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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.""
"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..
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.
Ash OS durbatulk, ash OS gimbatul, ash OS thrakatulk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul! Uzg-MS-ishi amal fauthut burgulli.
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.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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.
www.enthea.org
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