Doom Archive Reopened

Obiwan Kenobi writes "Computer game history buffs rejoice: Lee Killough's Doom Archive has been reopened at John Romero's site. Its been offline since 1998, when it was handed to Romero to look after, and has finally resurfaced. The info inside is priceless, if a bit Romero-centric, but who can deny the nostalgia of downloadable alpha versions, beta screenshots (complete with wild health meters) and the original Doom Press Release where the game tagline reads "Doom-the sanest place is behind a trigger.""

Comments

Features in the alpha / beta versions

[galaga79]

Does anyone know if the beta and alpha versions had any features that were cut out of the final version of Doom? I noticed two such features just reading the documentation.

The most interesting thing about this version is the different BFG -- it causes many fireballs to come out in many directions. See screenshots.

Fireballs ricochet off of floors and ceilings.

Re:Features in the alpha / beta versions

[Anonymous Coward]

My roommate and I had an alpha ver. that we downloaded from the on-campus pirate BBS (life before the "internet" came to campus). I seem to remember having the feature of climbing walls. You'd get to see the hands grasping at the walls and there'd be a straining/grunting sound. It also crashed our 486DX233 w/8 megs of RAM just about everytime you tried to climb a wall. I don't remember seeing this in any of the releases... wonder why? :-)

Yikes

[vasqzr]

Most of the improvment seems to be in the 'lighting' that made the retail game so scary and not so cartoonish.

There doesn't seem to be any lighting in these screen shots, and the game looks VERY amatuer.

Look at some of the other screens. This just shows ID released the game when they had everything looking right, in a 'Doom' sort of way.

Console Programming

[VoidEngineer]

You know... Doom is just the right level of game play, nowdays, for entry level console game programmers. Wanna design a 3D engine for the Playstation 3? A 3D engine for the X-Box 2? I'd bet that those Doom screenshots could be the perfect beginning of a major game manufacturing group for the next generation of gaming consoles. A group of nerds needs to sit down and reverse engineer the mathematics of that 3D engine. Perhaps approach the problem as a programming challenge to design and code the new engine entirely in fractals and menger spaces.

Re:Console Programming

[VoidEngineer]

Can you please explain in more detail what the hell you are talking about? Why would anyone want to play a game that looks like DooM on the PS3 or XBox 2?

Absolutely. There are many reasons why people would want to. Amongst others, these include:

1. First person perspective.
2. Combat oriented gaming (stress relief?)
3. Multiplayer capabilities.

Now then, for a short list of current games which look like Doom and are on the Playstation 2 or XBox:

1. Halo
2. Quake Arena
3. Unreal Tournament
4. Metal Gear Solid
5. All 3D Basketball/Baseball/Football Games
6. Resident Evil
7. Tomb Raider
etc. etc.

Do you understand my point? These games are all Doom and Wolfenstein based. They are not, for instance, based on such games as:

1. Pong
2. PacMan
3. Mario Brothers
4. Pitfall
5. LoadRunner
6. SpyHunter

(All of which happen to be favorites of mine.) Anyhow, compared to PacMan there are a lot of reasons why people would want to play a game that looks like Doom on a PS3 or XBox2.

The question becomes one of programming methodologies: How does an entry level console game programmer enter into the market and compete against people who are making games like Halo2 and LOTR: The Two Towers? Tough competition.

One answer (although not the only one): Leap frog ahead of the competition. Predict what the gaming platform is going to be 2 or 4 or 8 years from now, and begin programming now (hence the reference to PS3 and XBox2, and not PS2 and Xbox... I'm looking 2 years down the road here.).

Anyhow, you estimate the graphics performance of the futuristic box... 256bit processor, 512bit, 1Kbit, whatever; 1 Gig VRAM, 4Gig VRAM, whatever; 800x600 res, 1024x768 res, 1600x1200 res, 1600x1200 stereoscopic res, whatever. Once you figure out your target hardware platform, figure out the algorithms. The trick is to get that target hardware to output something that looks like Doom. Once you've passed that hurdle, you've got 80% of the work done (assuming that you're doing real programming, and writing the device drivers and algorithms yourself, thereby establishing a proprietary 3D engine, and not just ripping off or copying somebody else's work).

Now then, if you go through this process, and approach the mathematics carefully, you might be able to program up a nice engine that utilizes menger spaces and fractals. Now then, some physicists and mathematicians might say, 'Nay, a Hilbert Space is better than a Menger Space any day of the week!' To which, I am not completely convinced. I, personally, think that menger spaces and fractal algorithms have a lower overhead in terms of code manipulation, and produce more graphics performance than linear algorithms. Granted, there are many applications where a fractal algorithm is overkill and produces a lot of waste.

However, when trying to program biological and chaotic phenomena, such as plants, ferns, trees, snowflakes, waves, hair, and so forth, a fractal algorithm can do things in a dozen lines of code which other algorithms require thousands and millions of lines of code.

Ergo

It is my opinion that fractal algorithms are really slick, and I hope that PS3 and XBox2 games are programmed with such methodologies.

For the record, any first-person 3D engine has the basic graphics and math to provide you with the resources to do what I'm talking about. Hell, reality has the basic graphics and math to provide you with the resources to do what I'm talking about. I am merely pointing out that Doom may be good study material for the next generation of console game programmers...

Re:Console Programming

[Ryan Amos]

The math is rather trivial. Take a linear algebra class and you've got the right amount of math skills. Think of creating a world of polygons, then taking their orthogonal projection relative to the screen. Heck, this is all 3d is, well, of course there is some perspective stuff in there (sizing yadda yadda, add shadows for depth, etc) but essentially it's just matrix calculations. Nothing too earth-shattering here.

Modern 3d is a lot easier, because with 3d chips, all the tedious calculations were removed. The 3d card will handle all the scaling, lighting and masking for you, so you don't have to write any slow code to do it; it's all hardware and really fast because the operations are essentially the same for every game (and where they're not, we now have things like programmable shaders, vector units, etc.)

Anyway, I guess the point of this is even if you did what you say, it would give no real insight into modern game programming. It's like learning assembly so you can make a mysql database. Just keep in mind that doom (and doom 2 for that matter) were written before the advent of 3d accelerators. Hell, Doom was the first time 3d was used to create a convincing, immersive environment; before that 3d gaming just seemed like kind of a novelty.

Romero's inspiration?

[AnonymousCowheard]

Mr. Romero,

Puting aside all the splattered corpses, deranged vertebrae, snarling beasts of death, and moppy hair, what inspired you to be the the man to control the immortal death-spawning machine of E1M30?

Will I meet you again, some form or another, maybe even in a healthkit, somewhere within the scope of Doom3? It wouldn't be the same without you...Carmack thinks a good game is moreso implementation than creativity. You are the creativity, Carmack was the implementation; separate, we would see somthing less.

Stencil Shadows?

[Nasheer]

The source code of Doom was released a long time ago.
Wouldn't it be sweet if Stencil Shadows were implemented, just like it was in Quake 1?

God, I am felling weird again. Just like in the old times of Doom 2...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

ID hit the nail on the head on this one..

[cowmix]

"This is the first game to really exploit the power of LANs and modems to their full potential. In 1993, we fully expect to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world."

Yep, my small little ISP in '93 was brought to its knees because of this program..

Re:ID hit the nail on the head on this one..

[siphoncolder]

"In 1993, we fully expect to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world."

It happened to Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) too - he played so much Doom that it got in the way of his work. Unexpectedly, the record he put out after getting over his Doom addiction ("The Downward Spiral") turned out to be a smash multi-platinum hit. We (should) all know that he went on to do the sound effects & music soundtrack to Quake.

An aside: how many of you DIDN'T know what the "NIN" stood for on the boxes of nails in Quake? (Admit it - I've caught a few people that didn't know that.) It was another iD joke - John Carmack put a NIN graphic on the boxes during beta testing, as a joke & tribute to Trent Reznor, and it make it to the final product.

How can I run those?

[tweakt]

The old versions of DOOM won't run under modern OS's... anyone know how to get them running under, say win XP ? Or do I need VMWare or similar?

Thankyou DOOM, ID, and Cthulu.

[Hagmonk]

Not just a landmark in the gaming community, but in my life. It sculpted me into what I am today.

Suddenly, fast hardware was important. Getting friends around to deathmatch was important. Writing my own levels and sound effects files was important. I was shelling open the machine, squeezing out as much performance as possible. I was learning about graphics, about 3D design.

My reflexes became honed. I surprised people with my ability to notice pencils rolling off the table and catch them before they even had time to register something was happening.

Out of sheer time at a keyboard, both in and out of the game, I started typing at over 100 words per minute. I could mouse around a GUI quicker than people thought reasonable.

I discovered the internet. I payed $9 per hour to access it in Australian dollars, and that didn't include the timed STD calls I had to make to get to the ISP. I consumed every map file I could lay my hands on. I discovered porn, e-mail, gopher, the web, FTP, IRC in that order. I started making friends with people I had never seen in real life. I used Kali because Doom lacked TCP/IP support.

Now I am an I.T. professional, still as passionate as I was the first time I layed hands on the Doom I shareware installation floppies (that a thoughtful person in a Canberra computer games store copied for me). I still get shivers when I hear the Doom I map 1 music (it's my polyphonic mobile phone ring).

Without Doom, my passion for computers would not have developed, and I would probably not be posting to slashdot today.

May Cthulu bless ID and all their works.

Similarities between Doom III Alpha and Doom ideas

[Jugalator]

Found some interesting stuff in the Doom Bible by Tim Willits (things not making it into Doom I):

Bruiser Brothers
Twin terrors at the end of episode one

These were never used, but there are an unused "monster_demon_bruiser" in the leaked Doom III Alpha files.

A short while later, a strange alien creature bursts into the room. ("What the hell?") A fight ensures.

No monster breaks into a room in Doom I, but a strange half-machine "pinky" demon does break into a room in the Doom III Alpha.

Just two things I noticed from a quick browse... Perhaps there are more. :)

Card playing marines= Half Life

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the first thing I thought of when I saw that screenshot of the Space Marines playing cards before the dimmensional break. Like the scientist banging on the soda machine looking for his quarter and the Barneys walking around in the locker room and on the can (excuse me I'm in here!). That would be cool if they would re-release the game with all this cutting room floor stuff like more story line and different weapons into the game, like the Dragon in the original Quake that never made it.

Why Doom Sucks.

[cosmosis]

OK, I can't hold it anylong - Doom really sucks

It has done more to ruin the state of game playing than any game in history.

For those of you who were around playing games 10 years ago and longer, have the best chance have understanding why this is. Lets recap:

So what do we have today?

We have fantastic hardware and storage capacity. We have incredibly elegant graphic and AI algorithms that make the gaming experience itself very compelling. The advent of Doom was the first truly compelling real-time 3D engine. And it was precisely at that time that gaming has gone down hill. What Doom did for gaming in a positive way (fast rendering engines) it did as much or more in a negative way (dark, repetitive, single-minded (mindless) activity).

And because of the popularity and thus (financially lucrativness) of Doom we've now had to suffer hundreds of mind-numbing shoot-em-up games since. The overwhelming majority of games on the shelves today, are first-person action games where killing is the primary activity. This isn't so bad, if it weren't for the very depressing worlds, that this mayhem takes place in. Have you ever noticed that all the worlds these games take place in our DARK, DANK, and DYSTOPIAN??

People might counter and say what about Myst, or SIMS, or the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. Well Myst is an exception, but whatever happened to the old-fashioned adventure games? Even the Star Trek and Star Wars gaming franchises have succumbed to the Doominization of gaming. So now you can be a starfleet office whose primary duty is to kill as many bad evil aliens as possible! Whoopee! Or be some variation of a Jedi whose primary mission is to kill as many bad guys as possible. And sure enough all of these killing sprees take place in dark, dank, and depressing settings.

Ok, so what I am proposing?

Bring back the adventure games!!! We have all of the hardware and software algorithms now to make adventure games light-years beyond what was available with Ultima 7 or Zork, etc. Not only could we have far-out sci-fi, fantasy adventure worlds, but also we could explore these worlds in first person 3-D now. We could even throw in some real-time shoot-em-ups to spice it up. Why can't we have a game that combines the best of the spirit of true adventure games with the best of the shoot-em-ups?

Imagine a game, where there are hundreds of planets to explore. All of these planets are unique and compelling. Some of these worlds would have alien civilizations or spaceports and colonists, others would be hostile to life. On each of these worlds, lies mysteries waiting to be explored - pieces of a large puzzle that need to be solved. Perhaps we could just explore these worlds as part of a larger strategy of building our characters like we would in traditional RPG. And of all of this exploring could take place in full-immersion real-time 3D. And why oh why, can't we have worlds that are both compelling and beautiful and inspiring to look at?

Has anyone else noticed? Perhaps this is why I have not bought a single PC game in at least three years now.

Planet P Blog - Librety with Technology.

Re:Why Doom Sucks.

[Proc6]

Amen brother. Amen. I have felt the exact same as you for years. I love games. Yet I cannot find a single one I can stand playing for more than 2 minutes. No one makes "Games" in my opinion. Today's crap should be called "Linear, repetitive, entertainment excersizes."

My definition of a game is something where a rather simple set of rules can turn into an almost unlimited possible outcomes. Think of chess. Chess is like Langston's Ant, where just a few rather trivial rules are pitted against each other, yet the tree of possible outcomes and strategies is absolutely insanely difficult to calculate. You could learn to play in an hour, you can spend the rest of your life reading and practicing and always improve. It's truly beautiful.

So with all this powerful hardware, where are the games like that? Where are the carefuly setup rulesets that provide constraints, yet a chaotic, non-linear equation type amount of freedom? Not this "run, run, jump, jump, duck... ooops slipped. Try again. run, run, jump, duck... oops, slipped, try again." Or "kill everybody in a row, run to the exit. Kill everybody in a row, run to the exit." That is embarassingly idiotic.

But, maybe we shouldn't expect otherwise. Games have fallen into the same trap as movies. The demand for payoff is larger, thus the budget must be bigger, because the audience must be wider. The wider the audience, the more dumbed-down the game must become. Ridley Scott said, in Future Noir, the same thing will continue happening to movies till you just can't even break even anymore. Then ... maybe ... the industry will start over and start nichifying again.

It's sad too. You can see a "hint" of it, like in games like Diablo or Age of Empires, or the Grand Theft Auto series. Give people freedom. That's what they want. Don't setup the path, setup the rules, and people will breathe the kind of life THEY want into the game, by playing it THEIR way. And look what happens, those games become wildly successful. But it's like the idiot game designers miss the point, they give the credit for success to the graphics, so, like for Age of Empires, rather than in the next one, building on the chess like attributes they decided to spend all their time and money on a 3D engine which did exactly nothing for the game. So now we have the exact same ruleset, in fact, dumbed down as compared to AOK, but a glorious new tileset that does nothing for the playability. Its frustrating. Look at this recent Slashdot post and you'll see why the situation isn't going to get any better anytime soon.

Anyway, that's my rant. Sorry, I just agree with the original poster 100% and I hope that one day all the people forwarding the success of the clone army of Quake-style games will taste the true satisfaction of an open/world, Langston's Ant type game, and demand more of it from the game makers.

Re:Why Doom Sucks.

[Negatyfus]

What's wrong with dark, depressing and dystopian? I like dark, depressing and dystopian!

It is true that many mind-less first person shooters have spawned into existence since the release of Doom, but certainly this is not the only sort of game that is unleashed upon humanity today.

As for 3D adventure games, I liked Under A Killing Moon a lot. It has a compelling storyline, great graphics and yes, a dark, depressing and dystopian 3D environment. It's awesome!

More recently, I finished Sierra's Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It too has beautiful 3D graphics (for its time) and a great in-depth plot. Lots of things to explore and figure out, and I think it does justice to the old adventure genre in that respect.

As for RPG's since Doom, you may have forgotten about Baldur's Gate, which is-- God forbid-- a 2D game, as is it's successor Baldur's Gate II, but if you want 3D exploration, let's have a look at Neverwinter Nights or maybe you've got more interest in mindless hack & slack ala Dungeon Siege. Let's not forget the more recent hits in mindlessness; I think good fun can be had with Grand Theft Auto 3, despite it being mindless, but if you want something more intelligent in that vein, have a look at Mafia.

So, no. I don't think the gaming industry is totally down the drain. It could be better, it always can be. There's no such thing as the perfect game for everybody.

Re:Why Doom Sucks.

[cosmosis]

Fantastic post Proc6, and thanks for the compliments. I went to Langstons Ants, and I can assume and hope this is the same Langston who attended my Alma Mater (U of Az) and is the pioneer of Artificial Life?

I discovered Chris Langston back in 1987, when he gave a talk at UofA about his work and his new book Artificial Life (of which there are several volumes now). A few weeks after his talk, I had this huge intuite leap, and started to develop an entirely new Game Engine for Adventure games. The idea, is that there would be a large number of n-variables - people, chain-of-events, scenarios, etc. That way as you played the game it would through various degrees of strength effect the rest of the world in obvious and very subtle ways. Like cause and effect, the rest of the game world would could continue to morph and change on one side while you were playing on the other. Then about 18 months later, the original SIMS game came out, and they beat me to the punch. Oh well.

My original idea for this game, and I would still like to see something like it develop an adventure game where you started out a someone in 1987 earth (now 2003), and your goal was to reach the center of the galaxy. That means that you had to live long enough to make it there, or discover some kind of FTL drive sooner than that. So in the game you would a nearly unlimted number of ways to make it there - make millions so you could have yourslef cryonically frozen, or afford the best longevity medicine, invest in the right technologies such as nanotechnology, allie yourslef with the right syndicates so that you were on the winning side, etc, etc. Anyway, it was a great idea back in 1987, and I would love to see something even remotely close to it now.

I will re-iterate:

The state of gaming today is totally pathetic.

Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.

Re:Why Doom Sucks.

[Chris Carollo]

Out of curiousity, have you played Thief 1 or 2, System Shock 2, or Deus Ex?

Much of your rant lines up pretty well with the design philosophies we had at Looking Glass (and I know Irrational shared), and that we have currently at Ion Storm. So I'm curious as to your take on how well we've accomplished our goals.

Chris Carollo
Deus Ex 2 Lead Programmer

What's in a name?

[mraymer]

Carmack said, "There is a scene in "The Color of Money" where Tom Cruise shows up at a pool hall with a custom pool cue in a case. "What do you have in there?" asks someone. "Doom." replied Cruise with a cocky grin. That, and the resulting carnage, was how I viewed us springing the game on the industry."

Hehe, an interesting look into history, eh? By the way, I beat Ultimate Doom on Ultraviolent. I tried Nightmare but I just couldn't get use to the damn respawning. Umm, I failed a few classes that year, too. In retrospect... of course it was worth it! ;)

Blood on the Wall

[katalyst]

When you do something different, it doesn't have to be special of perfect, because it is different. And that is what Doom did. It may not have been the most creative game around, but it had way to many "firsts" to disregard. Doom is STILL making waves. You will find it on your GBA, and now on mobile phones (the new Nokias)!!! That speaks a lot for its popularity.
Meanwhile, I'm surprised that only ONE post refered to the song.. aka.. blood on the wall. It has been sung my an ex-Nazareth group member.. and that AGAIN says a lot for the popularity of the game. It's a gr8 song, better than lotsa the **** that plays these days....

A somewhat predictive exert.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the press release, "In 1993, we fully expect to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world."

Best as I can remember, they came fairly close to doing just that :)

Re:Doom on your phone...

[AndroidCat]

"This is your boss. If you keep playing Doom on company time, you're fired."