DOOM
DOOM is a first-person shooter computer game, developed by id Software and first released for the PC on December 10, 1993, later ported to various platforms and followed by two sequels and numerous expansions.
DOOM was remarkable, by 1993's standards, for its realistic 3D graphics. An important evolutionary step from Wolfenstein 3D (id Software's previous game and the first major first-person shooter), DOOM became a genre-defining title. DOOM also gave a tremendous boost to the until-then-nascent networked gaming scene. In the light of its popularity, a surge of similar games followed during the mid-1990s.
Due to its contributions to the first-person shooter genre, DOOM is widely regarded as one of the most influential games of all time. It has also been one of the most controversial due to its violence, gore, and spattering of Satanic imagery.
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2 Technology 3 Impact and controversy 4 Development and release history 5 Sequels and related products 6 Community 7 References and further reading |
Episode I: Knee-Deep in the Dead
The player takes the role of a nameless space marine who has been deported to Mars for assaulting a senior officer. He is forced to work for the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), whose biggest supplier, the military, is performing secret experiments with teleportation between Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. Something goes wrong, and all of a sudden creatures from Hell start coming out of the teleportation gates. The moon bases are swiftly overrun, all personnel killed or zombified. A UAC team from Mars sets out to investigate. Soon radio contact dies down and only one human is left alive - the player, whose task is to make it out alive.
Being a first-person shooter, DOOM is experienced through the eyes of the main character, and the central interactive feature is shooting down enemies. There is also a strong exploration element; the levels are for the most part non-linearly structured and there are plenty of secret areas and hidden power-ups to search for. Progression through a level generally revolves around finding keys or remote door-opening switches that enable access to new areas of the level, until an exit room (invitingly labelled with a red EXIT sign) is found.
The weaponry in the game is a mix of futuristic and modern equipment that some might argue is an anachronism. There are eight weapons, including a chainsaw, a shotgun, and the BFG9000, which fires enormous green energy spheres that usually destroy not only what they hit but also everything in the nearby area. The enemies that the player must overcome include zombies of military personnel and various demons such as brown, spike-covered imps, the Minotaur-like Barons of Hell, and grotesque cyborgs. The enemies are not particularly intelligent but rely on brute force and greater numbers – sometimes twenty to one or more. Enemies not only attack the player, but also other enemies that might have damaged them by accident; skilled players purposefully trigger this "monster infighting". The player, however, moves much faster than many of the monsters, especially the most dangerous of them.
Episode III: Inferno
DOOM consists of three episodes with nine levels each. Only the first eight levels, of which the last is a boss-battle finale, need to be completed to finish an episode; the ninth one is a secret level that can be accessed from within the first seven. The first episode, Knee-Deep in the Dead, was released as shareware, while the second and third (Shores of Hell and Inferno) are only available in the registered (commercial) version.
Knee-Deep in the Dead takes place in the high-tech UAC bases on Phobos. Shores of Hell continues on Deimos, in bases which, although high-tech, are crumbling and interwoven with beastly architecture. The transformation culminates in Inferno, set in Hell, whose environments are largely built of marble, rock, wood and flesh. The early, high-tech levels have names indicating that they are set in specific installations (Hangar, Nuclear Plant...), although the resemblances are vague - all of the environments are fairly abstract and the game could be said to have a surreal style.
Aside from the single-player game mode, DOOM also features two multiplayer modes which can be played over a network: these are co-operative, in which two to four players team up against the legions of Hell; and deathmatch, in which two to four players fight each other. DOOM was not the first first-person shooter with a deathmatch mode: MIDI Maze on the Atari ST had one in 1987, using the MIDI port built into the ST. DOOM was however the first game to allow deathmatching over a network, the game that introduced deathmatching to a wide audience, and additionally the first game to use the term "deathmatch". The deathmatch mode became highly popular, and was later popularized further by Quake.
DOOM's primary distinguishing feature was its realism, enabled by features such as its 3D graphics and stereo sound; there were many who experienced DOOM to have a level of immersion that had not previously existed in a computer game. The game's graphics were in 1993 unparalleled by other real-time-rendered games running on consumer-level hardware. DOOM's main advances over Wolfenstein 3D in graphics technology were:
In contrast to the static levels of Wolfenstein 3D, those in DOOM were highly interactive: platforms could lower and rise, ceilings could come down crushing the player, floors could raise sequentially to form staircases, etc. The lifelike feeling of the environment was enhanced further by the stereo sound system, which made it possible to tell the direction and distance of a sound's origin. The player was kept on guard by the grunts and gnarls of monsters, and would receive occasional clues to finding secret areas in the form of sounds of hidden doors opening remotely.
The DOOM engine, programmed primarily by John Carmack, had to make use of several tricks for these features to run smoothly on 1993's home computers. Most significantly, DOOM levels are not truly three-dimensional; they are internally represented on a plane, with height differences added separately. This leads to several limitations: it is, for example, not possible for a DOOM level to have one room over another. This two-dimensional representation does, however, have the benefit that rendering can be done very quickly, using a binary space partition method. For details, read the in-depth article about how DOOM's engine works.
By 1993, id Software was already renowned for Wolfenstein 3D, which by common definition is considered the first PC first-person shooter. DOOM exceeded its predecessor in terms of popularity as well as critical reception and influence on the industry, and is today widely regarded as one of the most influential games of all time, laying a foundation for the popularity and further development of 3D action games during the rest of the 1990s.
Dozens of new first-person shooter titles appeared following DOOM's release, and they were often referred to as "DOOM clones" rather than "first person shooters". Some of these were certainly "clones" — hastily assembled and quickly forgotten about — others explored new grounds of the genre and were highly acclaimed. DOOM's principal rivals were Apogee's Rise of the Triad and the more tongue-in-cheek Duke Nukem 3D, the latter based on Ken Silverman's Build engine. Allegorically, Duke Nukem 3D contained a satirical reference to DOOM for which id Software reportedly filed a lawsuit (although the lawsuit was unsuccessful).
In 1994, DOOM was awarded Game of the Year by both PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World. It also received the Award for Technical Excellence from PC Magazine, and the Best Action Adventure Game award by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. In the magazine's ten-year anniversary issue (April 2004), PC Gamer proclaimed DOOM the most influential game of all time.
The game sold a total of 1.5 million copies. While a large number, this was not extraordinary — for comparison, the contemporary graphical adventure game Myst sold a record-breaking 9 million. A better measure of DOOM's popularity is the distribution of the shareware version, which is estimated to have been downloaded and played by 15-20 million people. Notoriously, there are some reports that DOOM at a point was a serious threat to productivity and that networks were clogged by deathmatches and shareware downloads. The problems led some, including Intel and Carnegie Mellon University, to form policies specifically disallowing DOOM-playing during work hours.
DOOM was and remains notorious for its high levels of violence, gore, and Satanic imagery, which have generated much controversy from a broad range of groups. It was dubbed a "mass murder simulator" by critic and Killology Research Group founder Lt. Col. David Grossman and has been criticized numerous times by Christian organizations for its diabolic undertones. It again sparked controversy throughout a period of school shootingss in the United States when it was found that several of the students involved in shootings, including Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were avid players of the game. A rumor also spread that Harris had used DOOM to practice for the shootings (see: Harris levels).
There is an anecdote from DOOM's development history concerning E1M4 (level four of the first episode). The 1.0 version of the level contained a structure that formed a swastika (visible in the upper-left center of the 1.0 map below), inserted as homage to Wolfenstein 3D (which was set in a Nazi base and had several swastika-shaped levels). The symbol upset some people, and was changed to a shape that only loosely resembles a swastika for version 1.4.
E1M4 - from early draft to final version
DOOM was inspired by many sources, including the Alien and Evil Dead series of movies. Many parallels exist between DOOM and those series; including similarities between The Company of the Alien universe and the UAC of DOOM's, and the idea of entering an infested base severely outnumbered. DOOM's primary influence from Evil Dead shows up in the form of zombies, and the use by the protagonist of each of both a shotgun and chainsaw. The game was also influenced to some degree by the literary works of author H. P. Lovecraft. This, however, was more subtle although the use of Lovecraftian symbols on the teleporter gate textures are a direct reference. The use of demons as the primary enemy in DOOM could also have very well been a result of his works.
The final section, Inferno is clearly influenced by Book 1 of the Divine Comedy by Dante.
As witnessed by creative director Tom Hall's "DOOM bible", written in late 1992, DOOM was originally intended to be very similar to Wolfenstein 3D. Over the course of its development, the game underwent significant changes.
Following the first official release, several upgrades that addressed bugs and added new features were released. id Software has later on, due to public interest, also released some of the game's early alpha versions and an early press release version. The following is a list of versions that have been released to the public at some point in time (ordered by degree of development):
The game was released for many systems and consoles, including the following: MS-DOS, MS Windows, QNX, Irix, NEXTSTEP, Linux, Apple Macintosh, Super NES, Sega 32X, Sony PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Inform and 3DO. An arcade version using a "virtual reality headset" (an LCD screen an inch from the player's face) also existed. Some of these ports differ considerably from the original version. For example, the graphics in the Super NES version had to be degraded due to performance concerns, and the Nintendo 64 version, titled DOOM 64, is in most respects a separate game, with redesigned graphics and an entirely different set of levels.
DOOM II: Hell on Earth
A sequel to DOOM, titled DOOM II: Hell on Earth, was released on October 10 1994. DOOM II consisted of thirty regular levels, plus two "secret" levels, which nearly duplicated episode 1 level 1 and episode 1 level 9 of Wolfenstein 3D; the engine and gameplay were the same as DOOM, with an additional weapon (the super shotgun) and new monsters added. The two secret levels were missing from the version marketed in Germany because they depicted Nazi symbols, illegal under German law (see the article on Wolfenstein 3D for more information).
Due to its heavy graphic violence, DOOM II, like the original DOOM, received an ESRB rating of "M", with the exception of the Game Boy Advance port, which was rated "T". The game also marked id's departure from the shareware marketing strategy, releasing this game through Activision. DOOM II has sold more than two million copies, making it the best selling of any id Software game.
In 1995, a new version of DOOM was published; titled The Ultimate DOOM, this release included the three original episodes as well as a new, fourth one, named "Thy Flesh Consumed". Registered users of the original DOOM release were allowed to upgrade freely to this, in effect making it a free update of the original game. Another year later, in 1996, two new 32-level episodes for DOOM II were released: "The Plutonia Experiment" and "TNT: Evilution", collectively known as Final DOOM, both developed for id Software by TeamTNT. None of these were available as shareware; like DOOM II, they were only sold as commercial versions.
The game engine was licensed to several other companies as well, who released their own games based on it, including Heretic, Hexen, Strife and HacX. There is also a DOOM-based game released by a breakfast cereal maker as a product tie-in called Chex Quest, in which the player becomes a Chex Cereal soldier, annihilating Flemoids and snot-based enemies and rescuing fellow soldiers in a four area adventure. id Software created a completely new 3D engine, then released the successor to DOOM: Quake, in 1996. Quake's success mirrored that of DOOM for the remainder of the 1990s, though the success of competitor Unreal Tournament seduced a large segment of Quake's audience.
A set of four novels about DOOM were written with permission of id by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. The books, listed in order, are titled Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky, and Endgame. All were published between June 1995 and January 1996 by Pocket Books. Additionally, a comic book was issued in May 1996, produced by Tom Grindberg of Marvel Comics as giveaway for a video game convention. There has also been plenty of speculation about a movie based on DOOM. Such a movie has, however, never reached the production stage.
Work has begun on DOOM 3, which is expected to be released sometime in 2004. DOOM 3 uses an entirely new game engine and is set to be a retelling of the original DOOM.
The DOOM community is a still-active community of people who compete in, make modifications for, or just generally track events and releases related to DOOM. Since the first level editors for the game appeared in 1994, several thousands of custom levels and miscellaneous modifications have been created. The idgames FTP archive contains over 12000 files, and most likely only represents a fraction of all that has been made.
The source code of DOOM was published by id Software in 1997 under a proprietary license. The game was then ported to various other operating systems; in late 1999, the source code was re-released under the terms of the GPL. Several ports have been developed, the most notable being TeamTNT's Boom, Lee Killough's Marine's Best Friend (MBF), and later on, PrBoom, Eternity, jDoom, ZDoom, Doom Legacy, ZDoomGL, ZDaemon, and Skulltag. Most ports contain considerable changes to the game, including bug fixes, the removal of engine limitations, and various new features. Most importantly, source ports allow DOOM, originally created to run on MS-DOS, to run on operating systems that are not DOS based, such as Windows XP, Windows 2000, GNU/Linux and Windows NT.
Ports have also been created to allow DOOM to run on a different type of machine. One of those is a port to the Game Park 32, a Korean hand-held similar to the Game Boy Advance. A British company called WildPalm has also produced a port to the Nokia 7650 and 9210 cell phones. There is a port to the Sega Dreamcast as well. Websites for these ports can be found at the following locations:
Game overview
Technology
Main article: Technology of DOOM
The height differences, diagonal walls and texture mapping allowed levels to feature more detailed and convincing environments than previous game engines had made possible. The variable lighting, while contributing to the game's visual authenticity by allowing effects such as highlights and shadows, perhaps most importantly added to the game's atmosphere and even gameplay; the use of darkness as a means of frightening or confusing the player was an unseen element in games.Impact and controversy
Development and release history
Sequels and related products
Community
Main article: DOOM communityReferences and further reading
Literature
External links