Doom

aka: DOOM95, Doom: Evil Unleashed
Moby ID: 1068
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Description official descriptions

The Union Aerospace Corporation has been experimenting with teleportation technology on Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos. After early successes, something goes wrong. It seems the scientists have opened a gateway straight to Hell. Phobos base is overrun with demonic creatures, and the whole of Deimos simply vanishes. A squad of marines is sent to Phobos, but all except one are quickly slaughtered. It falls to the surviving marine to grab some guns and strike back at the demons.

id Software's follow-up to their genre-defining Wolfenstein 3D, Doom is another first-person 3D shooter: full-on action as seen from the space marine's perspective. Like Wolfenstein, the game consists of distinct episodes, playable in any order. The first episode, Knee-Deep in the Dead, takes place in the Phobos base and is freely available as shareware. The full game continues on Deimos in The Shores of Hell and culminates in Inferno, the final episode which takes place in Hell itself (the Sega 32x version lacks this episode).

The basic objective in each level is simply to reach the exit. Since dozens of enemies stand in the way, the only way to get there is by killing them. Switches and buttons must be pressed to advance at certain points and often color-coded locked doors will block the way - matching keycards or skull keys must be found to pass.

The game's engine technology is more advanced than Wolfenstein's, and thus the levels are more varied and complex. The engine simulates different heights (stairs and lifts appear frequently) and different lighting conditions (some rooms are pitch black, others only barely illuminated). There are outdoor areas, pools of radioactive waste that hurt the player, ceilings that come down and crush him, and unlike Wolfenstein's orthogonally aligned corridors, the walls in Doom can be in any angle to each other. An automap helps in navigating the levels.

Stylistically, the levels begin with a futuristic theme in the military base on Phobos and gradually change to a hellish environment, complete with satanic symbols (pentagrams, upside-down-crosses, and portraits of horned demons), hung-up mutilated corpses, and the distorted faces of the damned.

Doom features a large weapon arsenal, with most weapons having both advantages and drawbacks. The starting weapons are the fists and a simple pistol. Also available are a shotgun (high damage, slow reload, not good at distances), a chaingun (high firing rate, but slightly inaccurate in longer bursts), and a plasma rifle (combining a high firing rate and large damage). The rocket launcher also deals out lots of damage, but the explosion causes blast damage and must be used with care in confined areas or it might prove deadly to the player as well as the enemies. Two further weapons in the game are the chainsaw for close-quarter carnage, and the BFG9000 energy gun, which while taking some practice to fire correctly, can destroy most enemies in a single burst. The different weapons use four different ammunition types (bullets, shells, rockets, and energy cells), so collecting the right type for a certain gun is important.

The game drops some of Wolfenstein's arcade-inspired aspects, so there are no extra lives or treasures to be collected for points, but many other power-ups are still available. Medpacks heal damage while armor protects from receiving it in the first place. Backpacks allow more ammunition to be carried, a computer map reveals the whole layout of the level on the automap (including any secret areas), light amplification visors illuminate dark areas and radiation suits allow travel over waste without taking damage. Also available are berserk packs (which radically increase the damage inflicted by the fists) as well as short-time invisibility and invulnerability power-ups.

The enemies to be destroyed include former humans corrupted during the invasion, plus demons in all shapes and sizes: fireball-throwing imps, floating skulls, pink-skinned demons with powerful bite attacks, and large one-eyed flying monstrosities called Cacodemons. Each episode ends with a boss battle against one or two, particularly powerful creatures.

Doom popularized multiplayer in the genre with two different modes: Cooperative allows players to move through the single-player game together, while Deathmatch is a competitive game type where players blast at each other to collect 'frag' points for a kill and re-spawn in a random location after being killed.

The 3DO and Sega32x ports lack any multiplayer modes, though the other ports retain the DOS versions multiplayer to varying degrees. The various console ports all feature simplified levels and omit some levels, enemies, and features from the original DOS release. The SNES and Gameboy Advance versions of the game actually use different engines and hence feature numerous small gameplay differences.

Spellings

  • ドゥーム - Japanese spelling
  • 毁灭战士 - Simplified Chinese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

15 People

Design
Programming / Software Engineers
Graphics / Artwork
Tech Support
Level Design
Music
Sound Effects
Sound
Tools Programming
Audio Drivers
Model Development
Cover Illustration
Creative Director
Biz / Chief Executive Officer

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 84% (based on 76 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 741 ratings with 39 reviews)

Cult game

The Good
Doom was arguably the killer app of the MS-DOS world. Whole essays have been written about the game's freakish popularity and immense appeal, let alone the game itself. Just about everything good and bad about Doom has been written and rehashed many times, so one more review can hardly hurt.

It's nothing short of amazing how transcendental the game has become. It has a plot you could fit on a postcard, and gameplay that owes much to 2D arcade shooters. Yet many people take it as seriously as the air they breath. It features a faceless, nameless main character who never speaks a word (he's been nicknamed "the Doomguy" by a whole generation of gamers) who has somehow become a more recognizable character than the leads of most RPG and adventure games. It's stupid, brainless, violent and symbolizes every bad impression the general public has about video games. Yet very few games can claim to have transformed a genre, and for that sort of appeal the game must have done something right.

So in my opinion what are the factors that made Doom popular?

1. Gameplay. Doom is the distillation of the FPS genre. No subtleties, no niceties, nothing so pretentious as a story, just crazy white-knuckle action from beginning to end. This is the same formula that 90% of all action games have tried to succeed on. Id Software crafted a game that is extremely fast and extremely addictive, and combined with an advanced 3D engine was almost a sure-fire megahit. Play most 3D games made before Doom and you'll throw them out the window in no time, but Doom is eminently playable even to this day.

But Doom is not simply fun because of arcadish button-mashing, it was one of the first action games you could actually get immersed in. It's difficult to define, Doom just hits all the right psychological buttons. You feel terror, you feel elation, you feel exactly what the game wants you to feel. The game has no story, but that doesn't matter. The graphics (these days) are crappy, but that doesn't matter. While playing it, you are a space marine, trying to escape from a sick and deadly industrial world. It's amazing how much this game involves you in what's happening, especially next to games with much better graphics and much better stories that nevertheless fail to engage you in quite the same way.

2. Technology. Doom wasn't THE most advance game released up to that point (Ultima Underworld had a significantly better engine, with slopes and stackable rooms) but it still was quite revolutionary for its time. Doom introduced gaming to things like spiral staircases, elevators, crushing ceilings, and the most advanced 3D architecture ever seen in a game. It was fully texture mapped, featured realistic lighting, and still ran very fast on a 386. You could even interact with your environment to a limited extent (raising/lowering elevators and stuff like that in realtime 3D, which sounds incredibly simple today but was almost unheard of then).

The game was also designed with a very open-ended structure, allowing (and encouraging) users to add their own content. They even released the source code. Even if you don't feel like downloading one of the numerous Windows ports of the game, the game generally works fine on Windows XP. Doom is a technological marvel.

3. Ambiance. Doom is not a horror game, but nonetheless contains many scary moments. It was the first FPS to realistically incorporate lighting. If you fire a gun, everything around you gets lit up by the muzzle flash. Lights could fade in and out like strobes, and some really tense moments occur when there's hardly any light and you can't see what's attacking you. Speaking of getting attacked, Doom's monsters are deformed, drooling, nightmare-inducing freaks, and even after years of playing you can still get tricked into a "WOAH CRAP!" reaction when one sneaks up on you. The game's textures are weird and in many cases disturbing, some of them are miniature works of art. Lastly is Bobby Prince's unconventional but very effective music, which complements the game's frantic, gut-wrenching action and tense, claustrophobic levels extremely well.

4. The right place at the right time. OK, it's fun to have the illusion that Doom was The Little Engine that Could, a tiny shareware game that succeeded against all expectations, but that's not the way it happened. The stars were aligned for Doom's release. Firstly, technology had advanced to the point where texture-mapped 3D games were possible and playable. Second, modems and netcards were starting to become common, giving Doom a very powerful selling point in its multiplayer. Third, the groundwork for how the FPS genre should play like had been laid down by Wolfenstein 3D. The gaming industry was waiting for something that exploited those concepts. Doom's creators knew exactly what they were doing when they made it.

It bears mention that Doom was the GTA3 of the time in terms of controversy, due to its extreme violence and satanic references. By today's standards Doom looks tame, but it was definitely a factor in the rise of what we now call "adult" games.

The Bad
You could argue that the difficulty is skewed. The first four levels are on the easy side, and the fifth is a joke (I mean that literally, the guys at id confirmed it at one point). Also the game can sometimes be a bit too dependant upon mazes and key-hunting instead of action, though far less so than Wolfenstein 3D. This is all just nitpicking, and at the risk of sounding fanboyish there really isn't much wrong with Doom.

With that said, you need to approach it with the right expectations. Doom is incredibly advanced for its time, but the fact remains that it was made in 1993. If you play current-gen shooters and have gotten used to scripted cutscenes and inventories and auto-scaling difficulty and bullet-time effects then you'll have to lower your expectations when you play Doom, otherwise you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Fair warning.

The Bottom Line
Doom is a great game and I recommend it without hesitation. It's the most influential shooter ever made and even today it's romp to remember (provided you make some concessions to it). I'll leave you with this interesting note. The Doom community these days is not made up of nostalgic oldies or die-hard collectors like you'd think, but rather gamers who choose to play Doom over new releases. The game exercises a strange charm that transcends age in the same way Pacman and Tetris do. Think about all the hyped new releases as of this writing: Gothic 3, Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, etc. Will anyone be playing them in 10 years time? Maybe not, but people will still be playing Doom, I'm almost sure of that.

DOS · by Maw (833) · 2007

Oh hell yeah.

The Good
Ah, Doom. I think everyone on the planet knows about this game already - in that sense its sort of like Super Mario Bros., except with 12 gauge shotguns, high-powered energy weapons and unlimited numbers of hellspawn. But yeah, in terms of popularity, it's like SMB. In a more personal sense, Doom is also the only game I have ever played that caused me to have a major physical reaction (ie: more physical than jumping out of my chair) while playing it. And it is also the very first game that made me have a major mental reaction; it was way too dark to see in most of the areas in the game (primarily because I had a rubbish monitor which was as dark as a black hole on its brightest setting), so I was afraid to play the game. The only way I felt comfortable progressing was using IDBEHOLD and choosing the light goggles. Of course, that was when I was ten-years old, don't do that anymore.

Anyway, let's get down to business.

Since Doom doesn't have much of a plot (kill demons and exit the level), I'll just skip right along to the technical aspects. First, the graphics. The graphics were revolutionary in 1993-94. There was nothing else on the market that could compete with Doom in terms of "realtime" graphics. Yeah, there were the FMV games like Myst and Rebel Assault, but those were glorified point-and-click affairs. But Doom had the fastest and best looking game engine available, a situation that persisted until well into 1996. The visuals themselves where excellent, especially in the areas where the ID guys took their time and put some extra detail into the game. All of Episode I or E2M7, for example, still sends chills into my spine even in a day and age with real-time bump mapping, sophisticated particle effects and antialising.

The sound system is also the subject of heavy work. While not quite as innovative as the graphics and the game engine, every sound for every monster or object has been perfectly picked and mastered. The music also - in the MIDI style, at any rate - is phenomenal, ranging from blaring rock to slow apocalyptic movements.

The control system is as simple as it gets for an FPS. Use the arrow keys to move around, Control to fire and Space to open doors. Not much different than what games use these days, except now you have mouselook and you use WASD instead of the arrow keys. Either way, it works.

Gameplay is excellent. The combat is fast and furious, and you can get quickly overwhelmed with scores of enemies attacking you at once on the higher difficulty levels. But the in-game save system is, as always, eminently helpful and even with saves it never really gets too overwhelming.

The Bad
To quote PC Gamer UK's final assessment of Theme Park from June of 1994: "You'll die someday and won't be able to play it anymore".

OK, its not that good (both in regards to Theme Park and Doom), but it's pretty close in Doom's neck of the woods. Still, some areas of the game just don't seem to have had much work put into them. I am not sure if it is E2M4 or E2M5, but there is one level midway through Episode II where there are a lot of technical textures and a river of poisonous waste. Now, while a good portion of that level is just fine, there are also instances of pedestrian level design to be found in that map as well. Interesting architecture can really go a long way in improving the enjoyment of the game, so levels where said architecture is lacking can feel like real slogs.

In addition, the game just gets repetitive by Episode III and you start to want it to end. You can only stand wasting three thousand imps before the whole process gets a bit dull and tedious.

The Bottom Line
Instead of asking people to get this game, I would elect to ask prospective buyers of Doom why they don't already own it. Whether you like Doom (or FPSs in general) or not, you simply are not a hardcore gamer until you have been baptized by the fire that is Episode I.

If you don't own Doom, you must get it and play it. Plain and simple.

DOS · by Longwalker (723) · 2011

A pointless money grab of a port for a console that didn't need it.

The Good
I recently found my way to playing Doom on the SNES after I decided to take a break from making Master System videos for my Youtube channel. After playing the first two levels of the game I physically couldn't play it anymore. It was actually giving me motion sickness; stress headache and all.

I can appreciate what Williams, and more specifically Ray Landers, were going for when they endeavored to develop a SNES port of Doom. It's an interesting little piece of technology to show off to people curious about the Super FX chip the console uses to generate 3D graphics.

The novelty of playing Doom on the SNES is an interesting one and the instrumentation of the background music is quite good. Also this console port of the game contains every level and enemy from the PC original.

There are just so many concessions it doesn't seem to have a point to it.

The Bad
Doom on the SNES, although finished, feels incomplete.

According to many publications on this port of Doom it contains every level from the PC original and they are all faithfully recreated. A look at the first two levels of the game basically moots this point. While the levels might be faithful in the respect that the physical rooms might be present, lots of things like walls and other aesthetic elements have been removed.

In addition to this, there are no floor or ceiling textures and while this might not seem like a big deal it goes a long way to making the game look ugly and unfinished.

Enemies can only look in one direction eliminating the hilarity of monster infighting. The worst thing about the enemy sprites though is the way they scale. When they are a few feet away from you enemies become a mess of pixels moving around the screen occasionally firing a pot shot at you without changing their animation cycle. It's ugly.

This scaling problem extends to everything in the game, including wall and door textures. As soon as you move away from something, it loses detail and becomes a shifting, ill defined blob. The scaling is really harsh and it not only looks really, really ugly but it actually made me feel motion sick after playing for a little while.

The frame rate is also very low, making Doom guy feel like an 80 year old arthritis sufferer. This is the final nail in the coffin. The game is ugly and unrefined and then the frame rate turns out to be abysmal as well. It renders the game not unplayable, just not fun. It's slow, and ugly and it shouldn't exist.

The Bottom Line
Doom on the SNES feels unrefined and unfinished.

So what if it contains every level from the original Doom? That means nothing while it is busy being slow, ugly and exasperating. It is not fun to play and actively hurts you while you are doing it.

There are very few redeeming features to be found with this port of one of the most important games ever made. The SNES might have a huge library of great games, but this definitely isn't one of them.

SNES · by AkibaTechno (238) · 2011

[ View all 39 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Listing Mods?? Paul Budd (425) Feb 17, 2021
Happy 20th anniversary! Pseudo_Intellectual (66248) Jan 12, 2014
Doom budget? Johan Smedjebacka (5) Jun 26, 2013
Doom95 Rola (8486) Feb 3, 2013
What gameplay features were first in Doom? hribek (28) Aug 2, 2011

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Doom appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

3DO version

The development of the 3DO port was rushed; it was developed in ten weeks, from August to October of 1995. The 3DO release contains exclusive, CD-quality remixes of the PC's background music. According to the programmer, Rebecca Ann Heineman, hiring a band to record the music was necessary because she had no time to port the original game's music driver.

The 3DO version was originally planned to contain FMV cutscenes; Art Data Interactive created a number of still images (depicting actors in monster costumes) in hopes of convincing investors into giving them funds to film the sequences, but ultimately none were created.

The game was originally going to be distributed by Electronic Arts, but the deal fell through.

The source code of this port was released on GitHub by Rebecca Ann Heineman on November 30, 2014.

Administrator tool

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).

Bugs

  • When the player picks up a medikit while having 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. The code in question does its check on how much health is left only after the medikit is picked up. Since medikits give the player 25 health, they will always have at least 26 health when the check is performed. This bug is corrected in most DOOM source ports.
  • The 1.0 release had a bug that slowed down networks so much that a freeware utility called killdoom was released shortly after. It can be downloaded here.

Cheats

The <tt>SPISPOPD</tt> cheat code (no clipping) stands for "Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris". It has nothing to do with the band - rather, it's a reference to an Usenet post joking about a possible alternate title for Doom. More detail can be found at the Doom Wiki.

Demo scene

It was the first game to make a head-first mention in a demo (a 64k intro: Cyboman by Gazebo) a couple of days after DOOM was spread. The uptight demo-scene back then actually accepted the game, especially for its amazing graphics and execution. Until that time, most demosceners considered games to be far behind demos in terms of technology.

Development

  • Data file extension WAD means "Where's All the Data?"
  • 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 American McGee's Alice.
  • 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.
  • Alpha and beta versions are available through ftp.cdrom.com in the pub/doom/history directory. Most are crude technology demos, but there are some treasures.
  • The sky background of Episode 1 was taken from a photograph of Yangshuo Cavern made by Tom Atwood.

Doomguy

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

Enemies

  • The design of the monster Cacodemon (a floating head with a large maw and a single big eye) is very similar to the beholder, a classic AD&D monster (although the cacodemon has horns instead of eye stalks). Additionally, the Cacodemon's design is almost identical to the head of the "astral dreadnought", an AD&D monster which appears on the cover of the 1987 AD&D book Manual of the Planes.
  • Although the death animations of some monsters (Cacodemon, Baron of Hell) show that their blood is blue or green, these monsters always emit red blood splatters when damaged.

Eric Harris Levels

Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris is known to have created several levels for the game. A few including Thrasher.wad and RealDeth.wad have resurfaced, but a rumoured recreation in the game of the Columbine High School itself (possibly called Realdoom.wad), which would provide a macabre fascination, has yet to be found

Fake Atari 2600 Port

Many people thought there was an Atari 2600 port of DOOM in development 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.

GBA version

The Game Boy Advance port features green blood and removed splatter effects. Additionally corpses disappear almost instantly and all corpses which were used as part of the level decoration were removed.

Graphics

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. 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 very bad so they removed it. Up to version 1.1, it was possible to run the game on three monitors at once, giving a 270-degree field of vision.

Multiplayer

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

Music

Much of the music in DOOM (and DOOM II) 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.

Novels

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.

References

  • 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 favorite cue in a black case:
    - "What you got in there?"
    "In here? Doom."
  • 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. It would be the later 3D game Duke Nukem 3D, itself influenced by DOOM, that would quote some of Evil Dead's most memorable one-liners.
  • The layout of E1M8 (Phobos Anomaly) bears resemblance to Liberty Island in New York, although it is not clear whether this is intentional.
  • 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. On a side note, during that episode, the tower can be seen being built on the intermission screens.
  • The name of the 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.
  • The first retail version-only update of the DOOM engine had the revision number 1.666. This is also a Biblical reference, where 666 is the number of The Beast.

References in pop culture

  • Rammstein used a sample of the DOOM shotgun and some screaming in their song Wollt ihr das Bett in Flammen sehen? on their album Herzeleid.
  • The credits inside the booklet of The Smashing Pumpkins' album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995) contain "Explosion from DOOM courtesy of id Software, Inc and bobby prince Music". It's used in the first track, Where Boys Fear to Tread.
  • The game makes an appearance in season 5, episode 4 of Family Guy, an animated series. Stevie Griffin is riding his bike through various locations, and one of them is a DOOM level with some imps.
  • 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?"
  • DOOM was parodied in an episode of "Die Redaktion" (The Editorial Team), a monthly comedy video produced by the German gaming magazine GameStar. It was published on the DVD of issue 12/2011.

Rocket jumping

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 shoot a rocket launcher at a nearby object or wall. The resulting blast can proper the player a quite long distance away, allowing to clear otherwise impossible jumps.

Scrapped Features

  • The game 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.
  • 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. etc.). It was not implemented, however, since it would raise the game's system requirements.

SEGA 32x version

This 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: E1M1-E1M8 and E2M1-E2M7, as well as the two secret levels E1M9 and E2M9 (E2M9, renamed to "Dis", acts as the final level of the game). After the end credits, the game concludes by reverting to a fake DOS prompt if the player activated the cheat codes. This screen cannot be exited without shutting off the system. If the game was beaten without cheating, the prompt will not be shown; rather the player will see a montage of enemies encountered in the game, just as in DOOM II.

SNES version

The U.S. SNES version of DOOM was one of the few releases for the console to have a colored cartridge (Killer Instinct being another one), namely a red one. Besides this, due to limitations of the SNES hardware, the enemies in the game do not have sides or backs, and are always facing the player. All blood and splatter effects were removed.

The source code of this port was released on GitHub by Randy Linden on July 14, 2020.

Source code

On 23 December, 1997, id Software released the source code. You can download it here. Numerous source ports were subsequently created by fans.

Text adventure

In 1996, the first level of the first episode was implemented by Piers Johnson in TADS, resulting in FooM - a text adventure game interface for DOOM. Downloadable with source at http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/foom.tar.gz

Version 1.4

With patch 1.4, including all later re-releases and ports, a detail in the "Command Cotrol" level was changed: a few computers laid out into the shape of a swastika were rearranged. Romero referred to this change in a 2013 interview:

[43:11] It was a swastika, but [...] I changed it to this shape because we had people complainin' and really the funny thing is that I wasn't trying to promote Nazism, I was referencing Wolfenstein. [...] [44:21] And we got lots of people, you know, crying over different things about the game, but that was the only thing that we changed. Just because, I think we got a particular, like, letter from someone who was a vet. And so, well, okay, for a vet, we'll do that.

Weapons

  • 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.
  • 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.

Windows 95 Promo

The level E1M2: Nuclear Plant was used for Bill Gates' promo for Windows 95.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • June 1994 (Issue #119) – Game of the Year
    • April 1996 (Issue #141) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #5 Best Game of All Time
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #3 Most Innovative Computer Game
    • March 2001 (Issue #200) - #5 Best Game of All Time (Readers' Vote)
  • FLUX
    • Issue #3 - #3 Best Video Game of All Time
  • Game Informer
    • August 2001 (Issue #100) - #5 in the "Top 100 Games of All Time" poll
    • October 2004 (Issue #138) - one of the "Top 25 Most Influential Games of All Time"
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #1 Top Game of All Time
    • 2001 – Game Boy Advance Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
    • 2001 – Game Boy Advance Action/Adventure Game of the Year
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #3 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
    • Issue 12/2007 - one of the "Ten Most Influential PC-Games" (It is the milestone which stands for the change from 2D to 3D graphics. Since DOOM, the licensing of 3D engines is an important business branch in the PC industry.)
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #12 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
    • April 2005 - #2 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • Retro Gamer
    • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #9 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
  • The Strong National Museum of Play
    • 2015 – Introduced into the World Video Game Hall of Fame
  • Other
    • 2001 - The Greatest Game of All Time voted by industry insiders (according to GameSpy)

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Andrew Grasmeder, Arson Winter, AxelStone, Big John WV, BurningStickMan, chirinea, DarkDante, Echidna Boy, Emepol, IndustrialPope, Jiguryo, John Romero, Kalirion, Maw, Olivier Masse, Patrick Bregger, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual, ResidentHazard, Roedie, Sciere, Scott Monster, shifter, Silverblade, Steve ., tarmo888, Terok Nor, Ummagumma, WildKard, Zack Green. and Zovni.

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Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1068
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MAT.

Linux added by Hamish Wilson. 3DO added by karttu. Game Boy Advance added by Kartanym. SNES, Jaguar, Windows added by Satoshi Kunsai. PC-98 added by Terok Nor. Windows Mobile added by indimopi. SEGA 32X added by quizzley7.

Additional contributors: Tomer Gabel, Terok Nor, Ashley Pomeroy, Xantheous, Ledmeister, Unicorn Lynx, Frenkel, Guy Chapman, WWWWolf, Sciere, Wormspinal, Peter Berndtsson, Martin Smith, Ajan, Havoc Crow, LepricahnsGold, Cantillon, Medicine Man, Rola, Patrick Bregger, Thomas Thompson, Lugamo, Rik Hideto, FatherJack, SoMuchChaotix.

Game added June 14, 2001. Last modified March 18, 2024.