id Software Doom
id Software’s latest FPS Rage left a niggling feeling of déjà vu at the back of my brain for about a week after I started playing it, until I realised I was getting some subliminal Doom flashbacks. id Software Doom House of Doom In 1992, game developer id Software needed something special to follow up the hit that was …
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Unopened Copy
I still have a sealed freeware floppy of Doom amongst my "precious items" collection.
Super game, and somehow back then it held my imagination much more than any current game does. In fact I still hope that each new game I buy might transport me back to that magical time of total immersion.
Doom, the graphic novel
I can't believe that nobody's posted a link to the Doom comic yet, so:
http://www.doomworld.com/10years/doomcomic/
Utterly hilarious, deeply strange, probably involved drugs.
"You are huge! Therefore you have huge guts!"
Superb!
My mates and I used to play it on nightshift and the network traffic between the machines was so big and our network so naff that the network backups and batch jobs would take an extra 90 mins longer when we had a monster session. It was only after 3 months and someone putting a sniffer on the network they traced the problem to us and the IT support guys gave us quiet ticking off and told us to rig up a private network if we wanted to do that sort of thing overnight!
Better than the two developers who got caught during the day playing it and were given 15 minutes to get out of the office and find new jobs!
Happy days!
The PC coming into its own
I guess we must have bought our first PC somewhere around 1992 and prior to seeing Doom I don't recall anything being obviously much better than what we'd had on the ZX Spectrum that preceded it, other than loading quickly and being more capable with colours. And although it's not particularly subtle, I still think it plays better than most other games.
Quite a lot of my professional life has ended up focussed on computer graphics and, more recently, computer vision. The sudden leap forwards of Doom is the reason.
If the original sprites don't do it for you, get yourself the Doomsday Engine and the high-res texture packs and rediscover just what a well-made game it is.
A useful sales tool
When Samsung first introduced their notebooks to the UK I was the product manger, and I used to use Doom to show off the screen quality. As well as spending many a happy hour shooting stuff. I think Halflife was the next game that I felt to be as good as Doom. Wolfenstein was pants though.
I remember the guys in Doom 2 with the homing missles. I remember just running about trying to get them to hit other daemons so that they would start fighting each other. Nothing more fun than just watching all the bad guys kill each other off for you.
I remember messing about with the editing tools and making a "machine shotgun" that would rattle off shotgun shells like the chaingun and make complete mincemeat out of everything. Good times - I think I may have to load up a Linux port and find my wad files...
A useful sales tool
When Samsung first introduced their notebooks to the UK I was the product manger, and I used to use Doom to show off the screen quality. As well as spending many a happy hour shooting stuff. I think Halflife was the next game that I felt to be as good as Doom. Wolfenstein was pants though.
OS/2
Let you play Doom in a window - I remember thinking this was very cool.
Sun even gave the guys a SPARCstation (SS20 I think) so that they would port it to Solaris/X11. That kept the office busy for lunchtimes...
@AdamWill
Technically it was prototyped on NeXT machines. They got it all written once then rewrote the hard stuff in x86 assembler.
lunchtimes at work, network deathmatch, ...
who can get the chainsaw first.
it's a team building thing
Brilliant!
We used to play it at the office in the evenings. After four or five hours play, I'd be utterly jumpy. Leaving the empty building, I'd press the lift button and flinch because I expected the wall to open up and disgorge a pack of monsters.
I always remember the room with a lethal spider-thing and a lethal robot-thing on a platform in the middle. The only way to deal with them seemed to be to run round the outside until they started shooting at each other.
Yup, I remember that one
'twas in Doom 2. It was a Spider Mastermind and a CyberDemon (I think, it's been a while). I liked the level where you had a Baron of Hell giving a lecture to a room full of soldiers. Walk in, Baron spots you, carnage ensues.
Good times.
The start of an addiction
I played Wolf... 3D. I remember how it was kind of neat how you could slide move but other than that I didnt really enjoy it.
Then came Doom. I was told by a friend to play it and eventually did when I had to recover from a knee surgery and ended up back at parents’ home. I remember members of my family, mother, brother, etc watching me playing the game. They were just as fixated as I was , although we were all suffering from motion sickness. It’s the first game I ever played that totally immersive.
Some time later came the full version that was multiplayer. And that changed the gaming world. You could only play up to 4 players and the network setup was a pain, mainly because networking then was a complete ball ache. But the game was fantastic.
We had a few interludes, like Heretic, Triads, Duke , etc all good fun but gimmicks.
Then came Quake, the daddy of all proper 3D games. That is the game completely defined how 3D games would work. I used to run lan parties every few months and we would get 5-8 people playing.
Carmack is as far as I’m concerned is the man, hope people remember where this all came from!!
I still play this every so often. PS1 discs on the PS3 still look pretty good and only cost about a fiver on the tat bazaar.
Doom started my career
My first networking experience was getting IPX drivers to work so that we could play Doom. And yes, 1.0 had a knack of swamping the network, but on the other hand it let you get 3 computers together and have 'side' views.
After a marathon session of E1M1 on turbo255 with 4 players I had to drive home. I would have sworn to a court that I was only doing 30 had I not looked at the speedo. Oops.
Im up for the mowing too.
Invincibility, unlimited ammo on the BFG, and all the monsters you can spawn in a room.
That takes the urge to kill your boss next morning off.
I was once rung up by the networks team ...
...who said that while they didn't mind us playing Doom - heck, they put some hours in themselves - but would we lay off the chaingun during office hours?
@Phil A - "Amazing graphics for it's time..."...
Only if you insisted on trying to play games on the PC.
Amiga/ST owners had been enjoying superior graphics for some time by the time DOOM "amazed" the PC crowd.
The irony of the Amiga being poo-pooed as "just a games machine" never got old for me. Yeah, a games machine with a 32-bit multi-threaded, multi-tasking GUI OS at a time when the same thing on PC's was just a glimmer on the distant horizon.
And now the stature of a PC is often measured in terms of how well it plays games.
Sheesh. :)
Big up the Amiga
At the time I had an Amiga 500 at home, at work we were buying IBM PS2/386. I could successfully, if a bit slowly I admit, run Windows 3.11 under an emulator on my Amiga.
I never found a way of trying it the other way around.
not mentioned
Doom was also one of the best competitively balanced games ever, both for single player and deathmatch; there's still active scenes in both. There've been few games since Doom and Quake that lend themselves to speedrunning or competitive one-on-one deathmatch quite as well; FPSes since Quake 3 have gone in a more 'realistic', team-based direction I find pretty dull.
At some point in 2003 I'm fairly sure I'd played more Doom than anyone else alive; I worked out I'd averaged two hours per day, every day, since the original release late in 1993. I slacked off a bit after that and I think some of the Norwegians overtook me, though. =)
But the combination of level design, monster behaviour, the responsiveness of your character to the controls, and the effect of the known physics bugs and level shortcuts in both Doom and Quake is pretty extraordinary. It's entirely worth watching Doom Done Quicker - which you can find on Youtube starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6PK9bd_uUs - and Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance (the third QDQ run) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB76kyYxDoQ - just to see how extreme the best play on those games got after a while. (Neither run is completely state of the art in either game any more, but they're still pretty impressive to watch. The Done Quick runs are 'fake' complete game runs - each level is run individually (in a single take) and the individual level runs stitched together - the idea being to showcase the absolute best running possible at a given time.)
I did some of the levels in DDQr, FWIW. :) Still one of the most fun projects I've been involved in.
The speed of it
DOOM in multiplayer mode was an incredible rush, because there were no awkward physics models limiting your speed. Throw the mouse for that instant jump or a 90 degree turn. It made the game just as fast as you were.
Keep running was the law of the game, run or die. The walls and corners were the enemy, as they slow you down for just that moment your opponent was waiting for. And the rush of the berserk kit, instant death at close range ... and at close range that opponent will never get his rocket thrower ready.
Also it was the game you had to play with the guys across the corridor, because the networking just was not that far along. So you could hear the screams of anguish for an extra bonus.
Infant2
Ah I remember the Doom obsession well. Spending literally days downloading mods from the infant2 server circa '93. I think my personal stash of mods ended up at around 1500...though I think I only actually tried a quarter of them.
Typo: "such levels as the toxic refinery"
toxic --> toxin (as seen from the screenshot, even).
Doom2 has cost me about a year of my life, not working towards my degree.
a totally amazing game, played both Wolf3D then moved on to Doom, the Aliens mod was excellent, the line 'Game over man' and green hue, is what I remember most, arr the dam good old days, a friend and I, played death matches over a serial link (ya remember that!?) must see if I there is an Android version for my phone, just for a bit of nostalgia. Great work Lucy! Happy Dayz!
Doom in the real world
During slack times on a NT3.51server 'production line' for a famous UK clothing retailer's server rollout in a "Project Office" (aka caged off area in the warehous above the local store!), my building buddy wrote maps and swathes of scenery for Doom that closely resembled navigating around the Luton Arndale Centre (named as it was back then), all nicely darkened as if trapped in there with monsters* after hours. All the shops had the appropriate logos and all. It was brilliant. Not sure if he finished it, I left.
(* not Luton girls, I mean Doom monsters)
Q2 was amazing
Loved Doom, but never played it online. It was only when Quake II came along that I discovered the joys of killing an LPB (low ping b*stard) opponent with a railgun shot, despite my ping being 10x higher than his! Particularly liked the Lithium mod, with the hook to propel you quickly around the map. But my all time favourite for frantic gameplay was CTC (catch the chicken). Awesome, but particularly so when played using a custom Homer Simpson avatar, complete with sound effects like 'Woohoo!' "D'oh!" etc. Happy days.
Thanks for being back some great memories Reg. Now I can't get IDKFA or IDCLIP out of my head...Might have a couple of odd variable names in todays code :)
Ahh, but
IDCLIP was the updated no clip code in Doom II: Hell on Earth.
I think it was IDPISPOPD in Doom.
LAN parties
Ahhh that brings back memories
I always amazed me that the gang could turn up, setup 8-10 machines & be playing in under 15min
If only the desktop support people at work could be as quick :)
Explosion icon for Boom headshot
Fond memories indeed!
The thing that immediately impressed me about Doom was the feel of the environments. I had been playing Ultima Underworld before which was even more claustrophobic, but that first level of Doom, overlooking the little pool with the window into the courtyard just felt so much more 'solid' to me. The fact that the level was actually just a 2D plan was cunningly disguised.
I also totally loved the music, even though Bobby Prince had ripped off the key riffs/melodies for other metal bands. Ok it was only 4 channel MIDI music, but as someone who grew up with 8-bit microcomputer games, it was something I really appreciated. I even bought a Yamaha DB-50XG daughtercard to make the most of it!
And then there was the co-op and deathmatch modes. At the software house I worked in back then, we played games at lunchtime and after work. We'd start off with all the good intentions of playing co-op mode, but when it came to waiting by the secret door to the hoard of goodies, we'd all stand there, as cardboard cut-outs more or less, turning robotically to see who would go and press that far off button to open it. More often than not, we'd just end up shooting each other there and then and it would turn into a fun deathmatch with monsters as a side distraction.
I'll always remember what a fantastically new and exciting experience it was at the time. And the Quake 1 alpha just took that further with proper 3D maps, albeit without the plasma gun and BFG. Still there was nothing more amusing than perforating someone with nails and listening to all those Wilhelm screams.
Thank you id Software for kick-starting the FPS genre that we still enjoy today. I still believe the core skills for FPS games can best be learned with Quake 1, 3 or 4. That's what I get my kids to hone their skills on! :)
nostalgia aside
I saw a glimpse of the screenshot on the side bar as I was scrolling the front page and it looked very disturbing indeed. Freud me down.
Ah the toxin refinery...
If you peg it up the steps, turn left then before the barrier rises go down that corridor to get the +100% health supercharge!
Doom was the de facto 3D classic FPS & I still enjoy a frag now and again
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