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Doom Is Twenty Years Old
alancronin writes with a quick bite from the Dallas News about everyone's favorite FPS: "Few video games have had the impact that Doom has on the medium as a whole. While it wasn't the first first-person shooter out there, it was certainly one of the earliest hits of the genre, due in no small part to its revolutionary multiplayer. Today, that game is 20 years old. Made in Mesquite by a bunch of young developers including legends John Carmack and John Romero, Doom went on to 'transform pop culture,' as noted by the sub-title of the book Masters of Doom."
Yesterday, but who's counting. Fire up your favorite source port and slay some hellspawn to celebrate (or processes). I'm partial to Doomsday (helps that it's in Debian).
That's like saying "Singing legends Elvis Presley and Right Said Fred."
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...
There were some fragging good times playing that with friends.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I remember a friend and I bought the full version of Doom at a shareware vending machine at a local mall. We brought our own floppies and a two rolls of loonies to pay for it. Then spent the rest of the day taking turns playing on his 486. Good times! :D
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I believe Wolfenstein 3D was the first, but I could be wrong about that.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Maze War, 1973
My first memory of DOOM was playing it on a 385 25MHz with 2 MB of RAM. Yeah, that ran like a slideshow. I couldn't understand the big deal. Shortly thereafter I got a screaming 486DX 66MHz with 8 MB of RAM. THEN I understood why the game was a big deal.
I feel silly, but I started playing this game pretty young, about 9 or 10. And I was terrified. Not enough to stop playing mind you. But the snorts of the imps in adjacent rooms really terrified me. If I wanted a bigger scare, I'd turn off all the lights. I sure played games differently then. Not like I play games now, where I stroll around with a cocky sense of invincibility, just soaking damage and pressing the kill button as fast as I can.
May the game live on forever in everyone's PCs.
...you love me..
BLAM!
Best Slashdot Co
My roommate came home back in '93 with a bootleg copy of the original game. After we installed it, we were concerned about "going to HELL," so we called id Software.
"Hi, we're calling because someone gave us a bootleg copy of Doom...
"And...?"
"We need the address, so we can send a check... how much do we owe you?"
The person on the phone, after recovering from their shock, gave us the address, and told us to make sure to include OUR mailing address with the check.
A few weeks later, we received a boxed copy of Doom, and a bunch of other cool swag.
Doom always reminds me of my first first person shooter multiplayer experience.
My friend got his first 1x CDROM/Soundcard package for his 486 SX 25, and it came with a bunch of free games. We haggled and traded these crappy games at our local computer shop for a Null Model Cable, after discovering the Intersrv.exe and Interlnk.exe files and reading the help /? and realising that we could get 2 computers to "talk" to each other.
After enormous amounts of trial and error, tweaking config.sys and auto exec.bat, we were able to copy the doom.exe using a null model transfer to another computer, and have player vs player games. We had a lot of fun and felt like this was the cutting edge of gaming, or at least in our world.
Doom for me is the foundation of all modern multiplayer games, regardless of it was the first - i still have fond memories of where it all started for me. It's mind blowing to think about the games industry these days and how it's evolved.
We didn't have search engines or ways to connect with other people of similar minds to solve the problems that we encounter. From these early gaming experiences I learnt enough about DOS and the PC to make it my hobby and later my career.
I owe Doom more than just many hours of entertainment, in a round-about way.
I'd starting tinkering with computers about the time the MicroAce came out. I moved through the Vic, C64 and C128... and then to the Amiga. While I wouldn't consider myself a fan-boy, I supported the brand almost to a fault.
It wasn't until one day, in a Sears, I saw an Asus 486/DX2-66 for sale, and they were running DOOM on it. I bought a PC for no other reason than to play Doom.
I'm now an IT manager over our hardware repair and oncall function, and I owe it to the day I went "PC Compatible"... over a freakin' video game.
The first 1st personish game I remember on a PC was Tunnels of Doom on the TI 99. It's certainly wasn’t an FPS, but good portion of the game was moving through the hallways (or tunnels I suppose), which was from a 1st person perspective.
Ahh Tunnels of Doom; nothing like sitting around for 40 minutes while the game loaded from a cassette tape drive.
If you suddenly feel the need to play Doom after reading this and long since don't have a copy, I recommend Freedoom. Same engine and gameplay, levels are little different. Tons of fun.
http://www.nongnu.org/freedoom/
If your running a debian\ubuntu system, it's probably as simple as sudo apt-get install freedoom
I don't think you need a special PPA
I gather it runs on Windows, but I don't know much about that.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
IF EVER office productivity needed a kick...
Why is the google doodle today NOT a playable version of Doom?
Make note. For the 21st bday, it should be a link to local liquor stores and a playable version... You have one year to get on that...
Sincerely
Everyone that does not feel like working today...
I am 31337 or something.
We celebrated the 20th anniversary of Doom this year at RetroEuskal (which is held within Euskal Encounter in Bilbao, one of Europe's largest LAN parties with about 5000 people who bring their machines (Euskal Encounter itself has been going for 21 years now, it came out of the Amiga demoscene and still hosts quite a bit of demoscene stuff).
Here's the video I made of the tournament. Proper e-sports with prizes and everything :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukdDE96RN3w&noredirect=1
We also had a tournament in November at RetroMañía at the University of Zaragoza.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Check out DoomRL for a rougelike Doom experience. It works surprisingly well.
Yes I am gonna be that guy. Doom was certainly one of the earliest hits of the genre ON THAT PLATFORM. The FPS Tail Gunner came out in 1979. I thought it was quite a hit. Maybe I was wrong.
Marathon was better.
It's a shame that Marathon was a Mac-only game for the most part, as a lot of PC gamers missed out on a great title.
Bungie later got their just desserts through the success of the Halo franchise, but said rewards were quite overdue by that point.
I remember having to turn off error correction and compression on the modem to this, because the "packetizing" of the data stream made gameplay very laggy otherwise.
You also needed a 16550A UART for smooth gameplay. Most PCs at the time had 8250s or 16450 which had NO BUFFER! Every byte that came in generated an interrupt, which slowed things to hell. The 16550A had a 16 byte buffer, but that was enough to solve the problem.
The first time I played 4-player multiplayer DOOM on a gaming BBS with a 16550A UART (add-in serial card!) and error correction/compression turned off on the modem, I was blown away. It was the best multiplayer gaming experiences I had ever had to that point.
My first encounter of doom was when browsing the shareware rack at the local computer shop. I already had Wolfenstein 3D and loved the game and I remember it was made by id. So this Doom game was also made by id and looked interesting. Installed it on my 486DX-33MHz with 4MB ram and was blown away. Didnt run smooth but that was fixed when my father bought a 486DX2-66MHz with 16MB of ram for CAD work. what an amazing game and it sucked up hous of my time.
In high school our computer lab consisted of 486's (either DX25's or SX25's) which were networked with 10base2 coax and network booted though they also had 3.5 floppy drives. The server was netware and there was a shared student directory with a directory for each student to store their work in. The teacher was also the head of IT and he was frequently absent for most of the class allowing us to goof off as much as possible. I then got an idea: could I install Doom on the server? So I brought in my floppies and installed doom in my shared directory under another directory to keep it "hidden". I tested it out and it worked! My friends were all going ape shit when they saw me playing doom in class. Of course any student could read and write the other students directories so the other students had no trouble running doom from my directory. It was my first experience playing true multiplayer over a network. Though it wasn't all that great with the slow PC's and it took forever to load the damn game over the sickly slow network. But we had a shitload of fun. That was around 1994/95. Good times.
sit down kids, the old mans about to tell a story.
.....get off my lawn.
Doom, the game, meant so much more than any bejewel clicking farmville grinding facebook gaming ass-scratching fruit-ninja with a bird in a slingshot can ever hope to understand; but you can learn to.
it was 20 years ago that I sat in a dark bedroom beset with mountain dew and doritos, the boomy din of Nine Inch Nails churning away as I poured through the WAD file editor on a sunny saturday afternoon and a smirk on my face knowing the level I uploaded to the BBS that evening would be a work of art. It was designs for floors and trap doors and creative new weapons that filled my 3 ring binder during gym class and on the bus ride home I'd power through 30 minutes of the most unforgiving motion sickness in the tri-county area thinking about new places to stick a cacodaemon or a pain elemental. Doom was my respite, but it was also my temple. the days torment and teasing in school meant nothing once i heard the first few notes of the devils tri-tone main-screen theme and laid eyes on 'doom guy.' Network modem multiplayer and the joy of a friends new map, or the hillarity of a deathmatch laiden with machine gun rocket launchers of our own devise were the the epitomy of my childhood. Dooms wad editing frenzy pushed me into computer programming despite all odds. Six years later the mere act of playing doom was enough to send parents scrambling for body armor and in my case, suspended me for a week thanks to my inability to stop talking about Doom 2's shotguns and their modifications in school after the Columbine Massacre revealed its duo played the dreaded game.
Doom was analogous to who i was as a child. one lone guy trying to get past an ocean of seemingly endless torment and assault if only to make it to the next level where despite the horror of it all I still tried as best i could to beat the records and discover everything i could.
now go. buy a copy of doom and start knee deep in the dead as so many of us have, and *sniff*
Good people go to bed earlier.
And the day I really wanted to play it was gone.
First commerically available FPS? I nominate Phantom Slayer..1982
FIrst Person? Yes!
Shooter? Yes!
Spooky as well....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uFxq0dZ49c
Doom came out around the time that I lost interest in gaming. I think the fact that the medium was overtaken by first-person shooters was part of the reason.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Neat, I'll have to check it out. Wonder if it works with Brutal Doom.
Brutal Doom is possibly the best Doom mod ever. Check out this review.
Had a ton of fun with it. It's not extra levels, instead you play the same old levels with smarter monsters, heavier weapons and extreme brutality. The latter seems silly now, it's all just sprites, but I wonder how that would have been received in 1993.
Zenimax wouldn't allow it.
Thanks for making me feel old, Slashdot. I remember skipping classes at college because of DOOM.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
Although I thought Doom was cool and all at the time, it wasn't until Half-Life that first person shooters became my game genre of choice.
I remember downloading the shareware version of DOOM from a BBS shortly after it was released. Shooting at the soul sphere displayed in level 2 because I didn't' know what it was, and then almost falling over dizzy when I had to get up and go!
It certainly wasn't the first FPS to exist or even have networking (see Mazewar on the Xerox Alto), but it was the first to provide a fully immersive experience (full screen, all surfaces with texture, and sound) on a common desktop PC.
When I first heard of DOOM, and even judging by a leaked alpha (5/22), It looked like it would be a slow interactive game similar to Ultima Underworld. Boy, did that turn out not to be the case!
The thing that really kept it popular was how easy it was to create completely new levels.
And then having to upgrade from 4 to 8 megs to keep episode 3 from chugging away...
Not quite. The technology allowed quite a bit more than that-- XGA was already a standard, and Super VGA was quite common. I remember having a workstation (not mine, the boss's) in 1992 that could do 24-bit color at 1280x1024, and it was hardly top-of-the-line.
However, the Id team wanted to make sure DOOM could run on the widest installed base possible, so they targeted standard VGA with a 386 CPU.
Well, perhaps not a dark and stormy night, but a dull, windy and wet winter Saturday afternoon.
I was playing Doom on my 486, with headphones on on said dull afternoon. I had been playing a while and was really into it - Doom actually has great atmosphere with the music and the sounds of the various creatures and monsters shuffling around the map, and especially good atmosphere when played in a dimly lit room with proper headphones that cover the ears.
So my friend who I lived with at the time comes back from wherever he'd gone for the afternoon. In this place we rented there had been left these bean bag things for propping open doors. My back was to the door, and my friend seeing me fully engrossed in the game picks up one of these small bean bag frogs and throws it at me. The bean bag landed on my shoulder at the EXACT MOMENT one of those demons that go "Whoooooooooooo!!!!" (the ones that fire rockets) appeared behind me on the same side as the shoulder on which the bean bag had landed...
I almost died of heart failure right there on the spot. I certainly screamed like a little girl.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Other than Tetris, I can't think of a single game that's been ported to more platforms, and played more than DOOM has -- there are people right now, somewhere in the world still playing doom -- and I'm one of them.
What I enjoy about doom is that it's simply everywhere. I remember being at an E3, and among other new releases for the Super Nintendo (yes the 16 bit), was a DOOM cartridge. The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone), one of my favorites was finding the engine for SGI machines and SUN platforms very early on -- so, yeah... you could play it on a cheap 486, or on your high-end $20,000 workstation, it was (and still is) literally everywhere.
My prediction is that regardless of what new platforms materialize in the future, some enterprising hacker will port DOOM to it, making the franchise one of the most durable in the history of videogames.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Because they were HIGH quality graphics for the day. Consumer computer graphics pixel resolution (at least in the 2D era) was mostly limited by the cost of RAM. I boggle at modern graphic cards having a gigabyte or more of video RAM, especially when they're in a computer with 4GB RAM.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
It seems like it was just yesterday I was playing this game when it came out. Had a null modem cable to connect 2 PCs in adjacent rooms. Was too short to reach thru the hallway so we had to swing the cable window-to-window to connect. Endless battles between my brother and I. Creating custom levels using the free tools (DCK, I think?).
I started out playing Pong. Zork and other nascent games followed. Our grandmother taught us how to program, since she was the first one in our part of the state to own one of the early IBM PCs (the one with the 4"x4" screen). Atari, Colecovision, Sega, Nintendo, were all part of our mother's milk, digitally speaking.
Doom in college, though, was the first time I felt horror at playing a computer game. When the T-Rex demons came for me at the climax, with the creepy music, I felt something past the usual reflex adrenaline. Amazingly 20 years later we're still mostly at the adrenaline reflex and the genre has yet to fully come into its own as a medium for artistic expression, but the imminent demise of TV and its Baby Boomer audience hint at much better things to come. Doom, I think, will be cited by future gamer audiences and critics, as one of the classics that laid firm claim to creative seriousness.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I occasionally get nostalgic for those days back in 1994 but I have a big problem reliving them due to the sophistication of the audio in this game. You see, it was designed to play high quality MIDI if you happened to have a $1000 sound card. Of course I nor most of my friends did not have that... I had the standard soundblaster chip on my 486.
So when I play it in DosBox or whichever emulator, the sound is just too good! It is not the same as when I played it before!
Any tips on how to recreate that standard 1994-1995 486 experience aside from finding an old pc and installing win95?
I never did figure out how to get off of the first level. Of course, I was playing with a keyboard and mouse which didn't make the game too enthralling in the first place. Haven't bothered much with FPSs since, to be honest.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
I seem to remember a story awhile back where an EULA contained a line like
"The first person to call 1-888-555-5555 will get a prize of $10,000"
Apparently it took a few months, but somebody actually did call the number and get the prize. This was after thousands of people clicked "accept" to the EULA (basically providing that almost nobody really reads the damn things).
Some of the greatest things about Doom were the mods and multi-player capabilities. I remember tons of work just getting the damn null-modem, modem (and later network) play to work. Fiddling with connection strings, jumpers for IRQ's to get the @$)!(@! modem or ethernet card to work, and then later messing around with IPX/SPX drivers etc
Once that was all done, the mods. Custom maps, music (Doom was quite fun played to "hall of the mountain king" midi, and especially to "dance of the sugarplum fairy"), and weapons mods made the old seem new. The BFG behavior was basically to spawn small sub-blasts on enemies in an area around the main blast. One bit of fun we had was modding those sub-blasts into a "main blast", which would then spawn their own blasts etc. One shot in a crowded room would propagate through everything and bring slower machines to a crawl (afterwards, all the baddies were slag, though).
Though spin-offs such as Heretic etc were fun, nothing was quite as enjoyable until Duke3d came around with the ability to look/point/move (including jumping/ducking) in a less constrained fashion, and to build maps with 3d stacked floors and destructible walls/windows/etc.
That, and you'd have gotten something like 1fps playing doom in 1280x1024 in true color back then, and you'd probably be using all your video memory, so you'd get to watch each frame as it was rendered.
here I was all excited that coefficient governing rate of expansion of universe was sufficient to cause Big Rip in two decades. but instead of some cool cosmic doom it's just gamer bullshit. lame.
About the only thing that comes up every now and again about Doom and Doom 2 was that we laugh among friends about the memory of not being able to Jump.
You never ran SETUP.EXE did you? Pick Sound Blaster for music. Also some source ports such as Chocolate Doom have OPL emulation. It even has PC speaker emulation if you have the fetish for the ol' beeper.
The ISA bus is the prime limiter. VLB was only a luxury and PCI only belonged to those spoiled rich Pentiumgrillhaving assholes....
I was a teen(ager) back then! I got it from a local BBS, but couldnâ(TM)t play it. My next door neighbor could on his 386 DX machine, but he had to study for finals so he only played a few levels. Haha. Years later, I made two DOOM 2 mod(ification)s: http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/files/doom2/j2doom/j2doom.html ⦠I think I played DOOM at 9600 speeds with my next door neighbor (we both had 14.4k modems! :().
Does anyone remember what time DOOM 1 shareware was released to the public? I couldn't find that answer.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So when I play it in DosBox or whichever emulator, the sound is just too good! It is not the same as when I played it before!
What I want is for the DOOM Collection Complete for PS3 to sound like SNES DOOM, which was My First DOOM
Considering that the 1991 SNES had a 256 color mode...they chose that mode for DOOM so that it wouldn't require a very high end machine.
Course in a few years 3D hardware would enable running 24 bit color games on relatively low end hardware (like the PSone)
Chocolate doom has built-in emulation of the adlib chip that was present on the ubiquitous soundblaster cards of the 90s
Oh the fun coordinating the networking as everyone had to intiate at the same time with exactly the same specified number of players. Four floppys of gold they were, the University's 486's never worked so hard, I'm just glad I was there.
I don't know what Carmack did in the business world, but he was little more than a teenager when he created the first 1st person, 3D shooter (Wolfenstein ). That was freakin fantastic at the time. Everything before that, that I remember, was 2D scrollers of one sort or another (Dragon's Lair was phony 3D). Not only did he pull that off first, he did it with a 286 computer. That's scarey impressive. That's what's so excellent about him. He followed that up with Doom (I'm skipping Spear of Destiny since it was pretty much like Wolfenstein). Each game had a generous trial version. Later Carmack made the 3D engine public, with tools for people to create their own levels. I suppose most people know that, but I don't know if most here were around and playing games when it happened. He set a fantastic precedent, and I respect the guy for a massive brain and the willingness to try to get the genre going full speed.
Doom has been and always will be my favourite fps. To play Doom properly, you needed a combination of brains, reflexes, and skill. I laugh at the modern day gamers that get frustrated with the puzzles in Doom, or get frustrated when they start running low on ammo and health and have already mostly used the tight resources in the level. I especially love it when they play Nightmare difficulty for the first time, and throw a fit when they can't get very far. Modern Shooters really do have a lot to learn from the great granddaddy of them all (as in the one that really defined the genre).