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!
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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..."
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.