'Doom' at 30: What It Means, By the People Who Made It (theguardian.com) 29
UPDATE: John Romero released a new 9-map episode of Doom.
But it was 30 years ago today that Doom "invented the modern PC games industry, as a place dominated by technologically advanced action shooters," remembers the Guardian: In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block... The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom... [W]hen Taylor met id's charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project... "There were no critters in it yet," recalls Taylor of that first demo. "There was no gaming stuff at all. It was really just a 3D engine. But you could move around it really fluidly and you got such a sense of immersion it was shocking. The renderer was kick ass and the textures were so gritty and cool. I thought I was looking at an in-game cinematic. And Romero is just the consummate demo man: he really feeds off of your energy. So as my jaw hit the floor, he got more and more animated. Doom was amazing, but John was at least half of that demo's impact on me." [...]
In late 1992, it had become clear that the 3D engine John Carmack was planning for Doom would speed up real-time rendering while also allowing the use of texture maps to add detail to environments. As a result, Romero's ambition was to set Doom in architecturally complex worlds with multiple storeys, curved walls, moving platforms. A hellish Escher-esque mall of death... "Doom was the first to combine huge rooms, stairways, dark areas and bright areas," says Romero, "and lava and all that stuff, creating a really elaborate abstract world. That was never possible before...."
[T]he way Doom combined fast-paced 3D action with elaborate, highly staged level design would prove hugely influential in the years to come. It's there in every first-person action game we play today... But Doom wasn't just a single-player game. Carmack consumed an entire library of books on computer networking before working on the code that would allow players to connect their PCs via modem to a local area network (LAN) and play in the game together... Doom brought fast-paced, real-time action, both competitive and cooperative, into the gaming mainstream. Seeing your friends battling imps and zombie space marines beside you in a virtual world was an exhilarating experience...
When Doom was launched on 10 December 1993, it became immediately clear that the game was all-consuming — id Software had chosen to make the abbreviated shareware version available via the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that crashed almost immediately, bringing the institution's network to its knees... "We changed the rules of design," says Romero. "Getting rid of lives, which was an arcade holdover that every game had; getting rid of score because it was not the goal of the game. We wanted to make it so that, if the player died, they'd just start that level over — we were constantly pushing them forward. The game's attitude was, I want you to keep playing. We wanted to get people to the point where they always needed more."
It was a unique moment in time. In the article designer Sandy Petersen remembers that "I would sometimes get old dungeons I'd done for D&D and use them as the basis for making a map in Doom." Cheat codes had been included for debugging purposes — but were left in the game rs to discover. The article even includes a link to a half-hour video of a 1993 visit to Id software filmed by BBS owner Dan Linton.
And today on X, John Romero shared a link to the Guardian's article, along with some appreciative words for anyone who's ever played the game. "DOOM is still remembered because of the community that plays and mods it 30 years on. I'm grateful to be a part of that community and fortunate to have been there at its beginning."
The Guardian's article notes that now Romero "is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series."
But it was 30 years ago today that Doom "invented the modern PC games industry, as a place dominated by technologically advanced action shooters," remembers the Guardian: In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block... The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom... [W]hen Taylor met id's charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project... "There were no critters in it yet," recalls Taylor of that first demo. "There was no gaming stuff at all. It was really just a 3D engine. But you could move around it really fluidly and you got such a sense of immersion it was shocking. The renderer was kick ass and the textures were so gritty and cool. I thought I was looking at an in-game cinematic. And Romero is just the consummate demo man: he really feeds off of your energy. So as my jaw hit the floor, he got more and more animated. Doom was amazing, but John was at least half of that demo's impact on me." [...]
In late 1992, it had become clear that the 3D engine John Carmack was planning for Doom would speed up real-time rendering while also allowing the use of texture maps to add detail to environments. As a result, Romero's ambition was to set Doom in architecturally complex worlds with multiple storeys, curved walls, moving platforms. A hellish Escher-esque mall of death... "Doom was the first to combine huge rooms, stairways, dark areas and bright areas," says Romero, "and lava and all that stuff, creating a really elaborate abstract world. That was never possible before...."
[T]he way Doom combined fast-paced 3D action with elaborate, highly staged level design would prove hugely influential in the years to come. It's there in every first-person action game we play today... But Doom wasn't just a single-player game. Carmack consumed an entire library of books on computer networking before working on the code that would allow players to connect their PCs via modem to a local area network (LAN) and play in the game together... Doom brought fast-paced, real-time action, both competitive and cooperative, into the gaming mainstream. Seeing your friends battling imps and zombie space marines beside you in a virtual world was an exhilarating experience...
When Doom was launched on 10 December 1993, it became immediately clear that the game was all-consuming — id Software had chosen to make the abbreviated shareware version available via the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that crashed almost immediately, bringing the institution's network to its knees... "We changed the rules of design," says Romero. "Getting rid of lives, which was an arcade holdover that every game had; getting rid of score because it was not the goal of the game. We wanted to make it so that, if the player died, they'd just start that level over — we were constantly pushing them forward. The game's attitude was, I want you to keep playing. We wanted to get people to the point where they always needed more."
It was a unique moment in time. In the article designer Sandy Petersen remembers that "I would sometimes get old dungeons I'd done for D&D and use them as the basis for making a map in Doom." Cheat codes had been included for debugging purposes — but were left in the game rs to discover. The article even includes a link to a half-hour video of a 1993 visit to Id software filmed by BBS owner Dan Linton.
And today on X, John Romero shared a link to the Guardian's article, along with some appreciative words for anyone who's ever played the game. "DOOM is still remembered because of the community that plays and mods it 30 years on. I'm grateful to be a part of that community and fortunate to have been there at its beginning."
The Guardian's article notes that now Romero "is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series."
One of the best games ever made (Score:2)
And still getting mods. Currently, Complex Doom Invasion is the top-notch mod to play (if you can find a working server to play on.)
And so many games were based off of that engine.
Re:One of the best games ever made (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the few games that literally changed the game.
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Not just with game play and graphics and such, but also by relicensing the game engine under a Free license after a while..
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One of the few games that literally changed the game.
Yep...here's some background on the game:
The Shareware Scene, Part 4: DOOM [filfre.net]. Also read the prior and next parts of this series to get more of an idea how.
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It means you're old. It's one more year than last year. No reason to fixate on decades as a particularly special number.
It's a thing that is done by humans who aren't in-bred incels mistaking trivial absurdity for profound thought. You wouldn't understand.
cw3d (Score:3)
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You could run it on a 286.
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There is also this version [github.com] modified to run on an 8088 with CGA.
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Yes, I played a lot of Wolfenstein 3d and I was a little disappointed with DOOM because it was very dark and hard to make out scenes on the current videocards and monitors of the day.
I think that Wolfenstein 3d was limited to a single vertical level, and DOOM had more wide open spaces and elevations, that was probably a lot "truer" 3d than Wolfenstein
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I think Wolfenstein proved that the basic tech could work, but it was severely limited. The levels had to be flat, every wall on a square grid at 90 degrees, which really limited the gameplay.
Doom added arbitrary angle walls and different level floors. Suddenly the levels looked something like actual architecture, and the options to make interesting gameplay multiplied.
The first game that brought "specs" into the game (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember playing Doom at my rich friend's, he had a 486 DX *four* and the game ran perfectly. Playing Doom, besides the fun in the game itself, was also cool because it gave you the sensation of being on the cutting edge, part of something new, an era where the continuous advancement of technology would bring about new possibilities.
Instead, at least from the PC gaming standpoint, what came about wasn't really that exciting. After Doom, for many years the PC gaming scene became a monoculture of Doom clones, and in my opinion, it was mostly on consoles where fun and creativity were to be found. Especially after the PlayStation.
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> Doom was the game that ushered in the era where the specs of your PC started to count.
This is so patently false it's laughable. There were plenty of other games that pushed PC before it, especially in the era of running into the ceiling of 640kb of coventional memory requiring all kinds of funky DOS configuration. Origin games was one of those companies constantly pushing bounderies, with Wing Commander famously toning down graphics if you didn't have enough ram and didn't load extended memory. Ult
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Not to mention the necessity for a better videocard like voodoo3d to play Quake on
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Yeah, my recollection of Doom was that by the time I had a PC which could run it well, other games that I was more interested in had been released in the interim. I played a lot of Descent and Duke Nukem 3D, Doom got skipped over.
The Dark Mod (Score:3)
I recently got a Steam Deck and remembered The Dark Mod from a decade ago, which still gets content made for it.
A Thief inspired stealth game using Doom's engine, cool stuff.
Early multi-monitor (Score:2)
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You could clone your own cells and create a neural network from them and actually play Doom with yourself.
Here is link to the project. So far it is not able to play yet, but it is interesting idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That was version 1.1 that had the multi-monitor LAN support. Sadly the commercial releases did not keep that.
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I worked in the IT department of a large county highway department
We had regular after-hours DOOM parties, and one of the guys even modeled the department's building for us to run around the shoot monsters in.
That all came to an uncomfortable end as we went into lockdown after some revenge shootings at other county buildings occurred
Later today: Romero and Carmack on Twitch (Score:1)
happy days, (Score:2)
Sigil II (Score:2)
No, Romero is not "currently working on Sigil II" as mentioned in the year-old tweet, he actually took today's anniversary to actually release it [romero.com]; a free download, plus a paid version for 6.66 USD if you also want the in-game music that was specifically made for it...
The bit about Networking... (Score:2)
Carmack consumed an entire library of books on computer networking before working on the code that would allow players to connect their PCs via modem to a local area network (LAN) and play in the game together...
Yeah.... Nah...
In 1993 I was working for Europes only Network Equipment manufacturer.
In the office we were using coaxal ethernet cables (10Mb/s) to hook up our x386/486 PCs and dumb terminals.
After Doom launched, and after it got the multiplayer network play update which came later, we'd use our lunch time for a blood and gore fest.
Carmack couldn't have read all those the networking books well because Doom initially used IPX multicast which meant that the little green RX LED on every single machine in the o
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So I caught the end of the Twitch stream with Carmack and Romero.
John Romero said during the live stream that it was he who added the network support as a last minute thing when he realised it was still on their to do list.
Based (Score:1)
Impact on theology (Score:2)