Compiled by iD Software in response to various commercial Doom wad collections like D!Zone, the Master Levels for DOOM II was intended to be the largest mega-collection of additional Doom maps (the 'Maximum Doom' collection), plus twenty new official maps (the 'Master Levels').

1. The DOOM II with Master Levels application will be found automatically. Notice that after you select DOOM II with Master Levels in the list, some information about the application is shown to you: Star rating (in the left lower corner). This tells you the opinion other users have about DOOM II with Master Levels, from 'Highly recommended' to.
2. I figured out that one can compress WAD files, and then rename the.zip file to make a combined WAD file. Since No Rest for the Living has 9 levels, and Master Levels for Doom II has 21 levels, could there be a way that I could re-arrange the map replacer so that all the Master Levels (plus John Romero's new level E1M8b) are set as Maps 9-31.
3. + MASTER LEVELS DEMOS + Last update: DEMOS FOR PC MASTER LEVELS FOR DOOM II V1.9 Note: All.lmp files in this collection will play back correctly when using the original DOS files for Doom II: Hell On Earth v1.9, or when using Doom 95 with the v1.9 DOOM2 WAD loaded.
4. Maximum Doom is the name given to bonus content distributed with the Master Levels for Doom II in 1995. It consists of 1830 amateur PWAD files of varying quality downloaded from the Internet (191 for Doom, 1629 for Doom II and 10 for Heretic). Many of these files are still available, for example on the idgames archive. Some contain copyrighted material, such as sound files from television.
5. This remake attempts to enhance the level as far as I can take it with my harmonica skills. You'll need a beefy computer to run this! At least a GeForce 6600 and a 2GHZ Pentium IV! Requires Doom 2 IWAD and GZDoom 1.4.6 or later.

The 'Master Levels' are twenty stand-alone maps from independent level designers commissioned by iD. There is no overall campaign or an attempt to tie the levels together, though some of the levels from the same designer do have a connected story of their own.'Maximum Doom' is a collection of 201 .wads (map packs with varying numbers of levels inside) for the original Doom and 1,629 wads for Doom II, leading to the package's claim of 3,000 total new levels. These wads are not commissioned by iD or made by professional designers, and no claim is made as to these being the 'most popular' or 'best designed' homebrew levels available. The maps were gathered from various free or FTP sites on the Internet; however, the time and dial-up cost for a player to find and download the same collection of .wads themselves would have been substantial.

Action Doom 2 - Urban BrawlAdventures of Square, The - Episodes 1 & 2 (v2.1)Blasphemer (v0.1.5)Chex QuestChex Quest 2Chex Quest 3 (v1.4)DelaweareDoom. Download - Easy Setup (166 MB) Demon Gate: 666 New Levels for Doom & Doom II screenshots: A large collection of DOOM and DOOM II WAD files - Demon Gate was compiled by downloading add-ons off of the internet and then marketed to retail for those who did not have an internet connection.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

People who downloaded Master Levels for DOOM II have also downloaded:
Final DOOM, Lost Episodes of Doom, The, Doom 2, Ultimate DOOM, The, Demon Gate: 666 New Levels for Doom & Doom II, Doom, DOOM³, Quake

a 'Deluxe Edition' of the Master Levels for Doom II

NOTE:Absolutely no retail game content is included in this compilation. To play, you will need to own Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Master Levels for Doom II, combine them all with WadSmoosh, and run with the advanced source port GZDoom. The included readme explains how.

ALSO NOTE: This is a compilation of other peoples' fine work - distributed with the permission of the surviving authors - and I'm merely the curator, so all payments have been disabled.

In 1995 id Software was busy building Quake, and riding high from the success of Doom and Doom II: Hell on Earth, and more generally from Doom as a cultural phenomenon with millions of players and thousands of people creating their own add-ons with freely available tools. But id saw the sales of products like D!ZONE - unauthorized retail CD-ROM compilations of user-created levels, from which they (much less the levels' creators) didn't see a cent in royalties - as an act of bad faith. So they decided to, in John Romero's words, 'give them a run for their money'. id's Shawn Green reached out to a few notable community level designers and arranged to have them contribute never-before-released maps to a new, official compilation, to be sold at retail as 'Master Levels for Doom II'. The compilation was released on December 26th, 1995.

Nearly all of the designers who contributed to Master Levels soon went on to have some sort of career in games: Sverre André Kvernmo and John W. 'Dr Sleep' Anderson ended up working together a few years later on Daikatana at Romero's Ion Storm studio, Chris Klie became a level designer at LucasArts, Jim Flynn played a key role on TeamTNT as a developer for the watershed source port Boom, Tom Mustaine later co-founded Dallas area game studio Ritual Entertainment, and Tim Willits went on to become no less than studio director of id Software until 2019.

There's more to this story, however, and what I found after a bit of research is that most of the designers submitted more levels than just the 21 that made it into the compilation, and three designers' submissions in particular were part of larger series, the rest of which did see free public release. I played these extra levels and found them interesting in their own right. They helped form a more complete picture of what these designers, and the Doom mapping community in general circa 1995, were up to.

And so I realized that here were the makings of something akin to a 'deluxe edition' re-release of some classic rock album, with outtakes, demos, alternate versions, etc alongside the better known originals. And I realized that the all-in-one experience provided by my retail WAD merging tool, WadSmoosh, was an ideal way to sew all this material together into a cohesive and easy-to-play package.

Works of the Masters, then, is a 5-episode compilation of 42 levels total showcasing each designer's work in their fullest context, with the permission of the surviving authors to redistribute in this format. As mentioned above, you'll need to own the associated retail Doom games to play, and you'll need to combine their content with WadSmoosh, and run masters.pk3 as you would any other Doom addon.

To be clear, all the non-retail levels in Works of the Masters are available individually on the idgames archive; what this mod does is bring them together and put them into a deliberate sequence that was absent from the original Master Levels release (being just a folder containing WAD files).

Some additional material is included with the compilation: the original README files for the freely released levels, and a readme by me which includes this writeup, instructions on how to play, some thoughts on each episode, and some reference links for further reading.

Install instructions

Open the included readme file, 'masters_readme.html', in your browser for instructions on how to play this mod.

Download

Development log

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Tried this out today with the latest WadSmoosh, on ACHRON22 there is no sky texture. In the console, I see:

Unknown texture: 'ML_SKY3'

Check your wadsmoosh.log to make sure that the Master Levels were included without errors. ML_SKY3 is extracted from those WADs.

Yup, I got confused and broke something on my side, fixed now. Thanks!

Is there a version of Master Levels Deluxe that runs as a seperate episode but keep the rest of the episodes created by WadSmoosh such as Ultimate Doom, Sigil, Hell on Earth, and so on?

Playing this with Captain J's excellent Netronian Chaos gameplay mod causes my arsenal to get reset at the beginning of the next level. :(

Currently all episodes except for Cabal reset inventory at each map transition, as one would experience playing the Master Levels separately. This is currently defined in the MAPINFO so there's no way to turn it off. I think what I should probably do though is integrate my 'optional pistol start' mod that adds a menu option, leaves the current behavior as default but lets people turn it off entirely for whatever reason. No ETA on when I can have this added but it should be pretty simple.

Okay, I've released a new build with a menu option for this:

Let me know if that doesn't work with any mods you're using.

That was quick! And it does seem to work, at least with Netronian Chaos.. although I have to launch GZDoom without it first so I can adjust the setting, as it does not appear while Netronian Chaos is running. I guess it is not your fault that the mod's options override yours.

What I do not understand with the reset inventory is that it makes most secrets pointless, since they do not carry over to the next level. This is not your fault either, just something that strikes me as odd with the Master Levels' original structure.

In any case, thanks for the update and for the compilation! :D

Great initiative, a really well thought-of compendium of classic Doom maps.

Bug report: 'unable to open map 'ML_MAP06' after completing CPU.

Which IWAD are you running the mod with? It depends on having a doom_complete.pk3 IWAD created with WadSmoosh that includes the Master Levels files.

Master Levels For Doom 2 Wad Download

Sorry for late reply. Vocal rider vst free download.

I'm using DOOM2 as an IWAD, doom_complete.pk3 generated with the latest version of WadSmoosh (incl. the Master Levels).

Master Levels For Doom 2 Wad Download

I think the problem was caused by me using the DoomLauncher to run the mod, and probably something went wrong with loading order. I've just ran the mod by making a shortcut to gzdoom with appropiate -file parameters, and the maps load as they should.

Super sorry for confusion!

No problem! Yeah it's expecting the equivalent of this command line:

Master Levels For Doom 2 Wad Download Full

gzdoom.exe -iwad doom_complete.pk3 -file masters.pk3