Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

Seminal first-person shooter Doom marked the thirtieth anniversary of its release on December 10, and co-creator John Romero marked the occasion by releasing new levels for the game and celebrating its role as the genesis of many IT careers. The Register celebrated the game on its 20th anniversary, when we rated it "an …

[sammystag]

As teenagers we installed Doom on a friend's family PC. The born again Christian mother was so horrified by the demons and inverted crucifixes that after uninstalling the game, the PC has to be taken to church to be prayed over by the congregation in some kind of exorcism

[redpawn]

my parents were horrified by an early arcade game where you ran over pedestrians with a very slow car, at which point they became grave markers that would bog down your car. The pedestrians were safe on the pavement but kept entering the street to be run down. All very simple, monochrome and probably responsible for the state of driving to this day.

[Alan Bourke]

Exidy's "Death Race"

... from 1976

[David 132]

The born again Christian mother was so horrified by the demons and inverted crucifixes

Good job she never found out what happened when the installation CD was played backwards!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucks the game off the hard drive and back on to the CD?

[Pete Sdev]

I'm reminded of the story of someone wearing a FreeBSD t-shirt getting dirty looks in Texas.

[Andy Non]

That story rings a bell, didn't they get asked to leave a bar as the T-shirt was upsetting the locals.

[Uncle Slacky]

Here 'tis: http://www.lemis.com/grog/whyadaemon.html

[Liam Proven]

The original Unix daemon T-shirt by a young Phil Foglio (later of "Girl Genius" fame):

https://www.mckusick.com/beastie/jpg/foglio.jpg

Source:

https://www.mckusick.com/beastie/shirts/usenix.html

[MonocleRB]

We're not all like that...

Shame that the fundamentalists of the 80's gave all us other Christians a bad reputation.

[Pete Sdev]

I'd love to know the justification for the 2 down-votes of my original comment. It was pretty objective - there is such a story, and sammystag's comment did remind me of it.

Born-again christians? Texans? Both?

[jmch]

"The born again Christian mother was so horrified...."

I'd have thought she would have jumped at the opportunity to get in on some demon-slaying....

[chuckufarley]

Back when the system with the most MHz...

...on your LAN had the network address of BA:DD:AD:38:70:00.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: Back when the system with the most MHz...

Not BA:AA:AD:AA:A5:55...?

[Winkypop]

Doom and Duke Nukem 3D

Obsessions that started an IT career.

May the frag be with you.

[chuckufarley]

Re: Doom and Duke Nukem 3D

I've come here to reply and chew bubble...and I am all out of bubblegum.

[Jedit]

"and I am all out of bubblegum"

Actually an ad lib by the late, great "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in John Carpenter's 1988 classic They Live. Worth watching just for that scene and the endless fight between Piper and Keith David.

(Also you got the clauses backward: it's "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass".)

[Phones Sheridan]

Re: "and I am all out of bubblegum"

In game, it was ass and gum in that order. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0GZ4Y9w6o0

[Sudosu]

Re: "and I am all out of bubblegum"

Put the glasses on!

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: Doom and Duke Nukem 3D

Those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my ride

#memories

[Teiwaz]

Last time I played Doom, I got motion sick, which I never got back when I played originally. I put it down to my age or the low resolution graphics of pixelated walls sliding by, but probably a combination of both.

I could barely play a level at a time last time I felt nostalgic to dig it out.

[Andy The Hat]

I hit Wolfenstein 3D very hard but I got severe motion sickness with the original Doom - 5 minutes was all I could cope with. Never did work out what the difference between the two was - no perceptible flicker, same drifty motion ...

[robinsonb5]

I may be misremembering, but doesn't Doom have a wider field of vision?

Also I don't think Wolfenstein had the "head bobbing" thing where the camera's vertical position rises slightly with each footstep?

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Doom's "bob" is weapon only; the player's viewpoint remains fixed relative to the ground. However, the weapon bob is extreme and combined with the comically fast running speed in Doom, could be the cause.

[Malcolm 1]

Possibly the result of monitors being much larger these days?

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Zuckerberg's first mistake with Oculus was not to adapt Doom on to it as an intro to the ecosystem.

[Dan 55]

"Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

Should have got it from the Steam store, just as cheap (I think) but you also get the Proton version...

[David 132]

Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

Honestly. Who uses the Microsoft Store, except ironically?

[ssharwood]

Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

I had the MSFT store icon right there, but Steam isn't installed on this PC.

Don't judge me, please.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

Too late!

<Dredd> You have been judged and found guilty! </Dredd>

[Liam Proven]

Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

*Fellow Red hack judges freely and with abandon*

[sev.monster]

Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

The Store is just like any system native package manager in scope.

Only one problem, it's run by Microsoft, and it sucks.

What do you mean it's two problems? That was a compound statement and is cross-dependent.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

Get it from wherever you can find it cheapest and then throw the WADs into GZDoom.

Chaingun sniping on a UHD monitor is hilarious.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not wrong about the careers in IT. Back in the 90s my friends and I all geeked out on the hardware builds of our PCs, the LAN for Quake/Quake2/Unreal Tournament and dialup technologies all in the name of becoming a LPB (Low Ping Bastard) for online play. The lower your latency the greater advantage you had so we all hated those rich or lucky enough to acquire cable modems and worked hard to optimise connection strings, reduce lag etc tweaking the crap outta dialup. All of course born from our love of endlessly playing doom when we weren't building our own levels.

The modding community that came about as a result of doom and quake was immense and definitely a golden age for PC gaming imho.

I'll tip my hat to all those who remember playing Quake II Jailbreak mod. We were number one for a while...

I'm a network ops manager for an ISP now. Most of my buddies from those days are in IT jobs now. <3 Doom.

[The Dogs Meevonks]

We found the best way to combat that was to setup your own server on a work lan and ADSL... So we had the advantage.

We did stuff like that right up until the mid-late 2000's and it even proved to be beneficial for the company.

Once with an old BF42 server running the desert combat mod that I used to be involved with just outside of the firewall, we kept getting random stalls/lag of about 1s.

After some investigating by the ISP/BT they found a piece of misconfigured equipment in the exchange.

So that was used as a great selling point and justification for the boss to allow us to keep running a mini game server on the site. :)

It helped having a cool boss too.

[Piro]

Desert combat. Thanks for the nostalgia wave.

[David 132]

Hey, some of us STILL play BF1942 now.

Cooperative LAN play, just me and a few friends against bots - good fun.

Speaking of, can anyone recommend any modern games that support co-op LAN play against bots? Everything multiplayer these days seems to be online, and I have no desire to play against foul-mouthed kids on the other side of the world, or submit to the whole ridiculous ELO rating thing (it's a game FFS not an application to Harvard)...

[red19]

Only one I know/play would be Age Of Empires 2.

But might as well go for Aoe2 DE

[NJS]

Ah Doom

..and the null modem cable. Wander into computing lab (or engineering lab, we were equal opportunities), disconnect a couple of machines from the network (preferably facing the door so you could keep an eye out for staff), unzip Doom from a stack of floppies, frag away.

Very happy memories :)

[Andy The Hat]

Re: Ah Doom

Frak was available on a floppy somewhere ... was that the wussy version of having a Frag? :-)

[42656e4d203239]

Re: Ah Doom

>>Frak

Wow - that triggered misty memories! I can't even recall what the game was about (Puzzler wasn't it?), but I remember the name... wasn't DROD about the same era as Frack?

Edit: No It wasn't - Shows how old I am; compressing time because it just seems so vast otherwise!

[David 132]

Re: Ah Doom

Frak (or Frak! technically I believe) was a platformer game. I fondly recall playing it on the BBC Bs in our school’s computer room. The music was a jolly sailor’s hornpipe… which, I only learned many years later, meant that ours was a pirated copy, the developers having sneakily put in some primitive anti-copy code that did little more than change the music on illicit copies :)

[The commentard formerly known as Mister_C]

Re: Ah Doom

There was another pirate version doing the rounds too. Spotable when the main character lost a life and said something other than "Frak"

[cookieMonster]

Found my box set

last week while cleaning out the garage. Box, 3.5” disks and user guide all like new.

Happy days!

Wonder what it would be worth these days?

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Found my box set

AU$7.45

[David 132]

Re: Found my box set

“I need tree fiddy.”

[Zack Mollusc]

Re: Found my box set

God DAMNIT monster! What did I tell you about askin me for no tree fiddy?

[Phones Sheridan]

Lsl

Ne2000

Ipxodi /a

I remember religiously keying that in every Doom lan party

30 years later, retired sysadmin. Yup article was right!

[Howard Sway]

Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

Ah yes, the happy days when games came in boxes the same size as a box of cornflakes, containing nothing more than a CD and a tiny installation leaflet.

[Dan 55]

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

I see you weren't a fan of flight sims, space "sim"s, D&D games, or adventure games.

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

SIM Farm. Full box. CD release. Contents of the CD? 1.3mb. You could pirate it onto a single floppy disc...

[Pete Sdev]

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

For a premium one could produce "Offline-Edition" of modern games, with the game on a USB stick and a printed manual and poster and such.

Though the hassle probably wouldn't be worth it in most cases.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

They tried to do that for Kerbal Space Program, and for some reason it never happened, even though I had money ready to go.

[The Dogs Meevonks]

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

I still remember opening my original X-Wing box with multiple 1.44mb disks and a huge manual. I also remember selling a huge box of games on ebay about 20yrs ago for almost nothing... at least 20-30 titles, original boxes... some disk, some CD.

I still have a huge stack of CD/DVD based PC games in my home office... including some of those dodgy ones with the CDrootkit program on them that killed CDRW drives... lost a few drives to that before it was discovered.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

I remember the box for the original Amstrad CPC version of Elite. As well as the game (on cassette tape), and the rather thick manual, it also had a quick guide for the keyboard controls, a poster for ship identification, and a novella set in the game universe ("The Dark Wheel").

[David 132]

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

…and a Lenslok?

Or was that only on the Spectrum version?

[trevorde]

Hated by sysadmins

Every lunchtime, network utilisation shot to 100% as everyone joined in a huge corporate fragfest. It was a chance to shoot your real life boss in a virtual way. Happy times.

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Hated by sysadmins

Or if you had the unpatched release (pre 1.2 iirc) 200% network utilisation...

[BenDwire]

Re: Hated by sysadmins

One of my fondest recollections of a previous company was seeing the IT manager staring at his bit of networking kit in total bewilderment. It was mounted high up in a darkened corridor, so the blinkenlights bathed him in a glow reminiscent of the ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey. I was a newcomer to the business, and wanted to bring in CAD packages & general office kit to the design department. He was the COBOL guy, and had a token ring running across the entire manufacturing site. He wanted no part in my department, so left me to get on with it. All was fine until somebody wanted access to the MRP system which required him to link my LAN with his token ring. So far, so good.

This was 1993/4, and I had decided to use Artisoft Lantastic cards and software running on Win3.11. I remember the day that someone brought Doom into the office and asked if we could play across a few of the machines. The quick answer was no as I hadn't a clue what IPX was or did, but these were the days when technical support was much easier. I had a fax from the guys at Artisoft, telling me what drivers I needed and which bulletin board to get them from. Each machine got its own multi-boot menu and at the stroke of lunchtime there would be a dozen beeping machines and several concurrent games of Doom would spring into life.

Of course what we didn't realise was the bridge that had been installed for our MRP access happily passed everything onto to the token ring, hence the Dave Bowman moment. To his credit, he bought in another bit of kit to solve the problem, after initially just unplugging us and walking off.

We eventually progressed onto Doom2, Duke Nukem and Quake, the multiboot menus growing ever larger each time. We even got the resident softie to write our own WAD of the factory, which made it even more fun (except only he knew where he'd put the BFGs that day).

The then MD thought this was an excellent bit of team building and insisted on scheduling his important factory tours to conclude in my department at lunchtime, as if it was all his idea. Tosser.

Good times ...

[Pete Sdev]

Real programming

Carmack's Reverse algorithm and poss. the fast inverse square-root method.

I missed out on Doom an the time, though did play Wolfenstein 3D to death on my friend's dad's PC.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Real programming

I remember him saying he'd not port to the Amiga because it wasn't possible due to something or other, chunky graphics mode not being available or something? Of course, it's since been done and as even playable on stock builds. I wonder what his comments on that are? :-)

There are some amazing retro kit programmers out there still discovering new things and wowing on some ancient stock hardware.

[Binraider]

Doom's influence on MS and Win95 was obvious. The Win95 developers were that wrapped up in playing network Doom they weren't pulling the 18 hour shifts to work on the OS that's for certain...

I think I enjoyed playing with the level editors and DeHacked considerably more than the game itself. Initially by copying D&D dungeon floor plans into the an editor. Doom was simple enough for any 12 year old to pick up the tools and muck about with it, if not create something very impressive.

[The Dogs Meevonks]

Fond Memories

Whilst Wolfenstein 3D was my first experience of FPS gaming a year or two earlier... Doom was certainly the most memorable. Installed on a work computer that we played out of hours that had no sound card installed, and then on a very used 386 that I got and managed to install a soundcard on. We'd swap discs with fan made maps/levels and mods.

Then a few yrs later we had Quake... which advanced the graphics further and with true 3D modelled objects. It was also when I first started to get online through work as it would be 98 before I had a PC with modem at home. So of course we downloaded mods for quake to add star wars characters and sounds. We also downloaded soundpacks for Worms to make them sound like Simpsons characters and so forth. Of course we can't forget games like Dark Forces either... that I probably played more than any other.

Such innocent fun... now it's all 9.99 for a soundpack or a new skin for your character... thank fuck for the hats with skulls on.

Recently replaced a fan adapted versions of Dark Forces and Quake with better graphics.

I'm also still playing games like Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance thanks to the work over at the x-wing alliance upgrade project... taking the originals and making them look amazing once more. I hear that there's work on the original X-Wing game and hopefully X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter too.

[MDMAok]

I remember the impact of the IPX traffic. WE had to ban doom except at lunchtime. Cheyanne's NLM Faxserve, could not receive faxes if there was more than 4 players on Doom.

[Greybearded old scrote]

I suspect

Was your colleague who grumbled about the graphics quality too young to have experienced a 486 with 1/100th the clock speed that we get today?

[Gene Cash]

Re: I suspect

Especially considering it was pre accelerated graphics cards, IIRC.

[ThatOne]

Doom turns 30

> Doom turns 30

Oh my, I suddenly feel terribly old... :-(

I need to sit down (behind the stove).

[Blue Pumpkin]

DoomOps was done a long time ago ...

But was generally not good for the server : Doom as a tool for system administration

[Dave123]

Beginnings of networked games heaven

This game came out when I was in uni. My flatmates all had PCs and at the time NICs were quite expensive for student budgets. In the elec eng department, there were lots of aged PCs laying about with NICs, so we gave the NICs a better life and blew my project budget on coax and bnc connectors.

On the subject of networked games, Lemmings was awesome too.

[The Dogs Meevonks]

Re: Beginnings of networked games heaven

Some of the first downloads I ever did were sound packs for Lemmings... I made all of mine sound like Simpsons characters. :)

[Dabooka]

They're not wrong

Our early LAN parties saw token ring cards pilfered and network play in my mum's dining room. The movement required for four players was so great it invariably planned the whole weekend as towers, CRTs, keyboards etc were lugged about and setup, resulting in a whole weekend of varied gameplay.

Doom, Quake, Rise of the Triads, Heretic and even strategies such as C&C, Red Alert all found their way on to our (by know) TCP network. Pizzas and beer also featured

Happy days...

[Jay 2]

Ah Doom, how different it all was. I recall a friend of me telling me about it, saying how monsters could turn the lights off and it was pretty scary (for the day). Then later on I learned the fun of network deathmatches, though as it was initially on IPX it was the network that was getting fragged until the TCP/IP version came out. And somewhat later than than I used to make my own WADs based on silly things like my student halls layout or the office.

Whilst it wasn't the first of this type of game (ID's own Wolfenstein series came first), I think it was probably the most influential. In fact last Christmas I purchsed it for my Steamdeak to have a bit of fun, but my 13-year old nephew wasn't enitrely impressed!

[Anonymous Coward]

It really started with Wolf3D

Loved Doom but my favorite was Wolfenstein 3D. Killing those little Adolfs was great fun.