Doom Is Twenty Years Old 225
alancronin writes with a quick bite from the Dallas News about everyone's favorite FPS: "Few video games have had the impact that Doom has on the medium as a whole. While it wasn't the first first-person shooter out there, it was certainly one of the earliest hits of the genre, due in no small part to its revolutionary multiplayer. Today, that game is 20 years old. Made in Mesquite by a bunch of young developers including legends John Carmack and John Romero, Doom went on to 'transform pop culture,' as noted by the sub-title of the book Masters of Doom."
Yesterday, but who's counting. Fire up your favorite source port and slay some hellspawn to celebrate (or processes). I'm partial to Doomsday (helps that it's in Debian).
We called them (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hi, we're calling because someone gave us a bootleg copy of Doom...
"And...?"
"We need the address, so we can send a check... how much do we owe you?"
The person on the phone, after recovering from their shock, gave us the address, and told us to make sure to include OUR mailing address with the check.
A few weeks later, we received a boxed copy of Doom, and a bunch of other cool swag.
This game LITERALLY changed my life. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd starting tinkering with computers about the time the MicroAce came out. I moved through the Vic, C64 and C128... and then to the Amiga. While I wouldn't consider myself a fan-boy, I supported the brand almost to a fault.
It wasn't until one day, in a Sears, I saw an Asus 486/DX2-66 for sale, and they were running DOOM on it. I bought a PC for no other reason than to play Doom.
I'm now an IT manager over our hardware repair and oncall function, and I owe it to the day I went "PC Compatible"... over a freakin' video game.
Re:Bought from a shareware machine! (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. I don't remember vending machines like that at all.
I do, however, remember loading programs off cassette tape. :-P
Re:1st 1st-person shooter (Score:5, Interesting)
Other games like Descent, were more 3D, but as someone who designed levels in his spare time for the game, there's some weird stuff you can do in that game because the 3D engine was flawed, most likely to make it run fast enough. You could build a room with a floating cube in the middle. Put a door on one side of that cube. When you go through the door, you could enter a room bigger than the encompassing cube.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We called them (Score:5, Interesting)
DOOM is the most durable game franchise (Score:4, Interesting)
Other than Tetris, I can't think of a single game that's been ported to more platforms, and played more than DOOM has -- there are people right now, somewhere in the world still playing doom -- and I'm one of them.
What I enjoy about doom is that it's simply everywhere. I remember being at an E3, and among other new releases for the Super Nintendo (yes the 16 bit), was a DOOM cartridge. The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone), one of my favorites was finding the engine for SGI machines and SUN platforms very early on -- so, yeah... you could play it on a cheap 486, or on your high-end $20,000 workstation, it was (and still is) literally everywhere.
My prediction is that regardless of what new platforms materialize in the future, some enterprising hacker will port DOOM to it, making the franchise one of the most durable in the history of videogames.
Re:"legends John Carmack and John Romero"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Holy crap there is a lot of bile in your post.
Doom was designed to be modded - you had the IWAD that stored the main game data, and you could load a PWAD with command line parameters. Those features were either put in by Carmack or blessed by him.
I'm intimately familiar with what the Doom community became after 1998 when Carmack released the source code (how many other companies do that?)
He was tremendously supportive of the community and personally replied to some emails I sent him over the years asking him about GPL licensing of old id stuff.
He's even got an account here on Slashdot.
The portrait you paint of him does not match anything I've seen or read about him, ever.
Re:1st 1st-person shooter (Score:2, Interesting)
The Doom Engine was built out of a BSP tree, each leaf node had the floor and ceiling height. Then each frame was rendered by scanning across the screen horizontally and rendering each vertical strip in turn. This was done by building up a set of texture lines going from a point at the top of the screen to a point at the bottom, so it would alternate between ceiling, wall and floor spans. Thus players could go up steps, and steps could be made to rise and fall automatically or be triggered.
The Quake engine was originally written as software renderer. Then SGI wanted to demonstrate that a software OpenGL renderer could be as a fast as a custom rendering engine. 3Dfx brought out 3D piggyback rendering boards with their Glide API. Then Microsoft realized that this was edging into hardware programming API and brought DirectX.
The other technique was to use portals, where each room had special polygons/planes which defined where "portals" are, that led to other rooms. Whenever a portal was detected, that other room would be rendered first.