DOS

DOOM

Trivia

DOOM was named as #3 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking by German gaming magazine GameStar (issue 12/1999).

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The design of the monster Cacodemon is very similar to the beholder, a classic AD&D monster (with eye stalks instead of horns).

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The BFG9000 can only be found in secret areas in the game, so it's basically a secret weapon.

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The images for the pistol in Doom were most likely created from the Beretta 92FS pistol, which is currently the standard service pistol of the U.S. military.

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Although the death animations of some monsters (Cacodemon, Baron of Hell) show that their blood is blue or green, when shooting or damaging these monsters while they are still alive, their blood is always red, and never any other colour.

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The name of the last level of episode 2, "Tower of Babel", is an ironic Biblical reference. It is described in Genesis 11:1-9 as a physical pathway to the Heavens. In DOOM, however, the level is the pathway to Hell, as explained in the episode's ending text.

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The layout of E1M8 (Phobos Anomaly) bears resemblance to Liberty Island in New York, although it is not clear whether this is intentional.

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Much of the music in DOOM (and DOOM II: Hell on Earth) is likely to be inspired by songs of famous heavy metal bands. For example, the music from E1M1 is similar to Metallica's No Remorse (some also say that it is very similar to Master of Puppets), that in E1M4 resembles Rise by Pantera, and the music from E2M1 is similar to AC/DC's Big Gun.

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It was #3 in FLUX Magazine's (Issue #4) Top 100 Video Games of All-Time.

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In the anime-influenced TV show Megas XLR, in season 2, episode 4, "Viva Las Megas", there is a reference to DOOM. When Megas comes out of the Area 50 facility, he surprises a bunny near the facility with an explosion. This is similar to the way the Doomguy comes out of Hell and surprises a rabbit on the surface. However, in Megas XLR, the bunny doesn't, die, though it's supposed to.

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During the second episode, you can see the tower of the last level being built on the intermission screens.

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The 3DO release contains exclusive, CD-quality remixes of the PC's background music.

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In a little known FTP strategy guide bundled with some BBS versions of DOOM, John Carmack is quoted as saying "DOOM is in development for the Sega Mars". The Sega Mars was in fact the codename for the Sega 32X.

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Although on the box cover of the game the DoomGuy carries a weapon in his right hand, in the game, he is left handed - from the first person view, he carries his weapon in his left hand and also punches with his left fist.

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DOOM was the first game to include rocket jumping. Only, it worked a bit different from later first person shooters - instead of aiming at the ground (which you couldn't do in the game), you stand near a monster and shoot him with a rocket launcher. The result would be that you fly a bit higher, just like with a rocket jump.

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According to GameSpy, DOOM was voted by industry insiders to be the greatest game of all time in the year 2001.

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Doom was the first game to include a deathmatch mode, in which up to four players can compete over a network or in split screen. Maps used for deathmatch were the single-player levels, made less linear.

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The hands of the Doomguy, which millions of players believed to belong to themselves, actually are Kevin Cloud's - one of the art developers.

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The Pistol, Shotgun, and Chaingun where photos of toy guns, while the Chainsaw was the photo of a real chainsaw. It belonged to the girlfriend of one of the art developers, Tom Hall.

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Game Informer Magazine (Issue #138, Oct. 2004) named it one of the "Top 25 Most Influential Games of All Time".

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DOOM was named #5 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).

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DOOM is referenced in Friends TV series.

In season 2, episode 8, Ross must choose between Rachel and Julie and starts making a list of pros and cons of each. Joey and Chandler are helping him, and Chandler is making the list on his brand new laptop with "Twelve megabytes of RAM, 500 megabyte hard drive. Built-in spreadsheet capabilities and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 BPS".

While they're making the list, Ross says that Julie is a paleontologist just like him, while Rachel is just a waitress. To that, Chandler replies: "Waitress. Got it. You guys wanna play Doom? [looks to Ross and Joey, who stare back] Or we could keep doing this. What else?"

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The name of Doom's fourth skill level, "Ultra-Violence", very likely comes from Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange or its film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. In the novel and film, the protagonist uses the term to describe the activities of himself and his gang - randomly beating up, raping and killing people.

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DOOM was proposed for use as a tool for systems administrators in Dennis Chow's paper Doom as an Interface for Process Management; in it, through a modified version of DOOM (PSDoom or the Doom Process Manager), processes are depicted as enemies whose share of systems resources can be diminished by attacking them and which are completely terminated when their avatars are killed. (On a loaded system in which all programs' performances are strained, processes may begin attacking each other, aggressively competing -- as in Core War -- for system resources.)

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A little tongue in cheek piece of Trivia. The first retail version only update of the Doom engine had the revision number 1.666.

For those that don't know, 666 was introduced in pop culture by the movie "The Omen" as the mark of the beast. It can be found as a birthmark on the son of Satan.

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When you pick up a medikit and have 25 HP or less, the game is supposed to display the message "Picked up a medikit you REALLY need!" Due to a bug this message will never display in vanilla Doom. You see, the code in question does its check of how much health you have only AFTER you pick up a medikit. Since medikits give the player 25 health, the player will always have at least 26 health when the check is performed. This bug is corrected in most Doom source ports.

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In the very early stages of Doom the DoomGuy's right ear could take damage and turn into flimsy peace of flesh. This was removed in the later versions of Doom.

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The Sega 32X version contains only seventeen maps, taken from the "Knee Deep in the Dead" and "The Shores of Hell" episodes. No maps from the third episode, "Inferno", have been included. (Maps present on the 32X port: E1M1-E1M8 and E2M1-E2M7, as well as the two secret levels E1M9 and E2M9).

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After the end credits in the Sega 32X version, the game concludes by reverting to a fake DOS prompt if you activated the cheatcodes. The player cannot exit this screen without shutting off the system. If a player beats the game's levels without cheating, you will not be shown a DOS prompt, rather you will see a montage of enemies that you encountered in the game, like in DOOM II.

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Data file extension WAD means "Where's All the Data?"

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John Carmack took the title from the 1986 Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money, from the lines when Tom Cruise enters a pool hall with his favourite cue in a black case:

• - "What you got in there?"
• - "In here? Doom."

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Some development facts about the Doom engine. * It was the first 3d game engine that allowed variable heights for floors and ceilings. However, it only allowed one floor or ceiling per area, making multi-storied levels impossible. * John Carmack experimented with 16 bit textures, but found the overhead unacceptable for the game. * Id designed the game to work with 16 bit as well as 8 bit sound.

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The game makes an appearance in season 5, episode 4 of Family Guy, an animated series. Stewie Griffin is riding his bike through various locations, and one of them is a Doom level with some imps.

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American McGee used actual ground beef for some of the textures in the game. A trick that worked so well that he re-used it in Alice

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At 23-12-1997 id Software released the source code. You can download it from id´s FTP

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Back in 1996 the first level of Episode 1 was implemented by Piers Johnson in TADS, resulting in "FooM" -- a text adventure game interface for the FPS we all know so well. Downloadable with source at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/foom.tar.gz

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Doom was ranked # 2 in the 50 Best Games of All Time list published by PC Gamer Magazine in its April 2005 issue.

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Doom has a little-known feature that can be unlocked when starting the game from DOS. At the prompt, type in DOOM -DEVPARM. When playing the game, the game's frame-rate will be displayed at the bottom left corner of the screen.

Not only that, but the -DEVPARM parameter allows you to take screenshots by pressing the F1 key. It is widely believed that Doom is possibly the first game to allow you to do this.

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Doom's cover art, title screen, and chainsaw weapon seem to be inspired by the Evil Dead series of movies, specifically Army of Darkness. In the movie's storyline, the main character loses his hand to evil powers and fights with a chainsaw on his arm, along with a shotgun. In case you're not willing to travel off-site to look at the movie poster to Army of Darkness, a recent Evil Dead game (also derived from the poster) has a similar look. Having said that, it would be the later 3-D game Duke Nukem 3-D, itself influenced by DOOM, that would eventually quote some of Evil Dead's most memorable one-liners. Sometimes the developers are all watching the same movies! :)

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John Carmack once said that he fully intended to add decal support in Doom (e.g. semi-permanent marks on the walls from bullets, explosions, blood e.t.c.), but that never happened, since it would really raise the game's system requirements.

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Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver wrote a set of four novels about the Doom universe. They were published between June 1995 and January 1996 by Pocket Books. You can view the covers on this fanpage.

• Knee Deep in the Dead
• Hell on Earth
• Infernal Sky
• Endgame

In May 1996, Tom Grindberg of Marvel Comics made a comic book about Doom for a gaming convention.

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Doom was originally going to feature a story-based seamless world, similar to Half-Life. However, everyone hated Tom Hall's story idea (Soldiers playing cards? Come on!) and Carmack decided the engine couldn't handle a seamless world.

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Rammstein used a sample of the Doom shotgun and some screaming in their song "Wöllt ihr das bett in flammen sehen" on their album Herzeleid.

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The DOOM explosion mentioned on the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness booklet liner notes is used on the song "Where Boys Fear to Tread", track 1 of the second disc. It's audible right before the first sung line ("Candy cane walks down...") and in some other parts of the song. Once you hear it the first time, you'll detect all the times it's been used easily ;)

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Maybe the SPISPOPD cheat code had nothing to do with the band The Smashing Pumpkins (see below), The Smashing Pumpkins did use a sample from Doom however. Check the credits inside the booklet of the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995) album and you'll read:

"Explosion from DOOM courtesy of id Software, Inc and bobby prince Music"

By the way, I've listened to this CD like a hundred times, but I can't pinpoint the song in which the sample was used so it's not very obvious.

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The Gameboy Advance release of Doom is the only cut version - it features green blood and the Nazi symbol (a "Hakenkreuz" on the floor) in E1M4 was altered to look harmless. Being censored like this, it's the only version of Doom which is *not* banned in Germany.

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Doom is banned in Germany for ultra violence. :)

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There was even an Atari 2600 port of DOOM done. Or so many people thought when images of the port started spreading around the Internet, including pictures of the cartridge, a magazine ad and screenshots from the game. These turned out to be the results of a college project rendered on an Atari 800 computer by James Catalano, who for a joke posted them on a Usenet newsgroup. You can check out the images at the official 2600 Doom page, here:

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Arcade/8691/2600DOOM.HTM

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DOOM holds a certain bit of infamous publicity: it was one of the few 1st person shooters ported to nearly every OS/computer/console known! Here are some of the ports:

Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega 32X, Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo64, Mac, Unix/Linux/FreeBSD, Windows, Mac, BeOS, OS/2 (I think this one exists), Sega Dreamcast (unofficial port, though), and even Kodak Digita cameras, and God knows how many more!

Hell, there may even be a toaster that can toast bagels and play DOOM out there somewhere!

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On December 1993, Intel issued a company-wide memo banning Doom from their networks. Many big companies like this issued similar orders not just because of lost productivity but because it rendered most networks inoperative. Up until version 1.2 Doom sent data through high level broadcast packets that forced EVERY computer on a net (no matter they were running Doom or not) to transfer the data.

Regardless, even after fixing this, Intel kept the prohibition :)

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Doom was voted #5 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll published by Game Informer Magazine (Issue 100, August 2001).

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In the 200th aniversary issue of Computer Gaming World, readers named it the fifth best game of all time. It also earned the fifth spot on the list from issue 150.

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Doom was voted #12 overall in PCGamer Magazine's Readers All-Time Top 50 Games Poll (April 2000 issue).

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This game kept Novell network administrators pretty busy. The 1.0 release had a bug that slowed down networks so much that a freeware utility called "killdoom" was released shortly after mainly to overcome the problems the game caused.

Many sound effects came from retail CDs which had librairies of generic sound effects. A few sounds of doors opening and closing come to my mind, they all came from the same CD. There is probably no copyright on many sound effects in Doom as some can still be heard today in movies and TV ads, the screaming sounds still triggering a boost of adrenalin in those who remember them well...

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Kinda suprised that no one said this before, but the alpha and beta versions of Doom are available through FTP.CDROM.COM in the pub/doom/history folder. Most are cruel, technology demos, but there are some treasures.

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This game is on Computer Gaming World Magazine's Hall of Fame.

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Wanna play any Doom game at 1024x768x32 with completely customizable controls, mouselook, and 3D sound? Go to the Links page and visit the JDoom site!

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It was also the first game to make a head-first mention in a demo (okay, it's a 64k intro: Cyboman by Gazebo) a couple of *DAYS* after Doom was spread. To think of it, the uptight demo-scene back then actually accepted Doom, especially for it's amazing graphics and execution. (This is because, until that time, most demosceners considered games to be far behind demos in terms of technology. --Ed.)

People who have no idea what demo is, should visit www.oldskool.org for a detailed explanation. =)

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Doom had a low-res mode (toggled via F5) that doubled the width of the pixels being plotted by messing with the write mask in unchained VGA mode. That, coupled with the triple-buffering used, made the game majorly fast and quite playable on a 386/40. So why was that feature removed in Doom II?

Carmack was experimenting with a Hi-Color mode that allowed more than 256 colors on the screen, but that mode halved resolution. He wanted to see what it would look like because it got rid of the color-banding due to the diminished lighting, but 160-pixels horizontally looked like ass so we removed it. It's not present in the released versions of DOOM 2, only the Alpha versions.

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The 'SPISPOPD' cheat code (for 'no clipping') actually stands for 'Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris'. It has nothing to do with the band - rather, it's a reference to a little-known shareware game of the time (FAQ at ftp://ftp.gamesdomain.co.uk/pub/faqs/SPISPOPD.faq).

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Up until version 1.2, the game had a little-used function to let you play in a psuedo-VR mode with three monitors - one each for forwards, left, and right views.

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