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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.""
Its been offline since 1998, when it was handed to Romero to look after, and has finally resurfaced.
Oh, how reassuring.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I think little handheld thingies from Tiger do this now :)
... And now thanks to /., it's offline again!
So when can we get a full daikatana archive? What? nobody else want the alpha's for that?
---- Anyone can act smart, but it takes a smart person to act stupid. ----
It's been close to 9 years since I first played doom and I still find myself strafing around corners from time to time.
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.
aus.music.scrapbook
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.
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.
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.
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
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...
- Please, ignore everything written above.
My Ass hurts.
| |
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And now again in 2002.
I know what you mean.
Yet Doom was more effective. Given Carmack and Romero were two different design aspects, one man being all about implementation and the other focusing more on content and art; and the question I always receive from people is the same...
"WHO THE FUCK DO I HOLD RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CYBER DEMON AND THE SPIDER MASTERMIND TO BARELY FADE AFTER BEING NUKED A HUNDRED TIMES WHEN I AM BUT A MERE MAN WHO CAN BARELY WITHSTAND 1 ROCKET BLAST MYSELF?"
Doom had so much immortal gameplay put into it that strategy of choosing how to fight one of the nearly immortal enemies is what caused many gamers to pass their Quake bootcamp with flying colors. Doom's cheatcodes is what separated the draft dodgers from the 1337 strategists. I'll never forget playing 2 player DOS DOOM1.666 over serial cable...I have never played a multiplayer Doom game ever since; I tried to play csDoom, but at the time some dork made a denial-of-service app and always intentionaly crash the csDoom server 'cause he didn't like the csDoom maintaner and the poor implementation. Go figure?
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
You know you have been playing DOOM too long when...
...going to sleep you open the bedroom's door and instead of turning lights on you fire a missile into the room.
...you sleep with a chainsaw under your pillow,and justify it with 'you never know what lurks in the dark'.
...going into a room or getting off an elevator, you run in and out quickly to see what follows you out.
...you don't worry so much about getting hurt, since you'll probably pick up one of those blue spheres somewhere.
...watching someone come out of an elevator makes your mouse finger twitch.
...the dog growls and you dive over the couch while reaching for a shotgun.
...you find yourself strafing around corners from time to time.
...you push on a wall as you walk down the hall looking for secret entrances.
...you rush for a neon-blue down vest in K-Mart.
...you reach for your chainsaw when your wife's cold gives her the sniffles.
...you search for a radiation suit before going into a swimming pool.
...you instinctively target trash cans while walking around campus/work.
...you look for sniper spots above you when getting in an elevator.
...you can't stop squinting as you walk around your house.
...you think you can actually walk through walls.
...you start making chainsaw noises if you hear a strange noise.
...you wish you had a chainsaw, just in case.
...you buy a radiation suit and Infra-red goggles, just in case.
But hes teaching for the Arts and Engineering program at the University of Texas at Dallas (where I'm hoping to go, major in computer science however)... Why yes this IS John Romero's name on the faculty list :P
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
Sign the petition to get IDSPISPOPD in Doom 3!
It's not a coincidence that the screencaptures are all exactly the same resolution as my Casio E125 Pocket PC. Carmack and the boys were way ahead of the curve waaaay back then, coding for my PDA.
Good job!
"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..
"The game runs fine on a 386sx, and on a 486/33, we're talking 35 frames per second, fully texture-mapped at normal detail, for a large area of the screen. That's the fastest texture-mapping around-period."
Well, we cant argue with the facts...
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?
It might be a demo, full version, or a test version. It would be a good way to celebrate 10 years of DOOM. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
"Its been offline since 1998, when it was handed to Romero to look after [...]"
He's a crappy webmaster too!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
John Romero is secretely a woman.
||||*
Which was, like, pong for people without any friends.
KFG
Most people wanted the alpha so badly they payed forty bucks for it.
Of course what they ended up getting was the *pre*alpha. Yeah, most people would love to be able to download an actual alpha version.
KFG
IDKFA hahahahahaha!
I'll see your IDKFA, and raise you an IDDQD
Yeah only the thing is John makes GAMES, id software has been an ENGINE maker since he left.
Sure Daikatana was a fuck up but he TRIED - he got it wrong, he's not a good manager maybe but he put an effort in.
If you've ever seen an interview with the guy or READ rome.ro you'd realise this guy has a REALLY great attitude about gaming - he's nostalgic - he enjoys games and he want's to have fun - the guy was crying because some moron like yourself sent him (yet another) abusive email just to make themselves feel better.
That's more than I can say for the id crew who seem to care less and less about each title, John C himself has said multiple times in interviews that certain aspects of a game are just gimmicks (even though said aspects would add to the title such as realistic physics in Doom 3) to put it bluntly as far as _I'M_ concerned Carmack and crew have far less enthusiasm for GAMES than they do engines...
He may have had a few failures in his time, but for christs sakes can we leave the guy alone now please???
Fine! I call. I've got IDSPISPOPD *and* IDKFA!
I bought Doom with my brother on two floppies for about $8C from Radio Shack. Then our harddrive crashed before we could install it, and had to live with playing Star Trek 25th on our temporary 10 MEGAbyte harddrive [I kid you not]. When we got our new hard drive, we also upgraded to 8megs of RAM. Wow that game was great. I would play it in a nearly dark room with the speakers up, and still remember JUMPING as some doors opened to imps.
Good times...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Why would anyone want to play a game that looks like DooM on the PS3 or XBox 2?
Why would anyone want to play a game that looks like the original Super Mario Bros. on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 based PC with a GeForce 4 processor?
Why would anyone want to play Solitaire on that same system?
Why would anyone want to play Tetris on that same system?
Because they're still fun.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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.
www.enthea.org
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! ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
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|ALYS|
Mario Sunshine is certainly not dark and distopian. It gives you worlds to explore. I haven't played anything else from the Gamecube, but given Nintendo's history, I'm sure that there are many other bright, cheerful games.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The thing that made DOOM, and no other game since has managed to recreate (apart from the Alien DOOM mod, which was basically DOOM again) was the atmosphere.
DOOM was a favorite on damp winter afternoons. I would play it wearing headphones so as to not disturb others in the house. It felt _creepy_. You felt a bit of anxiety as you could hear another Imp shuffling around the place, but couldn't tell exactly where he was. You'd jump when you went around a corner and suddenly heard one of those half-man-half-goat things shout "Wwooooooooooooooo!!!" and start hurling fireballs at you.
I've not found an FPS since that does that for me. ID got the atmosphere absolutely right on that, and I hope they can recreate this in DOOM 3 - to a bigger extent with the graphics capabilities they should have.
One afternoon, I was playing DOOM and got the fright of my life. I was playing along, headphones on, volume up, creeping around one of the levels when my housemate sneaked up behind me and threw one of those beanbag frogs that were used to prop open doors. The frog landed on my shoulder JUST as a room erupted with Imps. I almost died of fright!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Space Moose says so! (Search for 'gay couple')...
Its been offline since 1998
It may not be back online until 2006 by the time it recovers from the Slashdot attack
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
...that you got owned by a twelve year old with one of those 1337 h/\><><0r names?
I don't think GameSpy game out till 94 or so where it encapsulated IPX packets into TCP over the net, and even then it was too damn slow to use.
I remember trying to get my hands on every magazine about Doom when it came out. All of them contained pictures and articles about Romero. It was great, he seemed so into games, and gaming history and what id wanted to do with the future. He was the chest thumper, which no one has EVER seen the likes of in this industry. And we still haven't seen anyone come close since.
Truely the David Lee Roth of the computer industry.
"This is your boss. If you keep playing Doom on company time, you're fired."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
People love to bitch about the "current state of gaming."
You think there weren't shit games when Doom came out? I know; I was there. Crappy puzzle games, endless side-scrollers, bad shooters, and mediocre RTS games.
Have you not played Deus Ex? Or Black and White? How about taken a look at the next SimCity? Do you remember Half-Life? Or, as mentioned before, the Sims?
There have always been good games and bad games. Don't fall into the trap of "things were better back when..."
One of the really effective bits in Doom was the sound effects. In particular, one little trick - they would vary the pitch of the monster sounds by a bit each time they played it. Simple but very effective - when there were a dozen demons somewhere around the corner, it really sounded like a snorting snarling herd and not just one growling over and over and over.
I thought it was strange that I haven't seen this trick in any other games. Am I wrong?
You can bitch about the legacy (that Doom's niche has somehow perversely become so dominant), that's understandable. But don't blame the one who started it. Your real problem is that people suck (not Doom), because they're so imitative, trend-following, and formulaic.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If you played the betas, you did get a really neat looking BFG effect. The thing is, iD only changed how the effect looked, but not how it behaved.
:) Essentially, the BFG always had the effect of 2-stage firing. The first was the "zzzzZZZ.. whump-whump" which was shown as a big ball coming out. When the big ball hit the wall and went "zchooo," that's when the secondary fire (shown in betas as streamers from the mouth of the BFG) would act.
:) All you had to remember was that when the ball thingy hit, you had to have your targets in your view. If you did, they'd be hit by the (now invisible) streamers your gun put out.
This lead to some really FUN BFG antics. People started calling me a BFG bitch because I knew how to use it
So to quickly get a kill on someone you knew was below you, you'd fire, drop down in the second or so you had, and point the muzzle at their avatar. "AAAaaaahhh..." they'd die, cursing you for how every you managed to pull that BFG shot off
I learned this mainly from the BFG FAQ and experience.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If you're on a Windoze system, why not try jDoom? It's got great graphics from the screenshots.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
As another commenter has said, the "Bruisers" are Barons of Hell. I have the Doom Legacy source code (one of the source forks of the Doom sources that iD released) right in front of me. The internal name (the name used *inside* the game code) for the Baron of Hell is MT_BRUISER.
Since you're looking for connections between Doom and Doom III and possibly other "Doom lore", perhaps you'd be interested in knowing all the monsters' internal names (for Doom2--the Doom1 monsters didn't change any, so this applies to Doom1 as well).
This list will go in order of Thing number, which should not be confused with the Thing ID which is different. Internal names will be on the left.
MT_PLAYER Player / Doom Guy
MT_POSESSED Trooper / Zombieman
MT_SHOTGUY Shotgun Guy / Seargent
MT_VILE Arch-Vile
MT_FIRE (not a monster--arch-vile fire)
MT_UNDEAD Revenant
MT_TRACER (not a monster--Rev. Fireball)
MT_SMOKE (not a monster--Rev. Fire Trail)
MT_FATSO Mancubus
MT_FATSHOT Manc. Fireball
MT_CHAINGUY Chaingun Guy / Chaingun Seargent
MT_TROOP Imp (not trooper)
MT_SERGEANT (pink) Demon / dog-thing
MT_SHADOWS partially invisible Demon
MT_HEAD Cacodemon
MT_BRUISER Baron of Hell
MT_BRUISERSHOT (not a monster--Baron Fireball)
MT_KNIGHT Hell Knight
MT_SKULL Lost Soul
MT_SPIDER The Spider Mastermind
MT_BABY Arachnotron
MT_CYBORG The Cypberdemon
MT_PAIN Pain Elemental
MT_WOLFSS Wolf SS / Nazi
MT_KEEN Comander Keen
That's it for the Doom monsters. There are many, many other Things in the Things list. Including Heretic monsters as one code-base supports both Doom and Heretic now.
Furry cows moo and decompress.