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

Comments

A couple corrections...

[coupland]

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!

Article forgets Doom for ZX Spectrum

[jtra]

Article forgets several attempts to make Doom for ZX Spectrum, I have one on tape.
here is another:
http://www.pandroid.zetnet.co.uk/reviews/doom.htm

do a search on google for more.

Yes, it was.

[jcr]

Doom was developed on NeXT machines. Id even went so far as to write a VGA emulator for NeXT computers, so that you could play it on your cube or slab.

Carmack gave one of his NeXT slabs to a friend of mine some years ago. He mentioned that he had a few he was willing to give away to anyone who would actually use them, and she fit that description. He told me that it was one of the ones he used to write the 3d engine.

I never did see Doom on NeXTSTEP with sound, though. The Omni Group eventually ported Doom II to NeXTSTEP and OpenStep, including the audio.

-jcr

You're mistaken on several points.

[jcr]

First of all, the Doom engine was indeed written on NeXTSTEP. Since GCC was available, NeXT slabs made a dandy platform for cross-compilation for everything from 386 boxes to game consoles.

Secondly, the Project Builder didn't exist yet when Doom was under development. It didn't show up until NeXTSTEP 3.1 or so. Before that, some of what would become PB's functionality was embodied in the Interface Builder.

Thirdly, Carmack wrote a VGA emulator so that he could test the engine without having to copy the compiled app over to a 386 box for every change.

-jcr

Doom at the end of the Earth

[logandr]

Back in '94 I was posted at a research station at the South Pole. The guys at ID sent us a complimentary copy of Doom along with a note: "We hope Doom doesn't turn you guys into a bunch of axe murders and you wind up killing each other but if it does please send us pictures..."

Seems like this is missing the biggest part

[Sloppy]

When Doom source was released and it suddenly got ported to every machine under the Sun, and people started improving the game engine. How can a "history of Doom" leave this out?

Oh for the love of Pete. Edit some more, resubmit.

[kobotronic]

"A great guide to the history of Doom..." - "An exceptional read" - "...but you will enjoy." -mkay, sure. So why was this item accepted?

Other than the highly suspect grammar, the strange non-sequiteurs and exclamations ("He's alive!!!"), the bulleted list of DOOM levels and what looks like verbatim transcripts from the game documentation, was there really enough meat on this for even a mediocre slashdot news story, you think?

Must be a slow day. Having read the HTML versions of the 'article', I must say I wasn't particularly inclined to download the 3.6 megabyte Microsoft Word document, though I assume I'd be rewarded with some BMP screenshots to go with the text.

To the author. If you had to publish this as non-HTML document, you could and should have used Adobe Acrobat instead of Mickysoft Word.

If you wanted to make a list of DOOM ports, try at least to keep the list complete and accurate. I didn't see any mentioning of the unix, linux, Macintosh, BeOS, Amiga or Windows CE ports of the game. In any case, a list of ports is really not that interesting either unless you provide some back story and details for each. You could also provide download links and perhaps try and find and talk to some of the people responsible for those release. You know, try a little harder.

Until you get your piece written properly, anyone remotely interested in the subject should instead go and visit Doomworld (http://doomworld.com/ports/index.shtml) which has good FAQs, interviews, articles and links instead of just copy/paste fluff.

It was nice...

[Flounder]

to reminice about Doom. I constantly monitored the wustl.edu ftp site the days before Doom was released. I even skipped a few classes because of rumors that the game was being uploaded to the site and would be available.

Then, I finally got the game, and stayed up 48 hours straight finishing the game on Nightmare. Got some sleep, then dragged my system to a friends house, hooked up the null-modem cable, then proceeded to spend the next 36 hours playing deathmatch. Haven't wasted so much time on a single game since (at least till The Sims and Civ III came out).

The history of Doom is an excellent topic to write about, I just wish the writer wrote more of a history, rather than just retyping the descriptions off the boxes and manuals. 3 pages cut and pasted from Coming Attractions?? Jeez! He didn't cover any of the differences between the early betas and the final released version. Nothing of the buildup of the hype (save for a brief mention).

As much as I hate saying this (and this will get the anti-Katz-ites into a frenzy), this is a subject I'd like to see Jon cover. And have him get more into the effects of the game on society. Essentially creating a new genre (yes, I know there were other FPS out before, but Doom really caused the development of so many other games). Public outcry about the violence. Colombine (there, that alone should get Jon writing about it). Maybe even cover FPS games in general, not just focus on Doom. Cover the Doom spin-offs (Heretic, Rise of the Triad), some of the more thinking FPS games (System Shock) and the modern FPS (Quake III, Unreal, etc). C'mon, Jon. Give us something that would actually be interesting to read.