Happy thirtieth birthday, Doom! Of course this was a milestone I was going to recognize out loud, I was a child of the eighties, after all, and an avid gamer since I had something to play with.
⚠️ beware: ramblings of a middle-aged nerd ⚠️
Before Doomsday
What did we have before Doom and what did we gaming kids get excited about? At home we had a few years old 286 with an EGA display and the pc-squeaker, and Wolfenstein 3-D:s shareware version was maybe the most impressive of the action games it could run. As long as you shrunk the screen a bit. For some reason me and my friends played the not-too-stable alpha version of Wolf. Of the other Apogee games we spent a sick amount on Keen 1 and 2. And in case you, dear reader, didn't have to experience the wonders of PC-speaker: it made awful noises and foul screeches at best, so we usually had the sounds off.
At that point in history I was just a bit older than Project Assistant I is now. How ridiculous was that?
My classmate Mikko (and his older brother) had a fresher computer (486 + SoundBlaster Pro), we went in batches to their apartment to witness noisy, violent games like Syndicate and Space Hulk. I still remember clearly how Mikko was explaining to me at the school yard that they had the newest game of the Wolfenstein people, how it had indoor, outdoor spaces, lights, many weapons, windows, up/down moving doors and walls, and lifts! Being used to that entering a lift in Wolfenstein meant that you proceeded to the next level, I asked if you could go back to where you were before and what sort of witchcraft was this?
Yeah, the point of this silly example was to describe what a huge change in games Doom was. A young child couldn't imagine all that was described without seeing. For one reason or another I never went to Mikko's to play or even watch someone else play Doom, and I couldn't remember any kind of an explanation.
My own Doomsday
Funnily enough there were three of us classmates that got a new multimedia computer (hah!) at their homes at about the same time. Ours was a Compaq Presario 720, which translated into a 486SX/66/4 with a double-speed cd drive (our computer's memory was doubled and then redoubled to maximum over some years), I guess it had a ~600MB hard drive that felt endless for some time. My namesake's family was the first of us to get there, so at his place I saw and especially heard Doom for the first time.
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| This view became quite familiar over the years |
Here we had a serious risk of me using cliches and exaggerations, but what could I do: Doom blew up my mind and pulled my legs from under my own self. Nothing, and I meant absolutely fucking nothing has ever made a comparable impression in gaming during the next three decades.
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| If you didn't hear At Doom's Gate right now, you may have gone beyond all help |
The monsters were making and awful racket in the darkness, the lights strobed and blinked, then there were some mofos throwing fireballs from beyond a poison pit! Staircases, lifts, yards, computer rooms. And that was the first level only, between the levels there was a cool map that showed where you just were and where were you heading. To help getting lost there was an automap so you didn't need to try to draw your own maps anymore. Nope, none of this could be imagined if Wolfenstein was the epitome of 3d in your brain.
The tiniest details have been devoured by the looming dementia, but the computer with 4MB RAM (and Bill Gate's infamous 512kB) forced you to fight with boot disks (did someone actually miss poking autoexec.bat and config.sys? Unlikely) to even get a game running. Could've been that the shareware Doom's older versions were more prone to crash as well, because in the earliest of my Doom memories it was pretty common that the game just crashed in the middle of the one and only episode and just dropped you back to DOS.
Wads and editors
At some point soon we also got a new computer and of course its sound card (an integrated ESS Audiodrive) made everyone go ooh and aah with the smooth sounds. The first amazer was Prince of Persia with its music, and I was pretty much the only one who was endlessly amused by the death screams of the nazis in Wolfenstein. And then there were the countless hours of Doom (and later Doom II) that echoed around the apartment.
Back in the mid-nineties being online wasn't quite what it is today, when you had to call with your 14400 baud modem to someplace (after five, due to the cheaper local calls) like a BBS or something, if you wanted to find files. Mostly my age group's big brothers were the ones who knew things and we younglings just shuffled floppies full of good levels in the sneakernet. Or then someone (or their parents) bought one of those megacds that had hundreds of wads, and those were a source of good levels if they happened to work.
I mostly played random levels or levelpacks, or fooled around replacing sounds with dmaud, mostly I changed things to be pretty stupid. Level editing (with DEU) looked too complicated to me, who was used to Wolfenstein's mapedit. Pics for comparison:
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| https://github.com/robilic/DEU |
At some point I discovered DeHackEd that allowed to tweak Doom's internal params. Very few pwads came with .deh changes, but they did exist. The biggest issues with cool conversion projects like Star Wars Doom or Aliens Doom was that they were mostly found as a zipfile (or an .arj, which I preferred) full of individual .wad files and that gave you a part of the full experience. It was a long way to proper TCs, and I wasn't deep enough in this to get too far with my trial and error approach.
Retail Doom
I had to admit that I got a full version of Doom from a friend at school at some point back in the day. The fact that no one in my circles had no practical way of register Doom in those days was just that, an excuse. Later I've bought Doom a few times (the cd releases of Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and I think I got Final Doom and maybe the Master Levels as gifts from friends, then I have bought the classic Doom games in Steam and finally I also bought Doom for the Switch as well because why not?). Maybe that compensated a bit afterwards.
The shareware version wasn't enough for a while, because I and everyone else wanted to get the next two episodes and especially to experience BFG-9000. At some point Doom got updated to 1.9 that added the fourth episode.
I guess you could imagine how disappointed and displeased I was already as a preteen that one couldn't get a Doom t-shirt in this buttcrack of the planet. Luckily the current owner of the rights sells these logo shirts and the original cover art t-shirts even to people like myself. I just wished I could tell the young ISD that "worry not, when you're grown up you've got a few of these and even your colleagues love them" but being a bit of a cynical little bastard, I most likely wouldn't have believed.
ATDT090001234
Ah, the crappy old times and the issues with connections. We had to agree who calls whom, and to keep the rest of the inhabitants far away from the phones because picking up the receiver killed the game. Or if someone answered the call when it was intended for the modem and instead of Doom you heard someone's "hello?". Luckily that was a mostly forgotten thing of the distant past, even though it was lots of fun back in the day.
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| APCiDoom (https://kangaroopunch.com/software/apcidoom) |
We didn't play co-operative games much with my then-friend X, not in Doom, Duke Nukem 3d, Heretic nor Hexen. We concentrated on Deathmatch. An insane amount of hours had given us our favourite levels, weapons and most likely our go-to in-game tricks.
For some reason our absolute favourite Deathmatch map was E1M4 "Command Control", and based on some sort of a gentleperson's deal we only used the shotgun and chaingun, because fighting with them was the most fun. At best we spent so long in a single game that the frag counter went around (it was only two-digit, but it took a while to murder your friend a hundred times). I tried to make a sort of a heatmap of the level to show where our usual deathmatching there concentrated on:
This realization gave us boys a glorious idea. What if we just removed everything we felt unnecessary and played that way? Like a concentrated arena of death. The first version was quickly done, most of the objects got simply deleted, the doorways leading to the useless areas were blocked by making them impassable and changing the wall textures appropriately. While playing this version we found it fitting to our playing style.
I remembered really clearly poking this one level, but the things following it were much less clear in my mind. Of course I may have been now building some fake memories too, but I think we went through a similar process over a number of the normal levels. Thinking about this afterwards made me believe that most of our "useless area" complaints were caused by the levels being large and on modems we could only play 1vs1 games instead of three- or four-Doomguy massacres.
The pain of creation
At some point a couple of us friends decided that we could poke the level editor a bit more, to go a bit further than just editing the existing levels. Like so many other beginners, I started copying something from the real world. I tried to recreate my friend X's home (he lived in a two-floor rowhouse) both inside and outside while I had no understanding of how not-easy it was going to be - if even possible. Of course I made a sauna, and of course you got more damage the higher up you went. Just. like. in. every. single. Doom sauna. ever.
Somehow this one level "hey, let's make X's home for Deatchmatch" idea developed into a full single-player episode. Two of us made the level editing work, and the third did the filling with items. Planning and playtesting we did tightly together.
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| 📷 (c) Sir Robin |
Being unaware of the engine and its limitations we managed to overgrow our levels (IIRC the fifth level started throwing a fatal visplane overflow error when you got to a specific point in the level's critical path). X, being an excited internaut found out a new Doom Source Port – Team TNT's Boom – removed the visplane limit and added tons of cool new features.
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| 📷 (c) Sir Robin |
As one would have expected, we started using the new features and tricks excitedly, but the already finished levels had things I complained back in the day and I still hated them, like the third level's one pixel too deep acid pits that you couldn't get out of. Or the invisible impassable linedef in the next screenshot's area - it made no sense without anything blocking, but supposedly "anything else would've looked stupid". Both the first two levels had some illogicalities and some of the universally loathed "if you don't guess in advance that that's unescapable, it's your own fault for being stupid" deathtraps, and I bet we went against a bunch of Romer's original Doom Level Design Basic Rules that we had been oblivious about. We learned to behave on our own during this project of hours, but but... One key issue that we should've thought about was to make the first level last instead of trying to build things sequentially. But that was us then, and it was a quarter of a century ago.
While digging my memories I tried to find some screenshots to show, but I didn't manage to find anything I truly wanted. X was, already at that point, eager to update every place with the latest stuff and hiding anything older than a month, let alone 20+ years.
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| 📷 (c) Sir Robin |
After some digging I got to Sir Robin's Castle and he had a review and an astonishing set of 11 screenshots. Those I used because I didn't have anything original quickly available. Here the last photo showed Duke Nukem 3D's (and TNT:Evilution's level 19: "Shipping/Respawning") effect with the real world copying, and that I hadn't fixed the x-offsets of the linedefs even though they were very clearly off. One of the limitations of the editor we used back in the day was, as noticeable, the minimum of 8px separation between vertices.
Silly tests
In addition to our so-called official episode, I had some silliness projects with Z. With those we played with ZDoom's new tricks, effects and features like adding new animated linedefs and sector textures in addition to the pre-existing ones, making some sort of intros and cutscenes with self-recorded voicelines and subtitles, making floating bridges and whatnot.
Then all of it just fell away.
Those ancient silly maps have been lost to /dev/null over the years and computer changes. None of those were published, that I knew.
The itching in the brain
Occasionally I've found myself thinking if I should install both Dooms and the addons (gzdoom as the source port, zeth for level editing and if someone had a better suggestion, I was open for ideas) to see what kind of stupid nonsense I could come up with. Eevee's articleset almost got me off my buttocks last year, but I didn't have time for everything. If I got truly mad, I could even try it on Steam Deck but I wasn't too confident on using the editors without a separate mouse + keyboard.
As a leveltype I've always been most fond of the Techbase levels, which made out most of Knee-deep in the Dead. The Inferno levels were always awfully messy-looking and even ugly (thinking primarily of Mt. Erebus what was chock-full of that animated blue-red wall). So if the inspiration bit me a tiny bit more forcefully and time wasn't so limiting, I could see myself poking at something simple again.
A funny thing, in October I chatted with a colleague about Doom maps and zdoom's craftier tricks. Standing by the stairwell in the lower floor of the office, we started talking how to implement the Room over Room effect in a convincing way in zdoom.
For some reason moving the polyobjects has taken an amount of processing time in my head lately. Not just because they'd allow some funky-ass space doors, but neat bridges over poisonous sludge that would roll sideways out of the wall with its safety fences and all. A bit like the walkway rises in E1M5 Phobos Lab, but much, much neater.
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| https://ian-albert.com/games/doom_maps/ |
Anyone reading my nonsense over these many years may have noticed the natural progress of my ponderings at this volume. Now the only problem was - like I said before - time, the most limited resource we had...
Doomed texts
A bit less time-consuming has been my low-burn python3 nonsense, that I was writing just for my own amusement sometime earlier, and that I even commented in the yearly post 2023. This script had no interaction whatsoever, it just randomizes the starting variables and starts running 1vs1 duels between Doomguy and a randomly chosen (the maxIndex for the array grows by one per round until it covers it all) enemy. In these screenshots below I had ended in the latest version, where just about all of the descriptions were set as colour-coded placeholders:
In addition to the basic stats the only important value that was handled was the generic distance, based on which Doomguy and the different enemy classes (close combat enemies like Demons; purely shooting enemies like the Cyberdemon; or those who could do both like the Revenants) chose how to move in that round: trying to get closer to attack / keep the distance / get further away, and then attack if they could. The stats and such were of course taken from Doomwiki to get the values exactly as they were supposed to be. I did one key change, and that was if Doomguy had the Berserk pack and he was within charging (running) distance -> the weapon was autoswitched to [0] Fist and the distance was driven to 0 so that Doomguy could start ripping and tearing. Adding the capital B into Berserking, that is.
My delusional plan was that this would just print slowly (at more or less my reading pace) a continually proceeding story of Doomguy diving deeper into a level, gathering stuff and killing enemies. Even in the earlier and less well-structured code it was much more entertaining than scrolling throuh zwitter, years before the ownership change and what crap followed.
And of course the script kept statistics of how the adventure had gone, how many monsters were slain and so on. While writing this text up I didn't doublecheck, but I remembered that the final row's death description was just as randomized as every other not-Doom-source-based text. Maybe I'd write a silly post about this supremely interesting and silly miniproject in a different post, even if this was just another hat-tip to the original Doom and its effect on me.
Final words
No matter how much time has passed and what else I have encountered, Doom has never faded away. You all had your own experiences with it, I surely have anchored myself with it pretty damn tightly.
I wouldn't leave if I were you. DOS is much worse.
