It’s the kind of bathroom you’d find in Hell, if the devil was a pick-up artist: flocked wallpaper, red trim, chandeliers above the vanity, a furry rug, and pebbles around the bathtub.
The infamous bathroom remodel was a project that took a user on Something Awful—a long-running (and often toxic) forum—two years to complete, ending in February. Now, Twitter user Dieting Hippo has fittingly immortalized the demonic space in BATHDOOM—a new map for 1994’s Doom II that allows players to wander the legendarily bad bathroom as the bloodthirsty Doomguy.
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How did this spectacularly bad bathroom come into being, both in reality and in Doom? It all started with some spectacularly bad assumptions. In 2017, Something Awful user “bEatmstrJ” posted pictures of his bathroom on the site’s DIY forum and expressed his desire to remodel his plain, but gorgeous space. The new bathroom would be “designed with a woman in mind,” beEatmstrJ wrote, because “woman [sic] play an unfair role in the home-buying process.”
Let us bask for a moment in how this thinking worked out for bEatmstrJ:
In a Twitter direct message, Dieting Hippo described the results as looking like “a bathroom that would appeal to cans of Axe body spray.” For the record, this is what bEatmstrJ’s bathroom looked like before he did his thing:
During the two year project, bEatmstrJ chronicled every painful step of the process on Something Awful. bEatmstrJ isn’t a professional, and he fucked up several times, including damaging the floor joists and installing the wallpaper upside down. He also surrounded the tub with rocks, which can be a breeding ground for mold and seem pretty uncomfortable on bare feet.
The finished bathroom is a nightmarish clash of red and black—the kind of bathroom you’d see in a 90’s era first person shooter. Which is why Something Awful user and Twitter user Dieting Hippo recreated it in Doom II.
“A bunch of goons had been posting hilarious photoshops of the pictures, and my fever-addled brain thought ‘I can totally crack out a quick Doom map of this!’ Dieting Hippo told me via a Twitter direct message. “The first video I posted on Twitter was after the main level had been roughed out, then I made a mad dash to finish it up after Twitter liked my virtual bathroom thousands of times.”
BATHDOOM is the product of bEatmstrJ’s hubris and Dieting Hippo’s genius. Everything is there—the weird color scheme, the psychedelic paintings, and the rocks that hurt your feet (and cause the player to take damage).
It’s not the first time that bEatmstrJ’s cursed bathroom has been injected into a video game. After he posted pictures of the finished bathroom and was roundly mocked, one poster recreated the bathroom in The Sims 4 and declared it too garish for use even by digital humans.
Thanks to Dieting Hippo and the power of Doom II, bEatmstrJ’s cursed DIY bathroom project will live on in digital memory.
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