here's the level. someone described this as "the pants-shitting heard 'round the world in 1996". would you believe one of the authors of this level then went on to work for valve
DOOM.
doom is a wonderful game. i'd say it is my all-time favorite video game. i'm talking the original DooM games from 1993 and 1994. i faintly remember seeing my dad playing it on the family computer one night and while the game scared tiny little me, i remember being somewhat intrigued by it. the first time i played doom was actually the xbox 360 port at my friend's house sometime around 2007. again, i was a huge scaredy-cat so i didn't play it very long until suggesting something else to do, but that time it just kinda stuck with me.
around that same time, youtube was just starting to find its niche on the internet as the place to upload videos online. and this was mid-late 2000's youtube, long before the term "content creator" ever existed. everyone just uploaded whatever random shit they wanted to show off to the internet: family videos, recordings of live performances, video game accomplishments or showcases, animations, music, whatever.
this is relevant because being a kid in the later years of elementary school at that time meant that whenever we weren't killing time trying to hit each other with golf balls or playing on the hip new playstation 3, we would be on the computer either playing runescape or watching whatever we could find on youtube. and this being pre-"THE ALGORITHM" youtube, you just kinda stumbled across stuff on there. and one day, i find a video showcasing a speedrun of the hardest map in plutonia, "go 2 it". for those unfamiliar, "go 2 it" was the hardest doom level ever commercially released, featuring 206 monsters in total, 13 of which are cyberdemons. to put it into perspective: the commercial release of doom and doom 2 have a combined total of 10 cyberdemons, and you only ever fought them one at a time. this level was unprecedented at its release. and seeing someone blaze through what i thought was the hardest level ever made for doom turned my reluctant intrigue into utter fascination.
this fascination turned into obsessive scouring through the internet, looking for whatever i could find about doom. websites giving tips about doom's weapons and enemies, videos on youtube of speedruns and general gameplay of doom, anything. and at some point someone had managed to port the shareware version of doom (as well as heretic and hexen) to flash, and uploaded it to all the flash game sites: newgrounds, kongregate, you name it. this was the first time i actually got to play doom on the pc, as intended. granted, it was a janky flash port that didn't have any music and had shoddy mouse controls, encouraging me to play keyboard-only, but it was my first time experiencing doom proper. the lack of music actually enhanced my experience in a weird way. crawling through the techbases of 'knee-deep in the dead' hearing nothing but the reeling of the former humans, the gurgling of the imps, and the grunting of the pinkies near me made for a hell of a first-time playthrough.