“Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…” – Terry Pratchett
As gamers, there are a few moments in our lives that are just seminal. Perhaps the first time you beat one of the older kids at Street Fighter in the local newsagents; maybe when you completed Sonic 2 on the day it came out within 2 hours of getting it home; or the day you finally got to the end of ‘Secret of Mana’. As for me, it was all about Doom.
I can still remember the first time I heard about Doom. My friend took great pains to explain to me the awesome intricities of this wonderful new gaming experience that I was yet to behold, but really I was sold the second I heard that one of the weapons was actually called the ‘Big Fucking Gun’. Doom was like nothing we’d ever played before. The graphics at the time were absolutely outstanding. The immersive 3D was simply groundbreaking. The sound was intense, the game play, frantic – Of course, the fact that you had an array of bloody cool weapons to take out thousands of demons in the most gruesome ways imaginable probably had something to do with it.Whatever it was, we were hooked. Doom destroyed the educations of so many students, lost so many people their jobs… it was just that addictive!
Where it all began
Before I delve into all things wonderful about Doom, let’s tip our hat to its predecessors.
id Software’s first foray into 3D gameplay was the game ‘Hovertank 3D’ released in 1991. The 3D rendering in this game was groundbreaking, but it wasn’t until id used the technology to create ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ that they gained real popularity.
Wolfenstein 3D can easily be seen as the predecessor to Doom, as its gameplay was very similar. Wolfenstein 3D was inspired by the 1981 game ‘Castle Wolfenstein’ set in WW2 and centred around killing Nazis. A wholesome activity I’m sure we can all agree.
After the popularity of Wolfenstein 3D, id created an updated version of their 3D engine and set to work on a new game based around the ‘Aliens’ films. This game gradually became the awesome Doom that we know and love.
Groundbreaking concepts
Doom proved to be one of the greatest game experiences around, but it has stood the test of time due to the foresight of its programmers. id were already creating custom ‘engines’ for their games that could be licensed to third parties to make new games, but the Doom engine was something very special indeed.
The Doom engine stored the majority of its game data in separate ‘WAD’ files (WAD stands for ‘Where’s all the data?’), allowing others to create custom levels, change the graphics & sound etc.
It didn’t take long for Doom editors to hit the internet and now there are literally hundreds of WAD files available for the original Doom.
The best WAD, in my opinion was the ‘Aliens for Doom’ mod. It changed the graphics to show aliens from the movie, had a whole new host of levels, and was just damn scary! We used to play it in the dark with headphones on. The sound was so immersive that it was actually possible to play reasonably well blindfolded, listening for the noise of aliens around the level.
Other notable WADs include ‘Simpsons for Doom’, which changed the graphics and sound to those of Simpsons characters, and ‘Star Wars Doom’, which featured a host of new levels and storm troopers as enemies.
After id released their next hit Quake, they released the code for the engine itself, which allowed people to build updated versions of Doom. Today you can still play updated Doom engines that utilize modern hardware to improve the graphics of the game, and include some of the newer features of first person shooters, such as mouselook, jump and crouch.
Doom resources
There’s loads of cool Doom stuff out there and if you’ve read this far, let me reward you with some links.
Old versions of Doom:
You can download the original Alpha releases of Doom from John Romero’s site here: http://rome.ro/lee_killough/versions/
Some of them are really old and vastly different to the Doom we all know. I’ve had hours of fun playing around with these.
New versions of Doom:
To play Doom now, you’ll probably want to download Doom Legacy. It’s a great port of the old engine which takes advantage of your graphics hardware and also implements newer FPS features
There are many different Doom ports out there, and I’ve only used Doom Legacy, but some WADs around require ZDoom, so here it is.
Original versions of Doom:
If you’d rather play Doom the way it was intended, you can still download the originals for free.
Download Doom
Download Doom 2
If you’re having difficulties playing the originals, you might want to try using ‘DOSBOX‘ which will emulate that old 486 you used to have.
Doom WADs:
Here’s links to some of the cooler WADs I remember playing as a kid.
Star Wars Doom (Original)
Star Wars Doom (Dark side)
Simpsons for Doom (Original)
Ultimate Simpsons (Newer, requires Zdoom)
Taught to death – a Doom 2 WAD by Rue Turner replicating Richmond Upon Thames College. Ironic really that it was Doom 2 itself that largely prevented me from finishing college in the first place. In any case, this WAD was never finished, but was awesome (and replaced the chainsaw with a feather duster). It doesn’t seem like you can download it anymore, so for posterity, here it is. Hurrah!
(The IDDQD cheat has been changed to OSCAR – named after a strange man in a large pink hat.)
Doom cheats:
IDDQD – God mode
IDKFA – All weapons, keys, ammo
IDCLIP – Walk through walls
Doom T-Shirts
Show your love for one of the greatest games of all time… get a Doom T-Shirt from RetroGT.
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