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Hurt Me Plenty - Remembering Doom
Thanks to TotalGames.net for reprinting a GamesTM article remembering the genius of id Software's seminal PC FPS, Doom. The article starts with the question: "How many of the lodestones of modern gaming do we owe to Doom?", and continues by arguing: "Without Doom conceiving the multiplayer deathmatch, it could be radically touted that the PC today would be an abandoned platform insofar as gaming is concerned." The piece finishes with comments on Doom 3: "While tradition alone will endear Doom 3 to many, the long-anticipated game may yet fail to make the evolving grade it was fundamental in establishing. Let it be said that the gaming world is nothing if not perverse."
While tradition alone will endear Doom 3 to many, the long-anticipated game may yet fail to make the evolving grade it was fundamental in establishing.
By that first line it sounds as if Doom 1 was REVOLUTIONARY (and it was to be honest). However Doom 3 will probably be evolutionary and does not attempt to be revolutionary as Doom 1 was. When you look at it that way, Doom 1 managed to strike the right balance of singleplayer action and increable multiplayer action. Doom 3 simply attempts to return to the days of bloodpumping, 'not sure if the next room will hold some horrible monster that will use up half your ammo' singleplayer action, and four player 'run for your frikin life because someone got the BFG before you' multiplayer action.
RtS games? The Sims? Civilization? Heck, SimCity did come out before Doom, after all. Notice the general lack of pure Adventure games on consoles? Notice the difference between computer RPGs and console RPGs?
Maybe I'm biased since I'm one of those rare cases that never got into Doom in the first place, but it wasn't the original first person shooter, and heck, from all I hear it's not the original deathmatch either!
Do you seriously think that if deathmatches had been invented on consoles (and they may well have been--see above link) that they would not be transferred to PC with online and LAN capabilities, quickly becomming more popular than the corresponding console equivalents?
Though yes, I'll agree that Doom deserves credit for popularizing it...the same way FF7 deserves credit for making RPGs more mainstream than niche.
It's a bit much to say that without deathmatch, the PC may be a dead platform. RTS is a genre as equally powerful as FPS (or at least it was back in the late 90's).
Doom was a classic. The reason I jumped to PC gaming. Can't say Doom 3 interests me in the slightest. Too little, too late.
Without Doom conceiving the multiplayer deathmatch, it could be radically touted that the PC today would be an abandoned platform insofar as gaming is concerned.
Sure, it was one of the first popular multiplayer deathmatch games for PC, but Doom didn't invent the multiplayer deathmatch idea.
I'm pretty sure that MIDI Maze & Faceball 2000 can claim the FPS multiplayer deathmatch credit for home gaming. It came out in 1987 and you actually used MIDI cables to create a ring network of up to 16 machines. Faceball followed in the same vein for the Game Boy (up to 4 players plus drones) and Game Gear (2 players plus drones). The ST game became quite a cult classic at user group meetings.
LAN parties before LANs! Yee ha. MIDI cables in the 80's. Where there's an FPS deathmatch will, there's a way...
Back in the 1995, the Usenet group boulder.general had some bozo who kept asking who the "Administrator" of this Usenet Group was (for those that don't know, there is none!) ... so a couple of us kept speaking up and jacking him around by saying we were ... but then (in typical Uselessnet fashion), there was a a big discussion about how come WE were the administrators, and how it should be decided ... it was all light-hearted.
We talked about settling with Rock Paper Scissors (aka RoShamBo) ... but we decided the best way was a DOOM deathmatch ... and thanx to Google, I actually found a web page that documents the DOOM Deathmatch to determine who is the Administrator of boulder.general ;-)
I also found a Usenet thread courtesy of Google Groups Note that we played on Pentium 90 MHz machine - was pretty state-of-the-art back then! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Doom was not first computer game. Doom was not first FPS. Doom was not first multiplayer game.
That's not the point.
When Doom was released everyone realized obvious things:
- you need fast video card (it was _before_ 3D accelerators!!!), after change from low-end VGA into high-end VGA you could clearly see why it's better
- you need sound card! before doom sound card was just "bonus" for rich players, but can you imagine playing doom without sound? if yes, then you don't know doom at all
- you need fast CPU _only_ for game, and there is no limit - just faster means more fps
Doom was game which started "hardware run".
Maybe you haven't noticed, but there is huge set of missions, graphics, sounds, etc... for Doom. It never happen before Doom. No game had so much contrib stuff. I had whole CD-ROM of that. Whole game was just few MB, CD-ROM had more than 600MB data. It's like 200 CD-ROMs of Civ3 missions.
Thanks to Doom players community changed. Players are important now. There is hardware made only for games (not just joysticks!), mission editor is stardard, there is always downloadable stuff for each popular game, there are servers working only as game servers, there is whole industry around. Was it really same before Doom? Compare budget of standard Atari game from 80s with any game today. And Doom was just milestone.
Early versions of Doom (Up to 1.6) you could enter the three commands below
Machine #1 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -left
Machine #2 : doom -devparm -nodes 3
Machine #3 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -right
and you'd have your main machine as the front screen, and the other two showing the left and right side, for a 270 degree wrap around mode
I actually got it working one night at a LAN, but couldn't 'unlock' my play style enough to use it effectivly.
Now you have video cards like the Matrox Parhelia-512 that do the same thing onboard, a mere 11 years later.
Wolfenstein wasn't the first of this genre either, I can remember playing Minotaur (Sorry no screenshots) on the Acorn Archimedes back in the late 1980's. Okay it wasn't nearly as advanced as Wolfenstein, but it was revolutionary at the time.
Close, but no cigar.
System Shock came out in 1994 with full 3D play.
Of course, it didn't have multiplay until the patch came out some time later.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Before DOOM, there was Spectre VR, which was all about multiplayer gaming...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
While I certainly enjoyed Doom more, didn't Castle Woolfenstein pre-date Doom by about a year or so?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Marathon was published in 1994; Marathon2: Durandal was 1995, and Marathon: Infinity was 1996.
Even the first Marathon was true 3D; at least the second and possibly the first had the ability to look above shoulder height. Even the first has deathmatch capability--only over AppleTalk, not IP!
(Offtopic, but Christ! What happened to the Bungie.com pages?! There's an obvious answer, of course--I guess they lost that gambit. At least they still have info on the old, pre-sellout games. But I digress.)
I still have fond memories of those games, and indeed, I think that they introduced some technologies to game mechanics that were later ignored by non-Mac users, who never played the Marathon series and so didn't recognize the debt that was owed.
--
$tar -xvf
Even earlier - as far back as 1971 Maze Wars
I remember playing this on a mac in the late '80s.