Nintendo taught a crumbled North American console market what made its games great when it flooded stores with its NES, bundled with a platformer that articulated that it was no ordinary console and what opportunities the market was missing. It brought platform video games to a new level when it bundled the SNES with its Super Mario World, and again outdid itself when its Super Mario 64 for the N64 made the most prudent use of the third dimension it could. Between those events, 20th Century Fox distributed my favorite Christmas movie of all time, Die Hard, about a cop who is caught in a tower takeover by terrorists and is their hostages' only hope out. Id Software had just begun to gain serious momentum when it unusually took players to a first-person perspective in a shooting game called Wolfenstein 3D. I like to think of it and its two other shooters, Doom and Quake, as id's answer to the Super Mario series, with Wolfenstein 3D being like Super Mario Bros. And Doom Super Mario World. I consider Quake my favorite as I do Super Mario 64, as both made equally prudent use of 3D graphics. Doom was in the middle, but as it has received the most attention out of all of id's shooters, it is past time to ask ourselves whether the game about a thousand-or-so hellspawn against a single space marine is a Christmas game in the same vein that we would of Die Hard as a Christmas film. After all, the game was released in December, and we do not even know whether it is set in a December.
As the story goes, on the moons of Mars, experiments by an interplanetary conglomerate involving interdimensional space travel spiral out of control. Its Phobos base is overrun with unknown forces, and Deimos disappears. Space marines stationed on Mars are sent to the Phobos base to contain the fallout. All infiltrate the base and die trying to clear the enemy, except Doomguy, who was initially ordered to secure its perimeter. With no one nearer than 50 million miles away to come to his aid, Doomguy is left with no choice but to fight his way through the most abominable creatures imaginable to man. The first thing the player sees is a nice title screen that looks like the cover of a jewel CD case, which, in the tradition of id Software's games, is followed by demos of what to expect from it. Among those things are killer metal music and fake Halloween gore. The level of violence in the game was unusual and ahead of its time, garnering controversy even as the public grew accustomed to violence in films, but in retrospect, the gore is lighthearted and nowhere close to gratuitous. Most of all, on a graphical level, floors and ceilings have textures, and the environment varies in elevation. Maps are no longer confined to towers where the ceiling and floor are of equal distance apart. Even more so, they are given much more geometry, along with interactivity that I will soon explain.
Once you step into the entrance on Phobos, you assume control of Doomguy. You start with only a pistol, but the learning curve allows you to familiarize yourself with the enemies and the mechanics. You soon pick up a shotgun with enough punch to its firepower to compensate for its slow firing rate, but then you learn that the maps you are in can be interacted with in ways not possible in Wolfenstein 3D. Some floors such as nuclear waste are hazardous to touch, switches can do more than open doors such as raising or lowering platforms, and crossing certain areas may activate traps such as teleporting monsters. Because of that, the helpful secret areas are more cleverly hidden. Explosive barrels and some ceilings that crush anything beneath them can either help or hurt the player. Even the brightness of an area is set high or low for good or poor visibility, and can be changed. They are not revolutionary in themselves, but they are a significant leap forward for first-person shooters.
You learn some basic enemies in the early levels such as human zombies with rifles or shotguns, imps that hurl fireballs toward Doomguy, and pink, hairless, ape-like demons who run and bite with their large jaws. Later appearances include the cacodemon, AKA a Flying Spaghetti Monster with a huge mouth who burps electric balls, and flying, fiery skulls that charge in straight lines. They all make gargles, grunts, and animal sounds so distorted that I am convinced only a synthesizer can produce, at least in the physical world. To add to the eeriness, the demons have partially invisible brothers, and a few rooms will flip their lights off and release more monsters. The action rises as you find a chaingun, a rocket launcher that can maim several bodies beyond recognition in one blast, a plasma rifle, and its bulkier cousin and the granddaddy of weapons, the BFG 9000. There is no looking up or down, which I can tolerate, but the weapons will aim at the monsters you point them at higher or lower than you. A nifty introduction is an automap that makes navigating mazes less irritating, and it even has a power-up that reveals all the undiscovered locations, including secrets. At the end of an episode awaits a fight with a boss, such as the delightfully loathsome Cyberdemon and eventually the one who ordered the invasion of the moon bases. A cliffhanger left millions of players anticipating the inevitable sequel, followed by a new free prequel episode a year later.
Recognizing their game would be played endlessly and leave an everlasting legacy, id Software thoughtfully tinkered the game so that players can create levels with their own textures, sounds, and music, all stored in a single file. After all these years, it is impressive to see a community of fans still uploading new levels. It only made sense once the Doom engine, id Tech 1, was open-sourced that the fans have upgraded and made mods for it. The last bonus is a feature that proved extremely popular: a networked multiplayer where up to four players participate and either fight each other in real time in a mode for which id Software coined "deathmatch" or team up against the monsters in campaign.
Doom is usually touted as the first FPS with a convincingly 3D environment, and was advertised as a 3D game by id Software. They are right, at least for the most part. It is not an issue here that there are sprites in place of models, which made sense for the time period. You see, the Doom engine was not without limitations, perhaps the most notable being that architecture with floors stacked one above another is impossible. Indeed, there is no standing on barrels or running over or under hostiles, and while it is true weapons cannot hit enemies if they are out of range, monster melee attacks and explosions can still do damage to themselves and players who are technically in reach but of radically different elevations. The worlds are thus better described as 2.5D instead of purely 3D. The reasons for the limitation obviously relate to the fact that a fine line needed to be drawn between weak computers and prettiness. In retrospect (and I would argue even then), I think the line was drawn a little too close on the weak computer side. To their benefit, perhaps they were right to make it accessible to weak computers, which could have left millions of players on the sidelines, and its legacy might have been harmed because of it. Players can still jump from platform to platform across structures that resemble actual buildings, caves, and outdoors.
One issue I take with Doom is something that other early first-person shooters also suffered from: the premise. I should stress that the story alone is not flawed, being a horror-themed sci-fi thriller about abominations from Hell who invade the bases of Mars' moons and then Earth, which, quite frankly, is original. There is definitely joy to be had out of being impossibly outnumbered by those abominations, only to obliterate them all in quick succession and make it out alive, and even more so out of them purposefully injuring each other after accidental friendly fire, making them dumber fighters than the Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D, but after a while into the game, slaughtering thousands of monsters nonstop becomes a bore and the gameplay shallow and senseless. Other famous first-person shooters before Half-Life followed a similar formula, and their gameplays also became shallow and senseless, although some had it better than others. Admittedly, it is not as if one would never touch the game again after becoming tolerant of its euphoric rewards. Maybe there are secrets one missed, or one may need to up the difficulty to Nightmare, which will certainly hold the player's attention for a time. Or one could look at the impressive multitude of user-generated maps and mods or join one of the community-run servers still active today.
VERDICT: Doom flooded the DOS community much as DOS flooded the personal computer market. It bolstered its reputation as a gaming computer by being briefly the biggest title of a sparse genre that utilized its underappreciated capabilities and looked impractical to produce even for traditional consoles. It recently hit me that Doom is the game that proved that the operating system it was built for, the then-12-year-old DOS, was inherently more powerful than the creators of the first multimedia personal computer, the Amiga, in their right mind ever dreamed of making it. The game by no means caused that computer's demise, but, when combined with the woeful incompetence of the bumbling fools in charge of the system, it struck the last nail in the coffin for the brand for which death was the only way out of the hands of its negligent caretakers. The point is that DOS was ahead of its time, its potential only realized because of Doom, and even that game was surpassed by other, more stunning titles for the same platform. It includes id's own masterpiece, Quake, but with a legacy Doom left and a story that has since evolved, it spawned a franchise still beloved and played to this day.
As the story goes, on the moons of Mars, experiments by an interplanetary conglomerate involving interdimensional space travel spiral out of control. Its Phobos base is overrun with unknown forces, and Deimos disappears. Space marines stationed on Mars are sent to the Phobos base to contain the fallout. All infiltrate the base and die trying to clear the enemy, except Doomguy, who was initially ordered to secure its perimeter. With no one nearer than 50 million miles away to come to his aid, Doomguy is left with no choice but to fight his way through the most abominable creatures imaginable to man. The first thing the player sees is a nice title screen that looks like the cover of a jewel CD case, which, in the tradition of id Software's games, is followed by demos of what to expect from it. Among those things are killer metal music and fake Halloween gore. The level of violence in the game was unusual and ahead of its time, garnering controversy even as the public grew accustomed to violence in films, but in retrospect, the gore is lighthearted and nowhere close to gratuitous. Most of all, on a graphical level, floors and ceilings have textures, and the environment varies in elevation. Maps are no longer confined to towers where the ceiling and floor are of equal distance apart. Even more so, they are given much more geometry, along with interactivity that I will soon explain.
Once you step into the entrance on Phobos, you assume control of Doomguy. You start with only a pistol, but the learning curve allows you to familiarize yourself with the enemies and the mechanics. You soon pick up a shotgun with enough punch to its firepower to compensate for its slow firing rate, but then you learn that the maps you are in can be interacted with in ways not possible in Wolfenstein 3D. Some floors such as nuclear waste are hazardous to touch, switches can do more than open doors such as raising or lowering platforms, and crossing certain areas may activate traps such as teleporting monsters. Because of that, the helpful secret areas are more cleverly hidden. Explosive barrels and some ceilings that crush anything beneath them can either help or hurt the player. Even the brightness of an area is set high or low for good or poor visibility, and can be changed. They are not revolutionary in themselves, but they are a significant leap forward for first-person shooters.
You learn some basic enemies in the early levels such as human zombies with rifles or shotguns, imps that hurl fireballs toward Doomguy, and pink, hairless, ape-like demons who run and bite with their large jaws. Later appearances include the cacodemon, AKA a Flying Spaghetti Monster with a huge mouth who burps electric balls, and flying, fiery skulls that charge in straight lines. They all make gargles, grunts, and animal sounds so distorted that I am convinced only a synthesizer can produce, at least in the physical world. To add to the eeriness, the demons have partially invisible brothers, and a few rooms will flip their lights off and release more monsters. The action rises as you find a chaingun, a rocket launcher that can maim several bodies beyond recognition in one blast, a plasma rifle, and its bulkier cousin and the granddaddy of weapons, the BFG 9000. There is no looking up or down, which I can tolerate, but the weapons will aim at the monsters you point them at higher or lower than you. A nifty introduction is an automap that makes navigating mazes less irritating, and it even has a power-up that reveals all the undiscovered locations, including secrets. At the end of an episode awaits a fight with a boss, such as the delightfully loathsome Cyberdemon and eventually the one who ordered the invasion of the moon bases. A cliffhanger left millions of players anticipating the inevitable sequel, followed by a new free prequel episode a year later.
Recognizing their game would be played endlessly and leave an everlasting legacy, id Software thoughtfully tinkered the game so that players can create levels with their own textures, sounds, and music, all stored in a single file. After all these years, it is impressive to see a community of fans still uploading new levels. It only made sense once the Doom engine, id Tech 1, was open-sourced that the fans have upgraded and made mods for it. The last bonus is a feature that proved extremely popular: a networked multiplayer where up to four players participate and either fight each other in real time in a mode for which id Software coined "deathmatch" or team up against the monsters in campaign.
Doom is usually touted as the first FPS with a convincingly 3D environment, and was advertised as a 3D game by id Software. They are right, at least for the most part. It is not an issue here that there are sprites in place of models, which made sense for the time period. You see, the Doom engine was not without limitations, perhaps the most notable being that architecture with floors stacked one above another is impossible. Indeed, there is no standing on barrels or running over or under hostiles, and while it is true weapons cannot hit enemies if they are out of range, monster melee attacks and explosions can still do damage to themselves and players who are technically in reach but of radically different elevations. The worlds are thus better described as 2.5D instead of purely 3D. The reasons for the limitation obviously relate to the fact that a fine line needed to be drawn between weak computers and prettiness. In retrospect (and I would argue even then), I think the line was drawn a little too close on the weak computer side. To their benefit, perhaps they were right to make it accessible to weak computers, which could have left millions of players on the sidelines, and its legacy might have been harmed because of it. Players can still jump from platform to platform across structures that resemble actual buildings, caves, and outdoors.
One issue I take with Doom is something that other early first-person shooters also suffered from: the premise. I should stress that the story alone is not flawed, being a horror-themed sci-fi thriller about abominations from Hell who invade the bases of Mars' moons and then Earth, which, quite frankly, is original. There is definitely joy to be had out of being impossibly outnumbered by those abominations, only to obliterate them all in quick succession and make it out alive, and even more so out of them purposefully injuring each other after accidental friendly fire, making them dumber fighters than the Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D, but after a while into the game, slaughtering thousands of monsters nonstop becomes a bore and the gameplay shallow and senseless. Other famous first-person shooters before Half-Life followed a similar formula, and their gameplays also became shallow and senseless, although some had it better than others. Admittedly, it is not as if one would never touch the game again after becoming tolerant of its euphoric rewards. Maybe there are secrets one missed, or one may need to up the difficulty to Nightmare, which will certainly hold the player's attention for a time. Or one could look at the impressive multitude of user-generated maps and mods or join one of the community-run servers still active today.
VERDICT: Doom flooded the DOS community much as DOS flooded the personal computer market. It bolstered its reputation as a gaming computer by being briefly the biggest title of a sparse genre that utilized its underappreciated capabilities and looked impractical to produce even for traditional consoles. It recently hit me that Doom is the game that proved that the operating system it was built for, the then-12-year-old DOS, was inherently more powerful than the creators of the first multimedia personal computer, the Amiga, in their right mind ever dreamed of making it. The game by no means caused that computer's demise, but, when combined with the woeful incompetence of the bumbling fools in charge of the system, it struck the last nail in the coffin for the brand for which death was the only way out of the hands of its negligent caretakers. The point is that DOS was ahead of its time, its potential only realized because of Doom, and even that game was surpassed by other, more stunning titles for the same platform. It includes id's own masterpiece, Quake, but with a legacy Doom left and a story that has since evolved, it spawned a franchise still beloved and played to this day.