six built-in demos. All require Doom II v1.9 to view them. The demo levels are:

Demo Level Skill Tics Length
DEMO1 MAP13: Last Look at Eden 4 1061 0:30.31
DEMO2 MAP29: Temple of Fear 4 2552 1:12.91
DEMO3 MAP25: Dead Progressive 4 5266 2:30.46
DEMO4 MAP02: Gateway Lab 4 2458 1:10.23
DEMO5 MAP02: Gateway Lab 2-player deathmatch 99166 47:13.31
DEMO6 MAP13: Last Look at Eden 4 109807 52:17.34

Demo packs[edit]

Three official demo packs were released for Hell Revealed. The first, Hell Revealed Help Demos (hrhelp.zip), is a collection of demos recorded on Ultra-Violence in no monsters mode to show how to complete each level with 100% secrets. The only exception is the demo for MAP07: Arachnophobia, which was recorded on I'm Too Young to Die because the level is not possible to complete without monsters.

The remaining two packs are UV max demo collections. The first, the Hell Revealed UV LMP Collection (hruvlmps.zip), was recorded by Yonatan Donner, Kai-Uwe Humpert, Daniel Lindgren and Peo Sjöblom, with a total time of 9:34:22. The demo for MAP25: Dead Progressive, a 5:00 demo recorded by Humpert, was the winner of a brief UV max competition on that level run by Donner shortly after Hell Revealed's release, whose demos are collected in hr25lmps.zip on the official website and available individually on the WAD's Doomed Speed Demos Archive page.

The second, the Hell Revealed UV LMP Collection 2.0 (hruvlmp2.zip), was recorded with the same team minus Lindgren but including Anders Johnsen, Adam Hegyi, Esko Koskimaa, Henning Skogstø, and Jonas Feragen. In this pack, two demos each are provided for MAP26: Afterlife and MAP30: Hell Revealed. MAP26 has a demo without ghost monsters and one demo with them, and MAP30 has one demo without 100% Kills and one with them. The total time with MAP26's ghost monsters and 100% Kills on MAP30 is 5:42:42, saving three hours, 51 minutes and 40 seconds. The pack also includes UV -fast demos for 20 of the levels, including an extra demo for MAP01: Into the Gate additionally recorded in UV Tyson style by Peo Sjöblom.

All UV max and UV -fast records set by these demo packs have since been beaten by the players of the Compet-n.

Speedrunning[edit]

IWADs
PWADs

Current Compet-n records[edit]

The Compet-n episode records for Hell Revealed are:

Run Time Player Date File Notes
UV speed episode, MAP01-MAP10 13:26 Jakub Machata (DooMerMan) 2003-03-29 1326hr01.zip
UV max episode, MAP01-MAP10 37:43 vdgg 2016-02-16 3743hr01.zip
UV -fast episode, MAP01-MAP10 55:25 Revved 2010-02-01 5525hf01.zip

The data was last verified in its entirety on June 21, 2020.

Current DSDA records[edit]

The DSDA episode records for Hell Revealed are:

Run Time Player Date File Notes
UV speed episode, MAP01-MAP10 13:26 Jakub Machata (DooMerMan) 2003-03-29 1326hr01.zip
UV max episode, MAP01-MAP10 29:15 Ancalagon 2024-07-28 hre1m2915.zip
UV max episode, MAP11-MAP20 1:36:02 Ancalagon 2024-07-29 hre2m9602.zip
UV max episode, MAP21-MAP30 1:15:11 Ancalagon 2024-08-01 hre3m7511.zip
UV max run 6:05:42 johnfrinky 2021-02-01 hrall-60542.zip
UV -fast episode, MAP01-MAP10 42:51 Andrea Rovenski 2024-03-28 hrep1f4251.zip

The data was last verified in its entirety on August 13, 2024.

File[edit]

Hell Revealed is contained in a zip file called hr.zip. It is 2,322,399 bytes in size and contains 4 files:

Size Name
7,027,154 HR.WAD
519,357 HRMUS.WAD
30 HR.BAT
2,551 HR.TXT

It has the following hashes:

Hash type Hash code
MD5 d81f945e77985d14c1b03a6df27cf055
SHA-1 678c898a1fc8ded84e4eac8f6899d0cb4a036d56
CRC-32 d299a6e4

History[edit]

Episode 1 (11 maps) was released in 1996, with a different MAP01. The music was also contained in a separate PWAD but was completely different from the final version.

External links[edit]

Official[edit]

Demos[edit]

Reviews[edit]

Miscellaneous[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ In Hell Revealed, you will find: ... full skill-level support ... and extreme challenge." HR.TXT, Hell Revealed at Doomworld/idgames (May 2, 1997). Retrieved on March 25, 2015.
  2. ↑ "Full skill level support that makes it finishable by even the worst players and yet challenging for even the best ..." Hell Revealed official website at the Internet Archive (OoCities mirror). Retrieved on March 25, 2015.
  3. ↑ "As with Chrozoron's Hell Revealed II, I am not involved with this project and neither is Haggay ... But both of these projects have my approval ..." Yonatan Donner official website at the Internet Archive (OoCities mirror). Retrieved on October 25, 2023.
  4. ↑ "The new musics are currently taken from Rise of the Triad - we might release an updated version with original musics soon." HR.TXT, Hell Revealed at Doomworld/idgames (May 2, 1997). Retrieved on March 25, 2015.
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