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."

Comments

1987 LAN parties: via MIDI

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree

[bckrispi]

Duke 3d added shooting on the Y plane and not just X and Z

Actually, IIRC, it was Star Wars: Dark Forces that first introduced the three dimensional aiming. I remember an ad that ran in some gaming magazines when it was released. It was a simple screenshot showing your crosshairs aiming at a stormtrooper's head. The tag line went something like: We've added a new dimension to gaming.

Doom had a unique gameplay mode

[EvilBastard]

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.

Re:Hyperbole to the Nth Degree

[default luser]

If *any* game(s) cemented the shift from SP to MP, and help keep PC gaming alive today, I'd say it was UT and/or Q3, *not* Doom.

Wrong. There are two "games" that helped cement the multiplayer culture, and you're wrong on both counts. One came before UT and Q3 and one was developed concurrently.

First of all, Quake was an evolution in multiplayer gaming. the community-supported Quakeworld was a revolution. It is one of the earliest multiplayer games to feature client-side prediction, and the experience was fluid even on 32-player internet servers...something that would bring a Quake server to it's knees.

Combine this with incredibly popular free mods and total conversions like Team Fortress that revolutionized gameplay, and you had a multiplayer platform that eclipsed even the popularity of Quake II at it's peak.

Half-Life is the second game on the list, not because the original HL multiplayer was anything special, but because it served as a platform for...

Counterstrike.

I know a lot of you bag on this game, but you just don't seem to understand how popular it is. The game is not even at it's peak anymore, and there are still over 100 THOUSAND active players at peak during the week. That's more players than every other current multiplayer FPS COMBINED.

Why?

It was free, well polished, and adapted gameplay styles from other genres. No rocket launchers plus the equipment purchase system made for a fresh look, and people ate it up.