After 24 Years Doom 2's Last Secret Has Finally Been Discovered (polygon.com)

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After 24 Years Doom 2's Last Secret Has Finally Been Discovered (polygon.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday September 1, 2018 @03:34AM from the achievement-unlocked dept.

"Almost 25 years after it was released, Doom 2 has finally given up its last secret..." writes Polygon. An anonymous reader quotes their report: It's secret No. 4 on Map 15 (Industrial Zone). Now, the area in question has been known, seen and accessed by other means (usually a noclip cheat code). Getting to it without a cheat appears to be deliberately impossible, according to Doom co-creator John Romero. Romero tweeted out congratulations to the solution's discoverer, Zero Master. Zero Master figured out that the way to trigger the secret was to be pushed into the secret area by an enemy (in this case, a Pain Elemental).
Apparently the secret sector was an area just below the floor of a teleporter -- but entering that teleporter meant players rose up to the level of the teleporter's floor, according to Romero, so "you never enter the sector... you would never get inside the teleporter sector to trigger the secret."

One Reddit user notes Zero Master "has the first legit Doom 2 100% save file on earth, after 24 years."

62 comments

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Was it worth it? by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 03:42 · Score: 0, Funny

No.
Congrats! by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 03:45 · Score: 1

...on wasting 23.9 years of your life ;)
1. Re:Congrats! by Aighearach · 2018-09-01 07:18 · Score: 1
  
  If I play another round of freeciv, do I get an award or certificate?
That music nostalgia by guruevi · 2018-09-01 03:52 · Score: 5, Informative

Kids these days don't know but that game, music and sound effects all fit in less than 15MB and was infinitely more fun than whatever we have now.

--
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
1. Re:That music nostalgia by alvinrod · 2018-09-01 04:04 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I think the most recent Doom recaptured a lot of what made the originals enjoyable. Rather than loading the game with cut scenes and spending large chunks of time spouting exposition at the player (for a plot that's probably nowhere near as clever or engaging as the developers imagine) Doom cuts that to a minimum to allow people to actually play the game.
  
  People might like to complain about how everything these days is about graphics over substance or other arguments that are a little lazier than they should be, while forgetting that Doom (and later the Quake series) were at the time major drivers of graphical improvement themselves.
  
  I don't think that every game needs to be like Doom in order to be enjoyable. Sometimes a good narrative is exactly what a game needs, but by the same token their also need to be games like Doom where your just fighting hordes of demons and enjoying the visceral experience of tearing through the legions of hell-spawn. For a long time there was an absence of that as the FPS genre had evolved away from the type of game. However, I'm glad that it's back now.
2. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 04:09 · Score: 0
  
  Not long ago I was able to get 'Unreal' from GOG for free. It was just as much fun to play as it was back when it was new. The installer is a bit bigger than the one for DOOM though.
  Even with the aging hardware on the XP box I have for such games Unreal was blazing fast, no stutters with everything turned up to max.
3. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 04:45 · Score: 0
  
  The original shareware Doom installed from a single floppy disk. That means it was less than 1.44 MB.
4. Re:That music nostalgia by jellomizer · 2018-09-01 04:46 · Score: 1
  
  Most games have a lot of details that Doom never had. Even back then an Older EGA game like Kings Quest IV took about as much space but every static screen was much more detailed. Doom has a few dozen bitmapped images that were just scaled in size to create the effect. Most of the work was CPU driven vs storage driven.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
5. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 04:52 · Score: 0
  
  I don't think that's correct. My recollection is of it being an insanely large 5 MB download from the Internet for me.
  "...what's a zip file? The executable didn't come with it? I just wasted all that online time!"
6. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  A lot of that is nostalgia. Personally I found the old shooters quite tedious. Even games that managed to tell more of a story were riddled with grinding puzzles. If it hadn't been for network multiplayer, I think game development would have taken a very different direction after the first few of those shooters. People complain about senseless grinding in "free to play" games nowadays, and they're right about that, but some of the old games were almost as bad. Give an old shooter to a teenager and let them play. They aren't going to be impressed by the graphics. Do you think they will like the game for the gameplay? I doubt it. This story is about an "impossible" secret that was only found after 24 years. Tells you a lot about the way those games were designed, doesn't it?
7. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 05:16 · Score: 0
  
  Doom's installer was compressed and fit into around 2.1 MB, so it could theoretically have fit on a single 2.88 MB 3.5" disk... but I doubt anybody ever packaged Doom on one of those, as they were very rare. Usually it was just a couple of 3.5" floppies.
8. Re:That music nostalgia by Dutch+Gun · 2018-09-01 05:29 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I can go on Steam / GOG, the PS store, or Xbox store and find a bunch of old-school side-scrollers, RPGs, beat-up-ups, or whatever genre you like, all with graphics and gameplay teleported from many decades back in addition to the most modern, slickest of AAA productions, and just about everything in-between. So, "whatever we have now" encompasses a broader and more diverse range of games than we've ever had before. And I can legally browse and download a vast selection of it over the internet, which is pretty much as convenient as things could possibly get.
  Personally, I think gamers are living in a fantastic time, with more access to a broader range of games than we've ever had before. Yes, there are trends which are annoying or even alarming, but all in all, things are pretty great for modern gamers. If you're not enjoying games like you use to, maybe it's just you, not the games.
  
  --
  Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
9. Re:That music nostalgia by UnknownSoldier · 2018-09-01 05:33 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  > People might like to complain about how everything these days is about graphics over substance
  And for good reason -- one of the problems with Form over Function is pointed out with this sarcastic FPS Map Design: 1990 vs 2016, ironically using Doom as a reference.
  > Sometimes a good narrative is exactly what a game needs
  Minor quibble. Technically, every game has narrative; the difference is that it isn't also obvious but narrative falls into two categories:
  * Developer narrative -- fixed story, or branching story (e.g. Guardian Heroes), may or may not have cut-scenes
  * User narrative -- sandbox games, old-school FPS like Doom; the user's decision of what to experience IS the narrative.
  There is a reason that Minecraft is the number one best selling PC game of all time: User narrative
  Minecraft, the digital Lego of this generation, is built upon 3 foundations:
  * Survive
  * Explore
  * Build
  The in-game story is whatever the player wants without all the bullshit of "Hurry-up-and-wait" unskippable cutscenes.
  Looking at the top 5 PC game and tagging them we notice that you don't need cut-scenes in order to be successful.
  1. Minecraft -- user narrative
  2. PUBG -- user narrative
  3. Diablo III -- dev narrative
  4. WoW -- dev narrative
  5. The Sims -- user narrative
  Agree with everything else you said. Doom (2016) captures the essence of the original Doom.
10. Re:That music nostalgia by Dutch+Gun · 2018-09-01 05:34 · Score: 1
  
  People might like to complain about how everything these days is about graphics over substance
  This was a popular argument a few years ago. These days, it's tough to make that argument with a straight face when Minecraft and the resurgence of pixel-art-styled games clearly demonstrates otherwise.
  
  --
  Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
11. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 05:47 · Score: 0
  
  damn kids with their fortnite nowadays
  Games are just too damn advanced nowadays and they take it all for granted
  They got their damn animated dancing moves, back in my day we only had 10 prerecorded lines. If we wanted Duke to say more we had to download a soundpack and install it on every single computer.
  we didn't have no fancy internet multiplayer and online accounts either
  if we wanted to play multiplayer we had to boot up into dos and manually set up our network setting by hand
  and if we didn't put everything back to just how it was they kicked us out of the computer lab for a week. Kids have it too easy these days.
12. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 05:51 · Score: 0
  
  Yeah, nobody plays FPSs nowadays...
13. Re: That music nostalgia by reanjr · 2018-09-01 06:00 · Score: 1
  
  You can procedurally generate details far beyond Doom or even most modern graphics and still avoid the need for a TiB of textures.
14. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 06:04 · Score: 0
  
  back in my day we only had 256 colors AND WE WERE HAPPY TO HAVE EM
15. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 06:05 · Score: 0
  
  I still play BF1942/DC Final regularly. It's the only game I haven't got bored of playing the same levels, because they always turn out differently.
16. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 06:11 · Score: 0
  
  Shareware Doom for DOS came on 2 floppies. The registered version was 4 floppies.
17. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 06:16 · Score: 0
  
  The shareware version fit into a single floppy.
18. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 06:23 · Score: 0
  
  try the Brutal doom mod with a modern sourceport, such as gzdoom. I tried it out a while back, and kept going back to it until I'd played through the whole original doom and doom 2 with it.
  Main problem with the original game is that it's just too slow. It was designed for people using keyboard controls to look around while running the game at a low framerate. Brutal doom speeds everything up a bit, monsters, projectiles, just about everything across the board, adds some more gore, and makes it into a game designed for mouselook running at 60fps.
  Core gameplay is basically the same, it's solid even if it is a little simple.
19. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 06:44 · Score: 0
  
  Yep. It's easy enough to verify,
  http://www.uselesssoftware.com/download/doom-zip
  The wad is 1.7MB compressed, and as someone else mentioned... 2.88Mb floppies were rare at the time.
20. Re:That music nostalgia by war4peace · 2018-09-01 07:08 · Score: 2
  
  1. Minecraft -- user narrative
  Indeed, it's a true sandbox game.
  
  2. PUBG -- user narrative
  Fail. PUBG has no narrative whatsoever, it's a "easy to play, hard to master", game in the like of Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. One of the reasons it's so popular.
  
  3. Diablo III -- dev narrative
  ...with optional lore. You can play it without giving a shit about the narrative. Skip all dialogue, hack all monsters, win.
  
  4. WoW -- dev narrative
  Agreed. While you can play the game even while minimizing lore impact, sooner or later you will find yourself having to learn its essential aspects, otherwise you'd not be able to progress efficiently.
  
  5. The Sims -- user narrative
  Sandboxes are all like that.
  
  Doom (2016) captures the essence of the original Doom
  ...and does ONLY that. It's why I disliked it after the initial "awww this brings memories back" feeling. Of course, many people liked it because they just wanted to play the old Doom with nicer graphics and shit. I wanted more than that, but I know I'm a minority so no biggie.
  
  --
  ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
21. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 07:19 · Score: 0
  
  I fire up my emulator and have access to hundreds of thousands of games. Most are junk, but a lot of gems. It is a great time to be a gamer.
22. Re:That music nostalgia by Aighearach · 2018-09-01 07:19 · Score: 1
  
  Duke Nukem has Megadeath, though.
23. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 07:23 · Score: 0
  
  Pshhhh, lucky, for 10 years I had to stare at a green and black screen. And I paid to do it.
24. Re:That music nostalgia by Quake1v1 · 2018-09-01 07:24 · Score: 1
  
  Serious Sam Says "Sup?"
25. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 07:25 · Score: 0
  
  Nope. It required 2 floppies, you can find V1.1 on archive.org.
26. Re: That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 07:37 · Score: 0
  
  I could only finger middle schoolers.
27. Re:That music nostalgia by 24-bit+Voxel · 2018-09-01 11:01 · Score: 1
  
  Just a note that you can get the modern version of Unreal direct from the Epic Game website free of charge too. After going back and trying to find Quake 3 games, looking at new versions of quake and not liking them, I found unreal is largely unchanged and free. I've been playing an hour or so a week for a while and digging it. Check it out!
  Sure it's pre alpha but it's working just fine. https://www.epicgames.com/unre...
28. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 21:01 · Score: 0
  
  How exactly does couple of "pixel-art" games make the rest of the "big" games not be about graphics? I don't see a connection there.
29. Re:That music nostalgia by thegarbz · 2018-09-01 22:22 · Score: 1
  
  Kids these days don't know but that game, music and sound effects all fit in less than 15MB and was infinitely more fun than whatever we have now.
  The past is always viewed through rose coloured glasses. I disagree that Doom 2 was more fun than for example Doom 2016, or any of the other games I have thrown countless hours into playing as of late.
  Maybe you just got old and grumpy?
30. Re:That music nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 22:22 · Score: 0
  
  I played Doom back when it first came out and was blown away by the 3D effect. I had played Wolfenstein 3D before, but Doom was something different all right.
  But I never finished it. Not because it was too difficult, because it wasn't. It was just that shoot the thing, press the button, run to the door, shoot the other thing, and so forth got old really really fast. The gameplay is extremely repetitive and I just got bored with it. There were other games to play, books to read, things to do.
31. Re:That music nostalgia by Osgeld · 2018-09-02 02:12 · Score: 1
  
  oh yea its that comment
  actually if you sit down and play doom for even a moderate length of time, its quite boring and repetitive until the end levels then its boring repetitive and the difficulty ramps to 11, not because of good game design, only because of baddy spawn vomit
Why do I see a quake tag by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 04:02 · Score: 1

for a story about DOOM?
1. Re:Why do I see a quake tag by DontBeAMoran · 2018-09-01 04:42 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Because the article is totally UNREAL!
  
  --
  #DeleteFacebook
2. Re:Why do I see a quake tag by jellomizer · 2018-09-01 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  Because you haven’t upgraded you slashdot experience.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
3. Re:Why do I see a quake tag by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 15:29 · Score: 0
  
  Heretic!
4. Re:Why do I see a quake tag by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 21:30 · Score: 0
  
  Stop, you'll put a HEX en it.
5. Re:Why do I see a quake tag by DontBeAMoran · 2018-09-02 04:54 · Score: 1
  
  I hadn't heard of these in FOREVER.
  
  --
  #DeleteFacebook
6. Re:Why do I see a quake tag by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-03 01:14 · Score: 0
  
  I think it's pretty KEEN.
How.... by Luthair · 2018-09-01 04:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

would anyone be sure this is the first? Its not like Doom 2 has required an active internet connection for the past 24-years.
1. Re:How.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 04:31 · Score: 0
  
  They aren't sure at all. Much like many idiots think that if some phrase or something doesn't show up in search results, it's never been written/said...
2. Re:How.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 05:41 · Score: 0
  
  well, it's definitely the first video of it being done
3. Re:How.... by 93+Escort+Wagon · 2018-09-01 05:46 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  would anyone be sure this is the first? Its not like Doom 2 has required an active internet connection for the past 24-years.
  Dude actually accomplished this 18 years ago - it’s taken that long for his AOL dialup connection to go through so he could upload the video.
  
  --
  #DeleteChrome
4. Re:How.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 07:58 · Score: 0
  
  Also related are the idiots who think that the oldest instance they can find of a given phrase is obviously its origin...
5. Re:How.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 07:59 · Score: 0
  
  would anyone be sure this is the first? Its not like Doom 2 has required an active internet connection for the past 24-years.
  For any event described in the past tense, just pretend there is an implicit "known" suffix at the end.
  That is this is the first time known.
  If someone chooses not to claim finding it and explaining or showing how, they are already content with not being named the first.
  If someone found it long ago and forgot and never mentioned it again, well that's just how the recording of history works, for everything.
  Only if someone else did it, claimed it, but their claims didn't make it far and wide due to being before the Internet was popular would there be any purpose in bringing it up.
  And by all means do bring up such situations, as that is the only way to correct our recording of history to be accurate.
6. Re:How.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 08:11 · Score: 0
  
  also known as dictionary editors...
7. Re: How.... by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 08:58 · Score: 0
  
  I' pretty sure I knew that one back then. At least there was a case where one needed to be pushed to achieve something. Could well have been this. Or something that's just similar.
Yes! by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 06:58 · Score: 0

Finally, news worth posting about!
Is there a video by thadtheman · 2018-09-01 07:45 · Score: 1

of this secret?
1. Re:Is there a video by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 13:32 · Score: 1
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irNoHfnLXRM
2. Re:Is there a video by umberleigh · 2018-09-01 21:43 · Score: 2
  
  Yeah, it's linked in the summary: https://www.polygon.com/2018/8...
IDDQD by p51d007 · 2018-09-01 08:15 · Score: 1

And he won't have to worry about dying LOL.
Not All That It Seems by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-01 11:22 · Score: 0

Apparently this only applies to the original MS-DOS version of the game. The other ports fixed what they had thought was a bug so players have been routinely getting to the secret area (really wished my Doom 2 version had the "A secret has been revealed" messages. That would have saved so much time...).
There is a video at the top of the first linked article. All hail the mighty shotgun! The YouTube video doesn't explain anything, but you can see the guy doing it as he plays the level: https://www.youtube.com/embed/irNoHfnLXRM?rel=0
Come get some by AndyKron · 2018-09-01 12:24 · Score: 1

Fuck. I'm glad that was solved. Duke Nukem Rulz (but not forever)! Come get some!
Absolutely not by complete+loony · 2018-09-01 13:05 · Score: 2

Apparently the secret sector was an area just below the floor of a teleporter -- but entering that teleporter meant players rose up to the level of the teleporter's floor
Absolutely not. Doom is a 2.5D game. A sector has a floor and a ceiling height and is surrounded by either other sectors or the area outside the map. There is no *above* or *below* a sector. In this case the sector is marked as a secret, and the walls are marked as teleporters. Touch the walls and you are transported somewhere else, *before* entering the sector and claiming the secret.

--
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
1. Re:Absolutely not by Anonymous Coward · 2018-09-03 17:18 · Score: 0
  
  But Doom does track your height, which is why you fall off tall ledges rather than just ending up on the bottom floor instantly. The secret trigger (in fact most sector effects) specifically checks the player's height is the same as that of the sector floor. If you fly over a secret sector, it won't register until you land in it, same as why damaging floors don't affect you in mid-air.
  Also, most of these effects are based on the player's centre, so you have to actually cross the sector edge to trigger the secret, and you have to cross the teleport line to teleport away. The problem here is the step, if you took away the teleport property, you'd still be having the same issue with the secret.