What is it?
I remember showing some people games that I liked on the Apple ][ and just having them sit there, completely not comprehending what could be enjoyable about moving these little guys around. People just did not get it. [But this game was different.] We noticed that the janitor coming in to empty the trash had just been sitting there staring at the game—for a long time. The game had this power: it could affect normal people.—John Carmack
Okay, so this is a very long link list. I first compiled it in 2001. It has not changed all that much since then. Doom pages may occasionally change host, but they rarely go down.
It was not really easy to convert these screenshots for the web. They were distributed in a non-standard LBM format with a little viewing utility and a batch file. So I actually had to take screenshots of these screenshots.
Created by Tom Hall in 1992, this document contains all the original ideas for Doom. As will be seen, Doom changed quite a bit from this original plan—almost nothing found within these 16 sections made it to the full game. Nevertheless, it's an interesting read—and explains more than a few mysteries about Doom's features.
I just had to do this: there are a few archives around the web with this stuff, so I thought I would share the adventure. Here's my list of the original alpha versions of Doom as seen in 1993, as well as the beta versions that are playable!
December 10, 1993. A day that would change my life. The day id Software released the very first shareware version of DOOM. The day FTP servers across the Internet were brought to their knees.
For the next three years DOOM was my life.
How many times did you want to have a closer look at the beautiful animation sequence for the archvile, only to find that the bastard was rather more interested in terminating you immediately with his deadly flaming spell than in running the catwalk? The good guys at id spent so much of their time painting faithful renditions of the DOOM monsters, each from eight different angles, that it's a real shame to only be able to see the front view!
So the DOOM Zoo was born. I captured most of the wild beasts and caged them in neat Netscape frames. You can approach them without fear of being attacked and, thanks to a little bit of Java magic, you can have a look at each monster from every angle. See the back of that firing cyberdemon at last!
Who can forget the first time they saw it? "That's an animation, right?" Your eyes would take a second or two to comprehend what they were seeing, quickly followed by a shiver down your spine that felt like you had transcended to your 3rd life. "It's interactive???" You run in circles around the opening room like a child in a toy store at Christmas, focused on everything at once yet unable to comprehend everything in one go. Up and down the stairs, looking out a window across a field, demons running around throwing fireballs at you. This is it. My life is complete!
Needless to say I was completely blown away by what I saw. My experience with electronic gaming up to that point had been limited to coin operated arcade machines [Atari Battlezone was always my favorite], and Apple had bundled Power Pete with it's Mac Performa 6200 software installer, which I had played with a mild sort of addiction. But that was a kid's game, and I was unprepared for the visual and aural assault of what became my daily 3 to 8 hour DOOM2 marathons for the two months or so it took me to finish the game. I'd come home from lecture class and start the game up while microwaving leftover pizza and eat sometime around 2am when I'd need a break. I missed a couple of group critiques because I was so obsessed with the game that ordinary things didn't matter -- what mattered was beating back the Hellspawn.
As you see, some write Doom and some write DOOM. It is just a matter of preference, the all cap version might be a little more popular. On the box of the Doom Trilogy you find the following text:
On par with Doom II's toughest levels, The Master Levels for DOOM II feature more acid drenched, hell spawned horror.
See what I mean?
Doom is certainly one of the most tinkered-with games. Editors take up a whole chapter in the Doom FAQ.
- The Blessed Engine: a cure for people bored with Doom
- The Sky May Be: The oddest Doom level in the world. Large.
- Kansam's Trial 4: A piece of history
- Kansam's Trial 9: The full and finished piece
- VSB Doom 0.2: Become a Coeurl, from Voyage of the Space Beagle
- Kansam's Duckshoot 0.1: A neat demo of the new BOOM conveyor belts
- Binary Doom: Attempts to perform a 4-bit logic in Doom
Our philosophy has been that though playing the old levels with nifty features is more fun than playing them without nifty features, the real key to DOOM's longevity has been the plethora of wonderful add-on levels that have been produced. The BOOM engine releases wad authors from many of the limits that DOOM imposed on them, and frees them to make excellent new environments for the players to enjoy.
- Supports all the editing features of Hexen. (ACS, hubs, new map format, etc.)
- Supports most of the BOOM editing features.
- The vast majority of Doom limits are gone (including the evil visplane overflow).
- Free look (look up/down).
- High resoulutions (with optimizations for modern processors).
- Translucency (regular and additive).
- A console.
- More music formats: MOD, XM, IT, S3M, MIDI, and MP3 as well as MUS.
- Better mouse support.
- Limited UDP (Internet or LAN) networking inherited from Linux Doom.
- Quake-style key bindings.
- Jumping.
- Crosshairs.
- Walk over/under monsters and other things.
- Runs under Windows 95/98, Windows NT, and Linux
- Polygonal engine with colored lighting, with software mode, OpenGL and Direct3D support, and any resolutions up to 1600x1200
- Translucency. Some things are translucent, also spectres' partial invisibility is replaced with 10% translucency, so they are really hard to see now
- Complete support for freelook (look up & down) in all games
- A powerful language to describe game logic, Vavoom C - now you can forget about DeHackEd and DDF!
- 100% client/server architecture with in-game joining
- Quake-style console, with key bindings
- Ability to play AudioCD tracks
- Indirect support for DeHackEd - utility to generate Vavoom progs out of DEH files
- Crosshair
- Jumping
I found no dedicated DOOM humor page, as they exist for other games. Here's some miscellaneous stuff from the web.
Ever want to know what DOOM would be like if it were made as 2D side-scrolling shooter? Well, now you can! DOOM 2D is an excellent fan-made game based on id's perennial favorite, featuring everything you love about DOOM, only in 2D. The games is very faithful to the original hit: the marines and monsters look just like they would look from the side, and the author even went to great lengths to use realistic textures and backgrounds from the game. Even the levels - all 19 of them - are faithfully recreated from actual DOOM maps, and die-hard fans will be able to recognize their favorite levels if they try hard enough to visualize 3D maps in 2D ;) The game supports two multiplayer modes: co-operative, and the famous deathmatch. Weapons are satisfactorily recreated from the original, although the game could use more sound effects.
From the beginning, Doom was a geek game. No wonder people used it as a benchmark or a system administrator tool.
In John Conway's game of Life, (a system of Cellular Automata), it is theoretically possible to build a digital computer. Ever since I heard that idea, I have wanted to build one in Doom! I haven't yet managed it, although I have made various digital logic circuits using dehacked. The XOR gate and the NOT gate are the building blocks of the half-adder, which is used to construct a full-adder which will add binary numbers. The object of this exercise is to add two 4-bit binary numbers together and get a result. I have not yet achieved this goal, but using BOOM I expect to do this with greater ease and stability.
