Slashdot Mirror
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...
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.
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.
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.
If you read the wikipedia article on the FPS genre, Wolfenstein 3D was not the first FPS. Turns out that FPS games started in the 70's but were not released to the public (one was a US Army tank simulator). the first publicly released FPS was Battlezone released in 1980.
Wold 3D did however put the genre on the map. Doom had the privilege of being the first FPS with true modem and networked multiplayer.
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.
IDSPISPOPD - that was the fun one.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Most people don't realize how far we've come until you go back and play those games. If I recall correctly, in Doom, there was no jumping, and you couldn't aim up and down. The only way to move vertically was going up small steps, which your character automatically walked up. The levels were all 2 dimensional. It didn't support rooms above other rooms.
Other games like Descent, were more 3D, but as someone who designed levels in his spare time for the game, there's some weird stuff you can do in that game because the 3D engine was flawed, most likely to make it run fast enough. You could build a room with a floating cube in the middle. Put a door on one side of that cube. When you go through the door, you could enter a room bigger than the encompassing cube.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Was your cube blue, by any chance?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
Bah, why isn't there an undo mod command. I accidentally hit underrated instead of overrated. Now I have to reply, lose a mod point, and can't mod anymore in this thread. Oh and so I have a relevant comment: iddqd I AM INVINCIBLE TO YOUR MODS!
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Did you know that cold fjord liked Doom before you read his/her post? I believe we have all been informed.
Duke Nukem Forever is two years old. That make you feel better?
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.