Everything about Doom Video Game totally explained
Doom (or
DOOM as a
brand in the game materials and press releases) is a
1993 computer game by
id Software that's a landmark title in the
first-person shooter genre, and in
first person gaming in general. It is widely recognized for pioneering immersive
3D graphics,
networked multiplayer gaming on the PC platform, and support for custom expansions (
WADs). Distributed as
shareware,
Doom was
downloaded by an estimated 10 million people within two years, popularizing the mode of gameplay and spawning a gaming
subculture; as a sign of its effect on the industry, games from the mid-1990s boom of first-person shooters are often known simply as "
Doom clones". Its graphic and interactive
violence has also made
Doom the subject of much
controversy reaching outside the gaming world. According to
GameSpy,
Doom was voted by industry insiders to be the greatest game of all time in 2004.
The
Doom franchise was continued with (
1994) and numerous
expansion packs, including
The Ultimate Doom (
1995),
Master Levels for Doom II (1995), and
Final Doom (
1996). Originally released for
PC/
DOS, these games have later been
ported to many other platforms, including nine different
game consoles, and even
PDAs. The series lost mainstream appeal as the technology of the
Doom game engine was surpassed in the mid-1990s, although fans have continued making
WADs,
speedruns, and modifications to the
source code released in 1997. The franchise again received popular attention in
2004 with the release of
Doom 3, a retelling of the original game using new technology, and an associated
2005 Doom motion picture.
Game features
Story
Doom has a
science fiction/
horror theme, and a simple
plot. The background is only given in the game's manual, and the in-game story is mainly advanced with short messages displayed between the game's episodes.
The player takes the role of a nameless
space marine (referred to as "
Doomguy" or "The Doomguy" by many fans), "one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action", who has been deported to
Mars for assaulting a senior officer when ordered to kill unarmed civilians. He is forced to work for the
Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), a military-industrial conglomerate that's performing secret experiments with
teleportation between the moons of Mars,
Phobos and
Deimos. The Marine may have been forced into a security or unimportant staff position according to the manual, stating "with no action for fifty million miles, your day consisted of suckin' dust and watchin' restricted flicks in the rec room." Suddenly, something goes wrong and creatures from
Hell come out of the teleportation gates, or "Gateways". A defensive response from base security fails to halt the invasion, and the bases quickly get overrun by
demons; all personnel are killed or turned into
zombies. At the same time, Deimos vanishes entirely. A UAC team from Mars is sent to Phobos to investigate the incident, but soon
radio contact ceases and only one human is left alive — the player, whose task is to make it out as such.
In order to complete the game, the player must fight through three episodes containing nine
levels each (see
Episodes and levels of Doom).
Knee-Deep in the Dead, the first episode and the only one in the
shareware version, is set in the high-tech military bases on Phobos. It ends with the player fighting the Barons of Hell and afterwards entering the teleporter leading to Deimos, ending with the player getting overwhelmed by monsters and seemingly killed. In the second episode,
Shores of Hell, the player journeys through the Deimos installation, whose areas are interwoven with beastly architecture, warped and distorted by the demonic invasion. After encountering the Cyberdemon, he discovers the truth about the vanished moon: it's floating above Hell. The player climbs down to the surface, and the final episode,
Inferno, begins. After the final
boss, the Spider Mastermind, is destroyed, a hidden doorway opens for the hero who has "proven too tough for Hell to contain", leading back home to Earth. The expansion pack
Ultimate Doom adds a fourth episode,
Thy Flesh Consumed, chronicling the marine's return to Earth, in other words his adventures between the first three original episodes of
Doom and
Doom II.
Gameplay
Being a
first-person shooter,
Doom is experienced through the eyes of the main character. The objective of each level is simply to locate the exit room that leads to the next area (usually labeled with an inviting red EXIT sign or a special kind of door), while surviving all hazards on the way. Among the obstacles are monsters, pits of
radioactive slime, ceilings that come down and
crush the player, and locked doors for which a
keycard, Skeleton key, or remote switch needs to be located. The levels are sometimes labyrinthine (the
automap can be used as an aid for navigation) and feature plenty of hidden secret areas that hold
power-ups as a reward for players who explore.
Doom is notable for the
weapons arsenal available to the player, which became prototypical for first-person shooters. The player starts armed only with a
pistol, and
brass-knuckled fists in case the
ammunition runs out, but larger weapons can be picked up: these are a
chainsaw, a
shotgun, a
chaingun, a
rocket launcher, a
plasma rifle, and finally the immensely powerful
BFG 9000. There is a wide array of power-ups, such as a
backpack that increases the player's ammunition-carrying capacity,
armor,
first aid kits to restore health, the berserk pack (a black first aid box that puts the character into
berserk mode, allowing them to deal out rocket launcher-level damage with their fists and potentially splattering former humans and imps), and supernatural blue orbs (called
Soul Spheres) that boost the player's health percentage beyond 100%, up to a maximum of 200%.
The enemy monsters in
Doom make up the central gameplay element. The player faces them in large numbers, on the higher of the game's five
difficulty levels often encountering a dozen or more in the same room. There are 10 types of monsters (
Doom II doubles this figure), including possessed humans as well as
demons of different strength, ranging from weak but ubiquitous
imps and red, floating
cacodemons, to the
bosses which survive multiple strikes even from the player's strongest weapons. The monsters have very simple behavior, consisting of either walking toward the player or attacking by throwing fireballs, biting, and scratching (though they can also
fight each other).
Many versions of
Doom (and its sequels) include secret levels which are accessed by the player discovering alternate exits, often hidden behind secret doors or in difficult-to-reach areas. In some versions of Doom II two of these secret levels incorporate level design and characters from Doom's precursor,
Wolfenstein 3D.
Aside from the
single-player game mode,
Doom features two
multiplayer modes playable over a network: "
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.
Development
The development of
Doom started in 1992 when
John D. Carmack developed a new 3-D
game engine, the
Doom engine, while the rest of the id Software team finished the
Wolfenstein 3D prequel,
Spear of Destiny. When the
game design phase began in late 1992, the main thematic influences were the
science fiction action movie Aliens and the
horror movie Evil Dead II. The title of the game was picked by Carmack:
Designer
Tom Hall wrote an elaborate
design document called the
Doom Bible, according to which the game would feature a detailed storyline, multiple player characters, and a number of interactive features. However, many of his ideas were discarded during development in favor of simpler design primarily advocated by Carmack, resulting in Hall in the end being forced to resign due to not contributing effectively in the direction the rest of the team was going. Most of the
level design that ended up in the final game is that of
John Romero and
Sandy Petersen. The graphics, by
Adrian Carmack,
Kevin Cloud and
Gregor Punchatz, were created in various ways: although much was drawn or painted, several of the monsters were built from sculptures in
clay or
latex, and some of the weapons are toy guns from
Toys "R" Us. A
heavy metal-
ambient soundtrack was supplied by
Bobby Prince.
Engine technology
Doom's primary distinguishing feature at the time of its release was its realistic
3D graphics, then unparalleled by other
real-time-rendered games running on consumer-level hardware. The advance from id Software's previous game
Wolfenstein 3D was enabled by several new features in the
Doom engine:
- Height differences (all rooms in Wolfenstein 3D have the same height);
- Non-perpendicular walls (all walls in Wolfenstein 3D run along a rectangular grid);
- Swaying of the weapon (in Wolfenstein 3D the arms stay fixed in front in the screen no matter what the character does), this gives the impression of fluidity while walking or running;
- Full texture mapping of all surfaces (in Wolfenstein 3D, floors and ceilings are not texture mapped);
- Varying light levels (all areas in Wolfenstein 3D are fully lit at the same brightness). While contributing to the game's visual authenticity by allowing effects such as highlights and shadows, this 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 released prior to Doom.
In contrast to the static levels of
Wolfenstein 3D, those in
Doom are highly interactive: platforms can lower and rise, floors can rise sequentially to form
staircases, and bridges can rise and descend. The life-like feeling of the environment was enhanced further by the
stereo sound system, which made it possible to roughly tell the direction and distance of a sound's origin. The player is kept on guard by the grunts and growls of monsters, and receives occasional clues to finding secret areas in the form of sounds of hidden doors opening remotely. Monsters can also become aware of the player's presence by hearing distant gunshots.
Carmack had to make use of several tricks for these features to run smoothly on home computers of 1993. Most significantly,
Doom levels are not truly three-dimensional; they're internally represented on a
plane, with height differences added separately (a similar trick is still used by many games to create huge outdoor environments). This gives the appearance of a two point perspective projection, and 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 partitioning method. Another benefit was the clarity of the automap because it could be displayed with 2D vectors without the risk of overlapping.
Another important feature of the
Doom engine is a modular approach that allows the game content to be replaced by loading custom
WAD files.
Wolfenstein 3D wasn't designed to be expandable, but fans had nevertheless figured out how to create their own levels for it, and
Doom was designed to take the phenomenon further. The ability to create custom scenarios contributed significantly to the game's popularity (see the section on
WADs below).
Release and later history
Initial popularity
The development of
Doom was surrounded by much anticipation. The large number of posts in Internet
newsgroups about
Doom led to the SPISPOPD joke, to which a nod was given in the game in the form of a
cheat code. In addition to news, rumors, and
screenshots, unauthorized leaked
alpha versions also circulated online. (Many years later these alpha versions were sanctioned by id Software because of historical interest; they reveal how the game progressed from its early design stages.) The first public version of
Doom was uploaded to
Software Creations BBS and a
FTP server at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison on
December 10,
1993.
Released as
shareware, people were encouraged to distribute
Doom further, and did so: in 1995,
Doom was estimated to have been installed on more than 10 million computers. Although most users didn't purchase the registered version, over one million copies have been sold, and the popularity helped the sales of later games in the
Doom series which were not released as shareware. In 1995,
The Ultimate Doom (version 1.9, including episode IV) was released, making this the first time that
Doom was sold commercially in stores.
In a press release dated
January 1,
1993, id Software had written that they expected
Doom to be "the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world". This prediction came true at least in part:
Doom became a major problem at workplaces, both occupying the time of employees and clogging
computer networks with traffic caused by deathmatches.
Intel,
Lotus Development and
Carnegie Mellon University are among many organizations reported to form policies specifically disallowing
Doom-playing during work hours. At the
Microsoft campus,
Doom was by one account The Microsoft 1995 release Excel 95 included a
Doom-esque secret level as an
easter egg containing portraits of the programmers among other things. It is speculated that Microsoft engineers took advantage of their experience working on the Doom Windows 95 port to place the code in the spreadsheet program.
Doom was also widely praised in the gaming press. In 1994, it 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 addition to the thrilling nature of the single-player game, the
deathmatch mode was an important factor in the game's popularity.
Doom wasn't the first first-person shooter with a deathmatch mode—
MIDI Maze on the
Atari ST had one in 1987, using the
MIDI ports built into the ST to network up to four machines together. However,
Doom was the first game to allow deathmatching over
ethernet, and the combination of violence and gore with fighting friends made deathmatching in
Doom particularly attractive. Two-player multiplayer was also possible over a phone line by using a
modem, or by linking two PCs with a null-modem cable. Due to its widespread distribution,
Doom hence became the game that introduced deathmatching to a large audience (and was also the first game to use the term "deathmatch").
WADs
The ability to create custom levels and otherwise modify the game, in the form of custom
WAD files, turned out to be a particularly popular aspect of
Doom. Gaining the first large
mod-making community,
Doom affected the culture surrounding first-person shooters, and also the industry. Several to-be professional
game designers started their careers making
Doom WADs as a hobby, among them
Tim Willits, who later became the lead designer at id Software.
The first
level editors appeared in early 1994, and additional tools have been created that allow most aspects of the game to be edited. Although the majority of WADs contain one or several custom levels mostly in the style of the original game, others implement new monsters and other resources, and heavily alter the gameplay; several popular movies, television series, other video games and other brands from popular culture have been turned into
Doom WADs by fans (without authorization), including
Aliens,
Star Wars,
The X-files,
The Simpsons,
South Park,
Sailor Moon,
Dragon Ball Z,
Red Faction,
Pokémon, and
Batman. Some works like the
Theme Doom Patch even combined enemies from several movies like
Aliens,
Predator and
The Terminator.
Some add on files were also made which changed the sounds made by the various characters and weapons. Notable ones were samples from
Beavis and Butthead and the famous fake orgasm scene from
When Harry Met Sally....
Around 1994 and 1995, WADs were primarily distributed online over
bulletin board systems or sold in collections on
compact discs in computer shops, sometimes bundled with editing guide books.
FTP servers became the primary method in later years. A few WADs have been released commercially, including the
Master Levels for Doom II, which was released in 1995 along with
Maximum Doom, a CD containing 1,830 WADs that had been downloaded from the Internet. Several thousands of WADs have been created in total: the
idgames FTP archive contains over 13,000 files, and this doesn't represent the complete output of
Doom fans.
Third party programs were also written to handle the loading of various WADs, since the game is a
DOS game and all commands had to be entered on the
command line in order to run. A typical launcher would allow the player to select which files to load from a menu, making it much easier to start.
Clones and related products
The popularity of
Doom led to the development of a sequel, (1994), as well as expansion packs and alternate versions based on the same game engine, including
The Ultimate Doom (1995),
Final Doom (1996), and
Doom 64 (1997).
Doom became a
killer application that all capable
consoles and
operating systems were expected to have, and versions of
Doom have subsequently been released for the following systems:
DOS,
Microsoft Windows,
QNX,
Irix,
NEXTSTEP,
Linux,
Apple Macintosh,
Super NES,
Sega 32X, Sony
PlayStation,
Game Boy Advance,
RISC OS,
Atari Jaguar,
Sega Saturn,
Nintendo 64,
Tapwave Zodiac,
3DO,
Xbox as a feature of Doom 3: Limited Edition, and
Xbox 360 on
Xbox Live Arcade. The total number of copies of
Doom games sold is unknown, but may be well over 4 million;
Doom II alone has earned over $100 million in total sales.
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, and the
United States Marine Corps released
Marine Doom, designed to "teach teamwork, coordination and decision-making".
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. Many of the games closely imitated features in
Doom such as the selection of weapons and cheat codes.
Doom's principal rivals were
Apogee's
Rise of the Triad and
Looking Glass Studios'
System Shock (which, unlike
Doom, featured true 3D gameplay). The popularity of
Star Wars-themed WADs is rumored to have been the factor that prompted
LucasArts to create their first-person shooter
Dark Forces.
When, three years later,
3D Realms released
Duke Nukem 3D, a tongue-in-cheek science fiction shooter based on
Ken Silverman's technologically similar
Build engine, id Software had nearly finished
Quake, its next-generation game, which mirrored
Doom's success for the remainder of the 1990s and significantly reduced interest in its predecessor. The franchise remained in that state until 2000, when
Doom 3 was announced. A retelling of the original
Doom using entirely new graphics technology,
Doom 3 was
hyped to provide as large a leap in realism and interactivity as the original
Doom, but received mixed reactions when released in 2004.
Doom has appeared in several forms in addition to games, including a
comic book, four novels by
Dafydd Ab Hugh and
Brad Linaweaver (loosely based on events and locations in the games), and
a film starring
Karl Urban and
The Rock released in 2005. The game's development and impact on popular culture is also the subject of the book by
David Kushner.
Controversy
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.
Yahoo! Games has it listed as one of the top ten controversial games of all time. It has been criticized numerous times by religious organizations for its diabolic undertones and was dubbed a "mass murder simulator" by critic and
Killology Research Group founder
David Grossman.
Doom prompted fears that the then-emerging
virtual reality technology could be used to simulate extremely realistic killing, and in 1994 led to unsuccessful attempts by
Washington state senator Phil Talmadge to introduce compulsory licensing of VR use.
The game again sparked controversy throughout a period of
school shootings in the
United States when it was found that
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed the
Columbine High School massacre in 1999, were avid players of the game. While planning for the massacre, Harris said that the killing would be "like fucking
Doom" and that his shotgun was "straight out of" the game. A rumor spread afterwards that Harris had designed
Doom levels that looked like the halls of the high school, populated with representations of Harris's classmates and teachers, and that Harris practiced for his role in the shootings by playing these levels over and over. Although
Harris did design Doom levels, they were not simulations of Columbine High School.
While
Doom and other violent video games have been blamed for nation-wide school shootings, recent research featured by
Greater Good Science Center shows that the two are not closely related.
Harvard medical school researchers Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner found that violent video games didn't correlate to school shootings. The
U.S. Secret Service and
Department of Education analyzed 37 incidents of school violence and sought to develop a profile of school shooters, they discovered that the most common traits among shooters were that they were male and had histories of depression and attempted suicide. While many of the killers- like the vast majority of young males- did play video games, this study didn't find a relationship between game play and school shootings. In fact, only one eighth of the shooters showed any special interest in violent video games, far less that the number of shooters who seemed attracted to books and movies with violent content. *
Doom article from Greater Good magazine
.
Continued legacy
Doom is widely regarded as one of the most important titles in gaming history. It was voted the "#1 game of all time" in a poll among over 100 game developers and journalists conducted by
GameSpy in July 2001, and
PC Gamer proclaimed
Doom the most influential game of all time in its ten-year anniversary issue in April 2004, and named it the second best game of all time a year later (number one was Half-Life). However, several game journalists have also contrasted the relatively simplistic gameplay in
Doom unfavorably with more story-oriented first-person shooters such as
Half-Life.
Although the popularity of the
Doom games dropped with the release of
Descent (1995),
Duke Nukem 3D (1996) and
Quake (1996), the game had still retained a strong fan base that continues to this day by playing competitively and creating
WADs (the
idgames FTP archive receives a few to a dozen new WADs each week
as of 2005), and
Doom-related news is still tracked at multiple websites such as
Doomworld. Interest in
Doom was renewed in 1997, when the
source code for the
Doom engine was released (it was also placed under the
GNU General Public License in 1999). Fans then began
porting the game to various operating systems, even to previously unsupported platforms such as the
Dreamcast,
PSP,
DS,
TI calculators and the
iPod, and adding new features such as
OpenGL rendering and
scripting, which allows WADs to alter the gameplay more radically. There are well over 50 different
Doom source ports, some of which remain under active development.
Devoted players have spent years creating
speedruns for Doom, competing for the quickest completion times and sharing knowledge about routes through the levels and how to exploit
bugs in the
Doom engine for shortcuts. Achievements include the completion of both
Doom and
Doom II on the
Ultra-Violence difficulty setting in less than 30 minutes each. In addition, a few players have also managed to complete
Doom II in a single run on the
Nightmare! difficulty setting, on which monsters are more aggressive, launch faster projectiles (or, in the case of the Pinky Demon, simply move faster), and respawn roughly 30 seconds after they've been killed (level designer
John Romero characterized the idea of such a run as "[justhaving to be] impossible"). Movies of most of these runs are available from the COMPET-N website.
Online co-op and deathmatch play still continues on servers listed through services such as
Odamex (External Link),
Skulltag (External Link) and
ZDaemon (External Link).
Further Information
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