Classic Doom players are continuing to pick away at some of the hardest remaining community challenges left, beating missions without attacking a single enemy in some of the hardest retail Doom levels ever released.
In the early 90s, shortly after the release of Doom II, some of the best Doom players in the world joined a website called Compet-n. This site housed speedruns, demos, and various community challenges for hundreds of levels spread across various Doom games and official retail add-ons. These challenges involved finding all secrets, killing all enemies, beating levels without attacking enemies, and more. Over time players completed most of these challenges. But some remained unbeaten and were deemed impossible by many.
In 2019, Decino, a Doom expert and Youtuber, uploaded a video showcasing the remaining impossible challenges. Some could be completed via tool-assisted runs, but others seemed impossible even with extra software. Since that video, some of the best Doom players in the world have been poking at these so-called impossible challenges to see if they are truly, really, completely impossible.
They’ve managed to make some good progress as seen in Decino’s latest video, which is an update on the current state of impossible challenges in classic Doom games.
Three challenges that were deemed impossible by humans have been completed by Doom experts. One of these is completing The Plutonia Expermeint’s final map on the second hardest difficulty without attacking any enemies. This is tricky for a whole bunch of reasons, including that this is a big boss level that tasks you with... attacking and killing the boss, the Icon of Sin. But a player was able to beat this level using skill and luck. It took over 800 attempts but Doom expert Pleymo pulled it off. Impressive stuff!
A few other challenges can be completed using tools or through save and loading exploits. But because demos can’t be recorded when saving and loading a game, these are still considering unbeaten as demos are required as proof.
However, they are technically possible to pull off and if the community of players still play id Software’s classic shooter find a new glitch or exploit, these final impossible challenges could one day be finished.
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