Doom (1993 video game)
Doom is a 1993 first-person shooter game developed and published by id Software for MS-DOS. It is the first installment in the Doom franchise. The player assumes the role of a space marine, later unofficially referred to as Doomguy, fighting through hordes of undead humans and invading demons. The game begins on the moons of Mars and finishes in hell, with the player traversing each level to find its exit or defeat its final boss. It is an early example of 3D graphics in video games, and has enemies and objects as 2D images, a technique sometimes referred to as 2.5D graphics.
Doom was the third major independent release by id Software, after Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D. In May 1992, id started developing a darker game focused on fighting demons with technology, using a new 3D game engine from the lead programmer, John Carmack. The designer Tom Hall initially wrote a science fiction plot, but he and most of the story were removed from the project, with the final game featuring an action-heavy design by John Romero and Sandy Petersen. Id published Doom as a set of three episodes under the shareware model, marketing the full game by releasing the first episode free. A retail version with an additional episode was published in 1995 by GT Interactive as The Ultimate Doom.
Doom was a critical and commercial success, earning a reputation as one of the best and most influential video games of all time. It sold an estimated 3.5 million copies by 1999, and up to 20 million people are estimated to have played it within two years of launch. It has been termed the "father" of first-person shooters and is regarded as one of the most important games in the genre. It has been cited by video game historians as shifting the direction and public perception of the medium as a whole, as well as sparking the rise of online games and communities. It led to an array of imitators and clones, as well as a robust modding scene and the birth of speedrunning as a community. Its high level of graphic violence led to controversy from a range of groups. Doom has been ported to a variety of platforms both officially and unofficially and has been followed by several games in the series, including Doom II, Doom 64, Doom 3, Doom, Doom Eternal, and Doom: The Dark Ages, as well as the films Doom and Doom: Annihilation.
Gameplay
Doom is a first-person shooter presented with 3D graphics. While the environment is shown in a 3D perspective, the enemies and objects are instead 2D sprites rendered at fixed angles, a technique sometimes referred to as 2.5D graphics or billboarding. In the single-player campaign mode, the player controls an unnamed space marine—later unofficially termed "Doomguy"—through military bases on the moons of Mars and in hell. To finish a level, the player must traverse through labyrinthine areas to reach a marked exit room. Levels are grouped into named episodes, with the final level of each focusing on a boss fight.While traversing the levels, the player must fight a variety of enemies, including demons and possessed undead humans. Enemies often appear in large groups. The five difficulty levels adjust the number of enemies and amount of damage they do, with enemies moving and attacking faster than normal on the hardest difficulty setting. The monsters have simple behavior: they move toward their opponent if they see or hear them, and attack by biting, clawing, or using magic abilities such as fireballs.
The player must manage supplies of ammunition, health, and armor while traversing the levels. The player can find weapons and ammunition throughout the levels or can collect them from dead enemies, including a pistol, a shotgun, a chainsaw, a plasma rifle, and the BFG 9000. The player also encounters pits of toxic waste, ceilings that lower and crush objects, and locked doors requiring a collectable keycard or a remote switch. Power-ups include health or armor points, a mapping computer, partial invisibility, a radiation suit against toxic waste, invulnerability, or a super-strong melee berserker status. Cheat codes allow the player to unlock all weapons, walk through walls, or become invulnerable.
Two multiplayer modes are playable over a network: cooperative, in which two to four players team up to complete the main campaign, and deathmatch, in which two to four players compete to kill the other players' characters as many times as possible. Multiplayer was initially only playable over local networks, but a four-player online multiplayer mode was made available one year after launch through the DWANGO service.
Plot
Doom is divided into three episodes, each containing eight main levels: "Knee-Deep in the Dead", "The Shores of Hell", and "Inferno". A fourth episode, "Thy Flesh Consumed", was added in an expanded version, The Ultimate Doom, released two years after Doom. The campaign contains very few plot elements, with a minimal story presented mostly through the instruction manual and text descriptions between episodes.In the future, an unnamed marine is posted to a dead-end assignment on Mars after assaulting a superior officer who ordered his unit to fire on civilians. The Union Aerospace Corporation, which operates radioactive waste facilities there, allows the military to conduct secret teleportation experiments that turn deadly. A base on Phobos urgently requests military support, while Deimos disappears entirely, and the marine joins a combat force to secure Phobos. He secures the perimeter as ordered while the entire response team is wiped out. With no way off the moon, and armed with only a pistol, he enters the base intent on revenge.
In "Knee-Deep in the Dead", the marine fights demons and possessed humans in the military and waste facilities on Phobos. The episode ends with the marine defeating two powerful Barons of Hell guarding a teleporter to the Deimos base. After the battle, the marine passes through the teleporter and is knocked unconscious by a horde of enemies, awakening with only a pistol. In "The Shores of Hell", the marine fights through corrupted research facilities on Deimos, culminating in the defeat of a gigantic cyberdemon. From an overlook, he discovers that the moon is floating above hell and rappels down to the surface. In "Inferno", the marine battles through hell itself and destroys a cybernetic spider-demon that masterminded the invasion of the moons. When a portal to Earth opens, the marine steps through to discover that Earth has been invaded. "Thy Flesh Consumed" follows the marine's initial assault on the Earth invaders, setting the stage for Doom II.
Development
Concept
released Wolfenstein 3D in May 1992. Later called the "grandfather of 3D shooters", it established the genre's popularity and its reputation for fast action and technological advancement. When most of the studio began work on additional episodes for Wolfenstein, id co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack instead began technical research on a new game. Following the release of Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny in September 1992, the team began to plan their next game. They were tired of Wolfenstein and wanted to create another 3D game using a new engine Carmack was developing. Co-founder and lead designer Tom Hall proposed a new game in the Commander Keen series, but the team decided that the Keen platforming gameplay was a poor fit for Carmack's fast-paced 3D engines. Additionally, the other co-founders, designer John Romero and lead artist Adrian Carmack wanted to create something in a darker style than the Keen games.John Carmack conceived a game about using technology to fight demons, inspired by a Dungeons & Dragons campaign the team played. This campaign would also influence the design of Quake and Daikatana. More broadly the team intended to combine the styles of the Evil Dead II and Aliens films. The working title was Green and Pissed, but Carmack renamed it Doom based on a line from the 1986 film The Color of Money: What you got in there?' / 'In here? Doom.
The team agreed to pursue the Doom concept, and development began in November 1992. The initial development team was composed of five people: programmers John Carmack and Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Hall. They moved operations to a dark office building, naming it "Suite 666" while drawing inspiration from the noises they heard from a neighboring dental practice. They also decided to cut ties with Apogee Software, their previous publisher, and self-publish Doom, as they felt that they were outgrowing the publisher and could make more money by self-publishing.
Design
In November, Hall delivered a design document that he called the "Doom Bible", detailing the project's plot, backstory, and design goals. His design was a science fiction horror concept wherein scientists on the Moon open a portal to an alien invasion. Over a series of levels, the player discovers that the aliens are demons while hell steadily infects the level design. John Carmack not only disliked the proposed story but dismissed the idea of having a story at all: "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important." Rather than a deep story, he wanted to focus on technological innovation, dropping the levels and episodes of Wolfenstein in favor of a fast, continuous world. Hall disliked the idea, but the rest of the team sided with Carmack. Hall spent the next few weeks reworking the Doom Bible to work with Carmack's technological ideas. However, the team then realized that Carmack's vision for a seamless world would be impossible given the hardware limitations, and Hall was forced to rework the design document once again.At the start of 1993, id put out a press release, touting Hall's story about fighting off demons while "knee-deep in the dead". The press release proclaimed the new 3D engine features that John Carmack had created, as well as aspects including multiplayer, that had not yet even been designed. Early versions were built to match the Doom Bible, and a "pre-alpha" version of the first level included Hall's introductory base scene. Initial versions also retained Wolfensteins arcade-style scoring, but this was later removed as it clashed with Dooms intended tone. The studio also experimented with other game systems before removing them, such as lives, an inventory, a secondary shield, and a complex user interface.
Soon, however, the Doom Bible as a whole was rejected. Romero wanted a game even "more brutal and fast" than Wolfenstein, which did not leave room for the character-driven plot Hall had created. Additionally, the team believed it emphasized realism over entertaining gameplay, and they did not see the need for a design document at all. Some ideas were retained, but the story was dropped and most of the design was removed. By early 1993, Hall created levels that became part of an internal demo. Carmack and Romero, however, rejected the military architecture of Hall's level design. Romero especially believed that the boxy, flat level designs failed to innovate on Wolfenstein, and failed to show off the engine's capabilities. He began to create his own, more abstract levels, which the rest of the team saw as a great improvement.
Hall was upset with the reception of his designs and how little impact he was having as the lead designer. He was also upset with how much he was having to fight with John Carmack to get what he saw as obvious gameplay improvements, such as flying enemies, and began to spend less time at work. The other developers, however, felt that Hall was not in sync with the team's vision and was becoming a problem. In July the other founders of id fired Hall, who went to work for Apogee. He was replaced by Sandy Petersen in September, ten weeks before the game was released. Petersen later recalled that John Carmack and Romero wanted to hire other artists instead, but Cloud and Adrian disagreed, saying that a designer was required to help build a cohesive gameplay experience. The team also added a third programmer, Dave Taylor.
Petersen and Romero designed the rest of Doom levels, with different aims: the team believed that Petersen's designs were more technically interesting and varied, while Romero's were more aesthetically interesting. In late 1993, a month before release, John Carmack began to add multiplayer. After the multiplayer component was coded, the development team began playing four-player games, which Romero termed "deathmatch", and Cloud named the act of killing other players "fragging". According to Romero, the deathmatch mode was inspired by fighting games such as Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury, and Art of Fighting.