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
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.
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.