Deathtag is a whole new approach to playing multiplayer Doom. In the past, the purpose was to have as many frags as possible. Deathtag offers a new purpose for multiplayer Doom II play, to invade the opposing fort, reach a switch, and escape alive.

Your basic 4 player 2 on 2 deathtag level:

There are two teams, Blue (Green & Indigo) and Red (Brown & Red) with two forts, a blue one and a red one, each indicated by colored skulls and torches surrounding the fort. Once you get a Rad suit, you'll have to cross a long sea of hot lava and access a lift to reach the scoring area. Hit your teams switch (red or blue) and you have scored one point! There are place(s) on the map where you can find out what the current score is and, eventually, who won. That's pretty much it.

Back in January of 1996, deathtag was becoming fun in Doom2. Ethan and his friends downloaded some deathtag WADs like ultamite dethtag and king of the mountain, plus others. One day, Ethan said: "Aha! I've had WinDEU for awhile, I think I'll make a deathtag wad for 3 players.

One day in our school's cafeteria, Ethan walked in with some paper. They were the "blueprints" of his deathtag wad idea. He explained it and it sounded like fun. And during science class, he kept passing back the freshly revised plans to me and our other friend Chris Kozura.

Ethan dedicated many hours creating this level, and I had to test every single version. And once it was all complete, there was a problem. You can't have deathmatch starting points... You wont always end up in YOUR fort. This was a problem that was quickly remedied when matt leighton was called on the scene for backup. The solution: coop mode! (duh)

After playing awhile, we realized that all of the forts security systems weren't foolproof or kozura-proof for that matter. There were a few glitches:

1) Some idiots (chris, ethan, chris) would chase each other into one another's fort, and while one made it in, the other was trapped in the fort's airlock.

2) For fear of the player in the airlock, the one in the fort wouldn't open the door. He could get killed and the person(s) in the airlock would steal all the weapons and radiation suits, not to mention flip the switch that brings him closer to victory. Meanwhile, the one not trapped (nate, justin) is running about, scoring points effortlessly, laughing at the other two while watching them with the automap or with the F12 key.

4) Some people, (chris) enjoy warping into other people's forts. When you do this, it closes the door YOU need to go through to warp back to YOUR fort. So when you cross that football field of acid and realize, "Hey I flipped my switch. Why is my door closed?"

Ethan solved this problem by placing switches inside the airlocks that allowed you to open up the door to let you back out. You could also close the door from the inside, too. With these things corrected as best they could be, we played 3forts.wad everyday for about two weeks. Then we said: "Let's play some deathmatch now." This level is the longest running wad to be played on the Fort Fairfield's official FragNet game server. 3forts is a classic to us, and we highly recommend it.