Fragged, fragged and thrice fragged! 20 years of id Software’s Doom

id Software’s Doom – the definitive first-person shooter – is 20 years old today. It was uploaded to the University of Washington’s servers at midnight, 10 December 1993 in the form of a .zip file containing the game and the first set of levels. It didn’t take long to generate a massive buzz – and because id was offering extra …

[Jedit]

Doom vs Wolfenstein 3D

An apt comparison. If you didn't like Doom, then you do like Hitler.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah the good old days, but

Dont forget the era of mods!

the aliens mod for Doom II was amazing!

check those corners.....CHECK THOSE CORNERS..

[TeeCee]

I remember someone on cix saying that he'd allowed his 7 year old to play Alien Doom, on one condition.

Playing rights were to be instantly and permanently rescinded if he ever said "Die motherfucker" in front of his mum.

[BernieC]

Brilliant

This ranks as one of my favourite comments ever.

[John A Fotheringham]

Ah the Aliens mod...

Played with the lights low and the sound up, that was a seriously scary version.

Not helped by the fact that I had a mouse problem at the time which meant every so often my gun would go off in automatic mode, making me jump and wasting all the far-too-scarce ammo that I had.

Happy days...

[AndrueC]

I had a humorous sound FX mod. The brown fire spitting monsters used to announce their presence with 'Yoo hoo' and 'Coo-ee'.

Classic fun.

[AdamWill]

the best thing about Aliens TC was the genius decision to put no monsters into the first level. awesome idea.

[asdf]

Re: Ah the good old days, but

The mods I remember most was the mod that turned Satanic creatures into Barney the dinosaur and friends and the sound mod that include dialogue from the classic movie Army of Darkness. This is my boomstick.

[Steve the Cynic]

+1 Scary

I remember sitting one night in a room lit only by a monitor playing Doom. I was cracking through episode 2 and had to stop and laugh at myself halfway through my first encounter with Rockethands, because the dark and the hunt had my heart going twenty to the dozen, thumpthumpthump.

Good game.

[James Hughes 1]

What Lucy said

Only game that made me look behind me when playing late at night.

[Thomas 4]

The id legacy

Hmmm, I dunno if I can really see Doom and it's ilk with the same hint of nostalgia.

Wolfenstein 3D, for me at least was an exercise in frustration - no maps, no easy way of finding hidden sections of wall aside from just spamming the use button everywhere and the shared ammo system for every weapon meant that once you had the next one up (e.g. machine gun to chain gun) you never used it's predecessor again.

Doom 1 was good for the reasons stated in the article, although sadly I never got to play deathmatch. Doom 2 was a mixed bag for me. It seems like the level designers had a lot more fun this time around, with lots of evil tricks (e.g. a plasma rifle beneath a huge slab of falling rock should you attempt to pick it up, turning the demons against each other). That said, there were some glaring issues with it - certain levels were nothing more than meat grinders without much strategy or design involved. Only one new weapon was added and some of the new creatures were just downright annoying (the resurrecting, flame spamming Archvile springs to mind).

It wasn't until Doom 3 that I genuinely felt The Fear, playing with the sound up and lights down. It seemed like more thought had gone into creating a realistic space environment, harking back to Doom 1 and then a lot more thought had gone into making afforementioned environment as laundry soiling as possible. The business with the endless keypads and numbers was a bit much.

[CD001]

Doom3

Doom 3 ... the atmosphere was excellent and genuinely scary - my other half came to see if I was coming to bed late one night during a Doom 3 session, in the dark, with headphones on... to get my attention she tapped me on the shoulder - I swear I screamed like a girl and nearly had a heart attack O_o The graphics were great, sound effects excellent, solid level design and, though rather clichéd, I enjoyed the story.

The _only_ downside with Doom 3 was that it became dated very quickly; not the old atmosphere tricks like very low, flickering lighting and quiet spooky noises suddenly punctuated by bursts of RAAAAH as some demonic monstrosity pounced on you as you opened a door, those are fine ... but a couple of months after Doom 3 was released Valve released Half-Life 2.

Suddenly, playing Doom 3 and walking into chairs without being able to just pick them up and throw them away, just felt very, very old.

[banjomike]

Yay, Nintendo DS version of Doom

It is actually pretty good.

[Audrey S. Thackeray]

And the Jaguar's version too.

[Anonymous Coward]

use on a network....

Bloody hell, I remember linking my 486 to my mates 386 with a home made serial cable, oh and humping your full sized tower and back breaker CRT halfway across town.

[Zot]

386?

Of course they had to play it on a postage stamp size window, just to get an acceptable frame rate.

[monkeyfish]

Re: use on a network....

Thomas? Is that you? The 386 was a bit crap though, had to have the screen res so low it was just a little box in the centre of the screen.

[Ron Christian]

Re: use on a network....

I remember playing Doom on Sun workstations -- already networked, it all just worked together. Great deathmatches.

[Mondo the Magnificent]

Magnifique El reg!

Brilliant! If I am not mistaken it made 41 in PC Gamer's Top 100 Games of all time 2010.

It was the first game I ever played that allowed collaborative on line play, up to 4 players

Man I spent hours playing that and recall how version 1.0 would kill the company network with SPX/IPX packets. 1.1 onwards resolved this issue, but sysadmin was still not happy.

There were also some sick mods with Aliens and Jurassic Park themes and weapon upgrades in modified .WAD files. My fave was upgrading the hand gun with an IMI Desert Eagle. Same punch as the shotgun!

Sneaking around corners, shooting exploding barrels, going up stairs and down via elevators, it changed gaming as I knew it. Imps, beasts, zombies and demons all set on a planet far, far away with a choice of weapons to match including..... a chainsaw!

Followed by Doom2 followed which all had the same look and feel with new environments and challenges

Sadly other great games like Quake and DN3D were released and Doom semeed a little aged, but nothing could beat it for the president it set in the gaming world.

Thank you John Carmack, American McGee and rest of ID Software for the best spent hours I "wasted"[?] playing this epic FPS

Off topic: I recall seeing a dead Doom Marine in a level in Duke Nukem 3D, what nice homage to the groundbreaking FPS.

Two thumbs up!

[Andy Farley]

Ah yes.

When level design meant more than an attractive single route the player could go down with cutscenes at the end. Managing your ammo, bypassing a health pack when you're at 95% because you'd waste 15% of it and you wanted it available to go back to – all these things make for a better game, regardless of how many bells and whistles the graphics engine distracts you with.

Talking about corridors my favourite level was in a Doom add-on. You teleported in to a long corridor with the out-teleport at the other end. There were loads of really tough daemons facing away from you and a shed-load of explosive barrels lining it.

Eureka moment – leg it down the corridor then turn and shoot a far barrel with the pistol. All the daemons start to turn round. Watch the chain reaction as the barrels blew race down the corridor taking them out – step backwards on to the teleport just before the shock wave reaches you...brilliant.

[James Marten]

Still fragging

Totally agree with your enthusiasm for this classic game. The graphics and movement may be primitive compared with today's technology, but the gameplay is still as good as anything that has appeared since. I still play it regularly and have not tired of it yet - how many gamers will still be playing COD:MW3 twenty years from now?

By the way, there appears to be an Android version available too.

[Richard Wharram]

Just don't mention Doom 3.

Seriously.

[irish donkey]

DOOM ruined my life.... who can I sue

If somebody hadn't shown me DOOM,

I would never have bought a computer,

I would never have gone to University..... and I wouldn't be working in IT

Some games will just never die. How many modern games will still be selling this far past their sell by date. Not many

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, happy memories

Reminds me of happy hours spent in the uni computer labs. They made the mistake of having a shiny new cluster of largely unsupervised 50mhz 486s about a month before this came out. As the only computers on campus that could play this properly they suddenly became a lot more popular. Of course any directory called doom in the root of the c drive didn't last long, we soon learnt to install it in a directory called word or a sub-directory of windows where it would last a little longer before we needed to bring in the stack of floppies again. Ac because my username here is my old uni mainframe account name.

[Phil A.]

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant

Doom is the best game ever written - the graphics were amazing for the time, the music superb and the atmosphere electric.

On top of that, the multiplayer was incredible - I'd hate to count the hours of productivity I lost playing deathmatches when I should have been working

In the history of video games, Doom is right up there with Space Invaders and Pong as a milestone in the evolution of the industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, awesome music which is now my earworm.

Thanks for that.

[Anonymous Custard]

Ah yes, fond memories indeed. Also fun to let of steam with the cheat codes (IDDQD and IDKFA if I remember correctly, even after 20 years or so) and running around just using the chainsaw (or the BFG if the mood took you).

[Ian Stephenson]

Don't forget:

IDSPISPOPD !

[Iainn]

Correct

As I type, I have the immortal (in more ways than one) letters IDDQD emblazoned on my water bottle at work. Not a single person yet has ever 'got it'...

[AdamWill]

oh, but...

...you're not hardcore unless you know *why* it's DQD.

[MrT]

Delta...

...but Chuck Norris didn't Quit...

[Destroy All Monsters]

Is it bad...

...that I flashed back to my rushing of the stairway shown in the "Alien resurrection" map screenshot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ermm....

I managed to persuade the charity I worked for to stump up for a Netware license so I could play doom deathmatches...in my defence I only arranged them after hours, and I did spend some time doing maintenance whilst my guest killed each other with gusto.

Later I realised I could load all the relevant drivers from a boot floppy, and didn't need the server...ah well, we got a really good deal, and it did make the training computers work far better...

[Anonymous Coward]

1st Screnshot

The 1st screenshot, is that a 3D model remake?

The original was all sprites.

Also, regarding availability, it is available on XBox live (or at least, in my drunken state, I managed to get it on the XBox...). Cue much whinging and gnashing of teeth about joypad vs. keyboard.

Played it on my first PC, a 486. After being used to 2D platformers, was a revelation!

[HollyX]

2nd screenshot

The second one is ... if you find the 320x200 spritelyness of the original a little hard to bear on today's massive (by 1993 standards) there's a full 3D-mapped version thats actually quite good, even if it does take a little of the nostalgic magic out

[AndrueC]

I once spent a long weekend playing the entire trilogy from beginning to end. It took nearly a week for me to stop feeling nervous when I approached a doorway :)

I'd like to see a modern equivalent. I know there's a lot of first person shooters but what I miss from Doom was the relatively free movement (go anywhere you like) and pretty much infinite ammo. It's obviously not realistic but I loved being able to just let rip and empty the entire magazine of the Gatling gun without having to worry about where the next ammo chain was coming from :)

[Sooty]

there are a few

Serious Sam, and Painkiller were attempts to recreate the old feelings of playing doom. There are probably more out there

[Piro]

Still holds up

It's still a great game. I think even the graphics aged well to a certain degree. Certainly, you can load the files into one of the new game engines based on the source, and get mouse look, and much higher resolutions. You're still using the original art, and it still looks fine.

A truly efficient, fun, and frantic game.

[Zingbo]

Cacodemons? Pah!

The red floating ones were called Tomato Beasts, the brown fireball-flinging ones were called Bungles and the pink ones were called Murrays! At least that's what they were known as by myself and my mates. I really got into Doom and as I had a lot of free time in 94/95 I also learnt how to make levels and some of them were even rather good.

On a nitpicking note, the first screenshot of this article is from Doom 2 - the original Doom didn't have the double-barrelled shotgun.

[Jay 2]

From the game that gave frag a slightly new definition...

Ah Doom!

I recall the earlier versions which used (I think) IPX which brang many a network to its knees, and the later TCP/IP versions which didn't as much.

And the mods (all those .wad files)! Can't remember if it was I or II, but I too played a pretty full-on Aliens mod. Sounds and everything it wasa great! I also created a few little mods myself, the best being the one that was a reconstruction of my flat at university (albeit one with lots of monsters, Nazis and a teleporter instead of stairs).

Happy days!

[AdamWill]

always IPX

The official Doom always ran on IPX (unless you count Doom 95, which...you don't). Only later source ports based on the open source release can use TCP/IP.

[Thecowking]

Thanks, I'll be humming the Doom music all day now.

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Da-da-da da-da-da da-da-da daaah-daaah!

Of course you have to try to make that noise through a very small plastic funnel to get the full effect of a crap little 2 inch PC speaker of yesteryear.

100W 14 inch woofer on a 5.1 Surround sound kit, hooked up to a games console? Tch! Kid's today, eh?!

[Thecowking]

I try and hum it through my nose, which sounds nearly the same to me.

Damn it, I need to re install it and dig out my floppies... oh balls. I don't have a floppy drive any more.

Do they even make them any more?

KHAAAAAAAN!

[Anonymous Coward]

floppies....

the best use for a compaq armada m100....

network doom, over 802.11...while drinking in a bar. Me and another guy on opposite sides of the bar

anonymous because the machine was supposed to be for work only....

[stucs201]

re: music and pc speaker

I'm not 100% sure, but my recollection was the internal speaker was sound effects only. If you wanted music I think you needed a soundcard - they weren't common back then but were starting to catch on.

[AdamWill]

correct

you, sir, are correct.

Doom had the old classic set of support for Ad Lib, Sound Blaster, and I think Gravis Ultrasound. And General MIDI, if you had a MIDI-capable card, for music.

[HollyX]

Nostalgia, not what it used to be!

I remember being handed the 1.0 two-floppy disks with a knowing 'you'll like this' from the physics department technician ... it's one of few games that actually gave me nightmares, lol.

There's nothing more tantalizing to a 16 year old girl than finding out you can shoot barrels next to people and reduce them to a set of spare ribs - a trick I repeated whenever possible >:-)

[Tasogare]

The world needs more girls with such tastes.

I still play Doom 2, myself. Mowing shit down is a great way to blow off steam after a long day. Modern FPSes make you think more. (which isn't necessarily a bad thing but isn't always what I want)

Modern FPSes often freak me out too much to enjoy it, too. Doom is cartoony enough to be fairly harmless in that respect, at least today. Pretty disturbing when I was twelve though.

Pain Elementals still make me flinch.

[johnnytruant]

Most ported game ever?

Could be. I've run it on my 4G iPod, and I've seen it running on devices as diverse as digital cameras and internet-enabled fridges.

[ThomH]

Then maybe even a flag waver for open source?

In that most of the weirder ports are a result of the source code release in 1997. Though it made it to pretty much every console from the SNES onwards through standard commercial channels.

Of those I've played: the PlayStation, Jaguar and Gameboy Advance versions are very good, the Saturn version is passable, the 32X and 3DO versions are pretty bad and the politest thing I can think of to say about the SNES port is that it's a technical achievement.

[LuMan]

Port-a-Doom

True. I've seen Doom running on all manner of stuff (there's even a 'sort-of' Spectrum version). Regardless of the platform it's still a great waste of time during those long, boring conference calls.

I remember having Zhadoom on my A1200 (with 160MHz ppc) and getting a better frame-rate than my mate's P60. Still play it now.

[johnnytruant]

I should add

That the frame rate when playing on a old greyscale iPod does leave something to be desired.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh deathmatch...

..but not on a PC, but two Atari Jaguars linked together (yes I think me and my friend owned the only pair!)

happy days...and I stil have my Jag + CD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unopened Copy

I still have a sealed freeware floppy of Doom amongst my "precious items" collection.

Super game, and somehow back then it held my imagination much more than any current game does. In fact I still hope that each new game I buy might transport me back to that magical time of total immersion.

[David Given]

Doom, the graphic novel

I can't believe that nobody's posted a link to the Doom comic yet, so:

http://www.doomworld.com/10years/doomcomic/

Utterly hilarious, deeply strange, probably involved drugs.

"You are huge! Therefore you have huge guts!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Superb!

My mates and I used to play it on nightshift and the network traffic between the machines was so big and our network so naff that the network backups and batch jobs would take an extra 90 mins longer when we had a monster session. It was only after 3 months and someone putting a sniffer on the network they traced the problem to us and the IT support guys gave us quiet ticking off and told us to rig up a private network if we wanted to do that sort of thing overnight!

Better than the two developers who got caught during the day playing it and were given 15 minutes to get out of the office and find new jobs!

Happy days!

[ThomH]

The PC coming into its own

I guess we must have bought our first PC somewhere around 1992 and prior to seeing Doom I don't recall anything being obviously much better than what we'd had on the ZX Spectrum that preceded it, other than loading quickly and being more capable with colours. And although it's not particularly subtle, I still think it plays better than most other games.

Quite a lot of my professional life has ended up focussed on computer graphics and, more recently, computer vision. The sudden leap forwards of Doom is the reason.

[Captain Underpants]

If the original sprites don't do it for you, get yourself the Doomsday Engine and the high-res texture packs and rediscover just what a well-made game it is.

[rgne.co.uk]

A useful sales tool

When Samsung first introduced their notebooks to the UK I was the product manger, and I used to use Doom to show off the screen quality. As well as spending many a happy hour shooting stuff. I think Halflife was the next game that I felt to be as good as Doom. Wolfenstein was pants though.

[cyborg]

I remember the guys in Doom 2 with the homing missles. I remember just running about trying to get them to hit other daemons so that they would start fighting each other. Nothing more fun than just watching all the bad guys kill each other off for you.

I remember messing about with the editing tools and making a "machine shotgun" that would rattle off shotgun shells like the chaingun and make complete mincemeat out of everything. Good times - I think I may have to load up a Linux port and find my wad files...

[shugie]

A useful sales tool

When Samsung first introduced their notebooks to the UK I was the product manger, and I used to use Doom to show off the screen quality. As well as spending many a happy hour shooting stuff. I think Halflife was the next game that I felt to be as good as Doom. Wolfenstein was pants though.

[Audrey S. Thackeray]

OS/2

Let you play Doom in a window - I remember thinking this was very cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun even gave the guys a SPARCstation (SS20 I think) so that they would port it to Solaris/X11. That kept the office busy for lunchtimes...

[AdamWill]

fun fact

Doom was coded on NeXT machines.

[ThomH]

@AdamWill

Technically it was prototyped on NeXT machines. They got it all written once then rewrote the hard stuff in x86 assembler.

[Anonymous Coward]

lunchtimes at work, network deathmatch, ...

who can get the chainsaw first.

it's a team building thing

[Kubla Cant]

Brilliant!

We used to play it at the office in the evenings. After four or five hours play, I'd be utterly jumpy. Leaving the empty building, I'd press the lift button and flinch because I expected the wall to open up and disgorge a pack of monsters.

I always remember the room with a lethal spider-thing and a lethal robot-thing on a platform in the middle. The only way to deal with them seemed to be to run round the outside until they started shooting at each other.

[Thomas 4]

Yup, I remember that one

'twas in Doom 2. It was a Spider Mastermind and a CyberDemon (I think, it's been a while). I liked the level where you had a Baron of Hell giving a lecture to a room full of soldiers. Walk in, Baron spots you, carnage ensues.

Good times.

[Fab]

The start of an addiction

I played Wolf... 3D. I remember how it was kind of neat how you could slide move but other than that I didnt really enjoy it.

Then came Doom. I was told by a friend to play it and eventually did when I had to recover from a knee surgery and ended up back at parents’ home. I remember members of my family, mother, brother, etc watching me playing the game. They were just as fixated as I was , although we were all suffering from motion sickness. It’s the first game I ever played that totally immersive.

Some time later came the full version that was multiplayer. And that changed the gaming world. You could only play up to 4 players and the network setup was a pain, mainly because networking then was a complete ball ache. But the game was fantastic.

We had a few interludes, like Heretic, Triads, Duke , etc all good fun but gimmicks.

Then came Quake, the daddy of all proper 3D games. That is the game completely defined how 3D games would work. I used to run lan parties every few months and we would get 5-8 people playing.

Carmack is as far as I’m concerned is the man, hope people remember where this all came from!!

[KroSha]

I still play this every so often. PS1 discs on the PS3 still look pretty good and only cost about a fiver on the tat bazaar.

[defiler]

Doom started my career

My first networking experience was getting IPX drivers to work so that we could play Doom. And yes, 1.0 had a knack of swamping the network, but on the other hand it let you get 3 computers together and have 'side' views.

After a marathon session of E1M1 on turbo255 with 4 players I had to drive home. I would have sworn to a court that I was only doing 30 had I not looked at the speedo. Oops.

[Anonymous Coward]

Im up for the mowing too.

Invincibility, unlimited ammo on the BFG, and all the monsters you can spawn in a room.

That takes the urge to kill your boss next morning off.

[Vladimir Plouzhnikov]

Two pillars of the 3D revolution

Doom and Descent.

[Admiral Grace Hopper]

I was once rung up by the networks team ...

...who said that while they didn't mind us playing Doom - heck, they put some hours in themselves - but would we lay off the chaingun during office hours?

[Jolyon Smith]

@Phil A - "Amazing graphics for it's time..."...

Only if you insisted on trying to play games on the PC.

Amiga/ST owners had been enjoying superior graphics for some time by the time DOOM "amazed" the PC crowd.

The irony of the Amiga being poo-pooed as "just a games machine" never got old for me. Yeah, a games machine with a 32-bit multi-threaded, multi-tasking GUI OS at a time when the same thing on PC's was just a glimmer on the distant horizon.

And now the stature of a PC is often measured in terms of how well it plays games.

Sheesh. :)

[Rob 22]

Big up the Amiga

At the time I had an Amiga 500 at home, at work we were buying IBM PS2/386. I could successfully, if a bit slowly I admit, run Windows 3.11 under an emulator on my Amiga.

I never found a way of trying it the other way around.

[AdamWill]

not mentioned

Doom was also one of the best competitively balanced games ever, both for single player and deathmatch; there's still active scenes in both. There've been few games since Doom and Quake that lend themselves to speedrunning or competitive one-on-one deathmatch quite as well; FPSes since Quake 3 have gone in a more 'realistic', team-based direction I find pretty dull.

At some point in 2003 I'm fairly sure I'd played more Doom than anyone else alive; I worked out I'd averaged two hours per day, every day, since the original release late in 1993. I slacked off a bit after that and I think some of the Norwegians overtook me, though. =)

But the combination of level design, monster behaviour, the responsiveness of your character to the controls, and the effect of the known physics bugs and level shortcuts in both Doom and Quake is pretty extraordinary. It's entirely worth watching Doom Done Quicker - which you can find on Youtube starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6PK9bd_uUs - and Quake Done Quick With a Vengeance (the third QDQ run) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB76kyYxDoQ - just to see how extreme the best play on those games got after a while. (Neither run is completely state of the art in either game any more, but they're still pretty impressive to watch. The Done Quick runs are 'fake' complete game runs - each level is run individually (in a single take) and the individual level runs stitched together - the idea being to showcase the absolute best running possible at a given time.)

I did some of the levels in DDQr, FWIW. :) Still one of the most fun projects I've been involved in.

[Schultz]

The speed of it

DOOM in multiplayer mode was an incredible rush, because there were no awkward physics models limiting your speed. Throw the mouse for that instant jump or a 90 degree turn. It made the game just as fast as you were.

Keep running was the law of the game, run or die. The walls and corners were the enemy, as they slow you down for just that moment your opponent was waiting for. And the rush of the berserk kit, instant death at close range ... and at close range that opponent will never get his rocket thrower ready.

Also it was the game you had to play with the guys across the corridor, because the networking just was not that far along. So you could hear the screams of anguish for an extra bonus.

[Cunningly Linguistic]

Infant2

Ah I remember the Doom obsession well. Spending literally days downloading mods from the infant2 server circa '93. I think my personal stash of mods ended up at around 1500...though I think I only actually tried a quarter of them.

[Marvin the Martian]

Typo: "such levels as the toxic refinery"

toxic --> toxin (as seen from the screenshot, even).

Doom2 has cost me about a year of my life, not working towards my degree.

[Leona A]

a totally amazing game, played both Wolf3D then moved on to Doom, the Aliens mod was excellent, the line 'Game over man' and green hue, is what I remember most, arr the dam good old days, a friend and I, played death matches over a serial link (ya remember that!?) must see if I there is an Android version for my phone, just for a bit of nostalgia. Great work Lucy! Happy Dayz!

[Rob 22]

Doom in the real world

During slack times on a NT3.51server 'production line' for a famous UK clothing retailer's server rollout in a "Project Office" (aka caged off area in the warehous above the local store!), my building buddy wrote maps and swathes of scenery for Doom that closely resembled navigating around the Luton Arndale Centre (named as it was back then), all nicely darkened as if trapped in there with monsters* after hours. All the shops had the appropriate logos and all. It was brilliant. Not sure if he finished it, I left.

(* not Luton girls, I mean Doom monsters)

[Steve Scott]

Q2 was amazing

Loved Doom, but never played it online. It was only when Quake II came along that I discovered the joys of killing an LPB (low ping b*stard) opponent with a railgun shot, despite my ping being 10x higher than his! Particularly liked the Lithium mod, with the hook to propel you quickly around the map. But my all time favourite for frantic gameplay was CTC (catch the chicken). Awesome, but particularly so when played using a custom Homer Simpson avatar, complete with sound effects like 'Woohoo!' "D'oh!" etc. Happy days.

[AndyJ]

Thanks for being back some great memories Reg. Now I can't get IDKFA or IDCLIP out of my head...Might have a couple of odd variable names in todays code :)

[Piro]

Ahh, but

IDCLIP was the updated no clip code in Doom II: Hell on Earth.

I think it was IDPISPOPD in Doom.

[Long John Brass]

LAN parties

Ahhh that brings back memories

I always amazed me that the gang could turn up, setup 8-10 machines & be playing in under 15min

If only the desktop support people at work could be as quick :)

Explosion icon for Boom headshot

[BobaFett]

Fond memories indeed!

The thing that immediately impressed me about Doom was the feel of the environments. I had been playing Ultima Underworld before which was even more claustrophobic, but that first level of Doom, overlooking the little pool with the window into the courtyard just felt so much more 'solid' to me. The fact that the level was actually just a 2D plan was cunningly disguised.

I also totally loved the music, even though Bobby Prince had ripped off the key riffs/melodies for other metal bands. Ok it was only 4 channel MIDI music, but as someone who grew up with 8-bit microcomputer games, it was something I really appreciated. I even bought a Yamaha DB-50XG daughtercard to make the most of it!

And then there was the co-op and deathmatch modes. At the software house I worked in back then, we played games at lunchtime and after work. We'd start off with all the good intentions of playing co-op mode, but when it came to waiting by the secret door to the hoard of goodies, we'd all stand there, as cardboard cut-outs more or less, turning robotically to see who would go and press that far off button to open it. More often than not, we'd just end up shooting each other there and then and it would turn into a fun deathmatch with monsters as a side distraction.

I'll always remember what a fantastically new and exciting experience it was at the time. And the Quake 1 alpha just took that further with proper 3D maps, albeit without the plasma gun and BFG. Still there was nothing more amusing than perforating someone with nails and listening to all those Wilhelm screams.

Thank you id Software for kick-starting the FPS genre that we still enjoy today. I still believe the core skills for FPS games can best be learned with Quake 1, 3 or 4. That's what I get my kids to hone their skills on! :)

[foo_bar_baz]

nostalgia aside

I saw a glimpse of the screenshot on the side bar as I was scrolling the front page and it looked very disturbing indeed. Freud me down.

[N2]

Ah the toxin refinery...

If you peg it up the steps, turn left then before the barrier rises go down that corridor to get the +100% health supercharge!

Doom was the de facto 3D classic FPS & I still enjoy a frag now and again

[Johnny Canuck]

cyberdemon

The cyberdemon boss at the end of the first set of levels scared the crap out of me. The sound of his metallic footsteps growing louder as he approached and his beastly roar would send me into panic mode and I'd just start running until I couldn't hear him anymore. Good times.

[Thorfkin]

I definitely enjoyed both Doom and Doom 2. But, like others mentioned, I didn't really find the game scary. I definitely enjoyed shooting anything that moved but it wasn't until Doom 3 that I really experienced fear from a Doom game. Setting aside the endless supply of hidden wall panels with demons inside, no other game got me so worked up that I stayed twitchy for hours after. Despite its issues, Doom 3 was the real masterpiece of the collection in my opinion.

[Nate Amsden]

don't forget

psDoom

http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

"psDooM is a process monitor and manager for *nix systems. It could be considered a graphical interface to the 'ps', 'renice', and 'kill' commands. psDooM is based on XDoom, which is based on id Software's 'Doom'. "

[Don Mitchell]

Carmack Genius

Princeton University had few Macs or PCs in 1994, it was really a UNIX workstation shop. But one grad student had a Windows PC for some project, and he showed me DOOM. I went and got Prof. Pat Hanrahan and showed him. Pat and I tried to figure out, how could a 486 processor be doing real-time 3D? It seemed impossible. The perspective mapping requires a 1/distance division operation at each pixel, and that is totally beyond the computational power of the PCs of that time.

A couple years alter, I got to meet Carmack and talk with other people in the game development field who knew how the software worked. Visibility in DOOM was calculated in the 2D floor plan projection. Polygons were rendered in vertical or horizontal scans of constant distance, so only one division per line, not per pixel. Really an elegant solution.

Later the brilliant Ken Silverman wrote probably the first (and probably the only robust) "free-direction texture mapper", which could scan convert polygons along lines of constant direction at any angle, not just vertical or horizontal rows of pixels. So you were not limited to DOOM's vertical walls and horizontal floors, you could render general polygons in space. That's tricky to get right with now pixel glitches, and among game developers, he was much admired. But free-direction mappers never really got deployed, there was just Ken's unreleased neo-Build engine that used it experimentally.

Eventually people just learned how to interpolate the 1/distance division across horizontal spans of pixels, and they got that code to run fast enough that the "British Three" could render arbitrary textured polygons on a PC (the three major British rendering engines, Renderware and two others I forget now). Microsoft bought one of those British companies and formed the beginning of Direct3D. Not very successful, and it was all rewritten a few versions later.

Hardware acceleration eventually made all this clever work obsolete.

[pprotus]

I really shouldn't post this...but it's been 20 years...

As a bit of vintage trivia... I was a full-time employee of Intel's SSD when the original Doom zipfile hit the interwebs. This is (the? one of the?) Intel Division that had two names. Intel "Scalable Server Division" and Intel "Supercomputer Systems Division". The corporate culture in SSD (we only used the three initials) was totally and adversarially different from anything I have ever experienced at any other Intel facility. For all practical purposes, we were our own start-up. And main Intel was a potential hostile-take-over entity. We used the original Doom as part of our single-board (multiple processor) system-level stress testing process. This may or may not be due in part to the large number U of W engineers on the development team. If the node board ran Doom for a certain number of hours on all application processors and under all corner conditions, then it was good to go to the next level of system integration. (Run Doom OK? Cool. Level up.) I really miss SSD. We were tasked to produce a One T-flop supercomputer. We delivered "Asci Red" which ran at Two T-flops, sustained, when using the appropriate benchmark software. All this being said... Please, if you will, try to imagine being a young squirt of an engineer, playing Doom...the first, first-person-shooter to exist in all the world...in multi-player mode, where each player has a supercomputer node board as his/her dedicated hardware, while using a half-rack of node boards and a RAID as the game server, with all game data being exchanged via an ultra high-speed (for its time) backplane. Ping of 2? No problem. It was pretty nice.

[Jay 2]

Yay Doom!

It must have been at the end of 93 when a friend of mine told me of a new game where the monsters turned the lights off at it was pretty scary. The university's networks ground to a halt under the original IPX multiplayer version.

A year or so later on my placement year I'd 'aqiuired' a small server for use as my desktop machine, so I threw on MSDOS 6.22 (with NT 3.51 on top). After hours I'd boot into DOS, load up the drivers and we'd deathmatch for a few hours.

And a year on from that (back at university) I'd started downloading the mods (Aliens and Star Wars being my faves), and even made my own maps, the best of which was a copy of my halls of residence. Every room had it's own theme vaguely related to the occupants. Not sure what Andrea the strange Italian made of his room really being a gateway into hell...

Big thumbs up to ID for this groundbreaking game!

[Timbo]

Not long to go...

..until 10th December 2023, when DOOM will be 30 years old !!

Anyone feeling old yet?

(And I still have 3 or 4 CDROMs of WADs...as well as the expansion packs for QUAKE !!)