Slashdot Mirror
The History of Doom On All Systems
Consolevision writes: "This news from dcvision.com -- One of our great members (Steveffs) has written a great guide to the history of Doom, right from the beginning to the very newest ports of it, it is an exceptional read for those who have followed gaming for a long time. The History of Doom will take a short while to load as it is a rather large document but you will enjoy :)" This link is unfortunately to a .doc file, but Mr. Vision continues: "I have now split the History of Doom into 5 pages and converted to html for those who are having trouble with the rather large but very impressive doc file."
Here are the pieces: Page1,
Page2,
Page3,
Page4 and
Page5
Man, I love this. Doom is a probably the game that deserves a history written of it. It sparked the revolution the gaming and technology industries. And yes I know that it wasn't the first FPS (First Person Shooter), but it brought FPS to the masses of the world. And thus, earned the right to be revered in such a manner.
A great article but I noted a couple historical anomalies:
ID software was created and was composed by John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack.
Adrian Carmack didn't actually join until near the end of the first Commander Keen game. Hence the difference in artwork between the first and second trilogy.
January 1993 : The first previews of Doom appeared in the press.
Actually, Jan 1993 was when the game was announced. Screenshots weren't released until Mar, 1993.
August 1993 : An unauthorized beta version of the game appeared, I don't know if it was voluntary
The first leaked alpha appeared Feb 4th, 1993 and was unintended. Another alpha was leaked Apr 2nd, 1993 a beta on May 22nd, 1993, and finally a press beta on Oct 4th, 1993. Only the screenshots of Mar, 1993 were authorized.
It sure is fun to think back on the old days!
I've put up a PDF version of the document for those who don't like Word or HTML formats for whatever reason. It's much smaller than the Word doc and weighs in at only 480KB.
Pre.S. Ok, before you all slam me for being a hypocrite, READ the whole paper....I'm not the best writer, but bear with me.
I just read most of the Doom history article. I have made the following observation: It's well intended, perhaps, but...bad..very bad.
I'm not an English teacher, rather I am a 22 year old college student, majoring in Fine Arts. I have had to write my share of papers, and in the realm of academia, and among my peers, this is a poorly written paper.
This brings me to question Slashdot, and their decision to post this. The paper appears at first to be a hastily written article summarizing the history of id Software, and their Doom game. It then turns into a 3 page plug for the Doom movie (most of which I did not read, after getting tired of the typos and poor grammar). Was any editorial process used in reviewing the nature of the article before deciding it was worth posting? Rather, did an editor go "oooo, Doom...too long, no time to read, must be good, post it". What this comes out looking like, however, is a disguised plug for the Doom movie...
And did anyone actually see any pictures? I didn't on either version.
Anyways, </rant>
-Doug
Q. What's it take to get a story posted on
No, network play was available over IPX from the first version of Doom, head-to-head modem play was added in a subsequent patch. The "Some guy" you refer to wrote a generic tool to tunnel IPX over TCP/IP and hence Doom over the internet was finally born.
If you were on Usenet, waiting for Doom to arrive, you got bored. SPISPOPD was the result.
A tribute site Richard Ward created... On the net, nothing ever dies, it's enshrined forever by someone.
Seth (yes, that original idspispopd cheatcode/FAQ guy)
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