On Dec. 10, 1993, PC gaming was forever changed. Doom killed side-scrolling 2D games the way Nirvana killed hair metal. The brainchild of John Romero and John Carmack, Doom was a shock to the system, a seminal event in gaming with repercussions still felt to this day in everything from 3D engines to pushing the boundaries of what society now finds acceptable.
Countless articles, even entire books have been written about Doom, how it was made, and its legacy. I was in college the day the game was released, stuck waiting on the wuarchive.wustl.edu FTP site to download it like tens of thousands of others. I’ll steer clear of the history and ensuing critical praise, controversy, and everything else it attracted over the ensuing years. Instead, for this article, I just want to stick to the gameplay from the perspective of what it was like to play it when it came out—and what made it so compelling.
Rise of the First-Person Shooter
The storyline of Doom—such as it was—was that you were a marine stranded at a military base on Phobos, one of the two tiny moons orbiting Mars. Military brass sent you there as punishment for reporting a fellow officer. It turned out researchers there were experimenting with teleportation between Phobos and Deimos. Something went terribly wrong, Deimos disappeared, and horrible monsters from hell began invading Phobos, killing everyone in sight. As the last person standing, you fought through hordes of demons and undead across 27 different levels, replenishing your health and ammunition whenever possible along the way. This was it; there were no cutscenes.
In fact, Doom still wasn’t even 3D. It employed a 2D version of a technique called binary space positioning to render only the visible parts of the view. You could also shoot at different heights in a semi-automated fashion. All you needed to do was aim as if the enemy was on the same plane as you were. The levels didn’t have puzzle elements other than finding color-coded key cards to get into certain areas. There were no secret doors to find, combinations to guess, or anything resembling a plot. Sometimes you’d encounter pits full of toxic waste, or ceilings that lowered and could crush you.
Mostly, this game was wall-to-wall shooting and fighting. You went up against mutant soldiers and sergeants, brown imps, pink demons, invisible specters, flying red cacodemons, giant spiders, and lost souls, which were flaming, floating skulls with horns. Boss characters included minotaur-like Barons of Hell who threw green fireballs, a giant Cyberdemon with a rocket launcher for a left arm, and the final boss, which I’ll leave to the imagination.
You had a series of weapons you called up with the number keys, starting with a pistol on number 2 and your useless pair of fists on the number 1 key. Your immediate problem was scoring more ammo for your pistol and then figuring out where the shotgun (key “3”) was. Once you found it, you could blast everyone with both barrels; there was a moment to load in a shell and then the obvious kickback from firing it, but it was immensely satisfying (especially if you had a Soundblaster-compatible sound card). Key “4” was for the machine gun, where individual bullets didn’t do much damage (about the same as the pistol) but you could shoot a dozen a second.
Eventually, you’d find the chainsaw, which replaced your fists on key “1” and was as gruesome and terrible as it sounds. Key “5” didn’t come into play until later; it called up the massive shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, an insane weapon for someone to carry around and fire rockets with. The plasma rifle (“6”) was more powerful than the machine gun, although perhaps less satisfying. Finally, the famed BFG9000 took several long seconds to charge itself up before it fired, but once it did, you said goodbye to almost everyone in front of you. “BFG” stood for what you think it stands for regardless of what anyone else says.
Doom could scare you with its level design, but it wasn’t a horror game aside from the copious amounts of pixelated blood. Shoot an enemy close enough with the shotgun, or from any distance with the rocket launcher, and you’d be treated to a disgusting gurgling sound as its body exploded into a bunch of pieces and blood and guts splattered everywhere. It was gross, but also hilarious. It didn’t look real.
A Technological Breakthrough
The things that made Doom different, aside from the revolutionary 256-color VGA graphics engine and fast action, were the feel and the speed. It felt immensely satisfying to obliterate soldiers and aliens, and the frame rate was unmatched given the level of detail. According to id Software, Doom required at least a 386SX, but you needed a 486 for the most immersion and fastest responses. Play it on a 486DX-33 or 486DX2-66, like I did, and the frame rate seemed perfect. It wasn’t 60fps on those machines either, but no one was counting back then, and we were all too busy being amazed.
I played this game with the keyboard, not a mouse, and got good at it, but there was also a limit to the speed at which you could turn around with a keyboard. It didn’t matter in Doom, but it mattered in future first-person shooters (which is why I was never good at any of the others). Start a game of Doom and you’d feel it in your bones right from the beginning, as if you had only played it an hour ago when you hadn’t booted it up in months. It was like Asteroids or Space Invaders in this way. You never forget.
Bobby Prince’s musical score was another point of perfection. He figured out how to record MIDI tracks, using what any pro musician would call cheesy electric muted guitar sounds, and programmed the notes to mimic those you’d get from someone playing electric guitar strings with a pick. Even the mighty Roland Sound Canvas SCC-1 couldn’t fool anyone into thinking there was a real electric guitar in a track, but Prince wisely stayed away from power chords and other dead giveaways. The result sounded like metal, as if he took the same kind of manic energy, power drum fills, machine-gun double-kick beats, and relentless riffs from Metallica’s Master of Puppets and shoved them all into MIDI files.
Multiplayer Madness and Mods
Doom also pioneered several other unique features the company added in the next several months. The first was multiplayer support over a local area network (LAN), meaning two to four gamers could play cooperatively to complete levels. Or you could set up deathmatches, free-for-alls where you killed off your friends, all with the free game. Thousands of gamers did this.
Players could also make their own levels with the included tools. The resulting files were called WADs (an acronym for Where’s All the Data?). Soon, users were sharing hundreds of these WADs on the Internet, containing not only levels but new graphics, textures, and even monsters; the only stipulation from id Software was that the WADs had to remain free.
My personal favorite Doom mod was even more than a WAD. Aliens TC (short for Aliens Total Conversion), designed by Justin Fisher, was modeled after the 1986 film and included new weapons and sounds. The entire first level, huge in scope, turned out to be completely empty. So did the second one. When you finally descended to where the aliens had taken up residence, you knew immediately. The transition was hair-raising, and by this point you were already scared out of your wits. Eventually, you even got to use one of the yellow power loaders from the movie as a weapon.
Birth of an Icon
Carmack and Romero already knew the shareware model worked well for Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, where they encouraged people to make copies of the free version rather than cracking down on piracy. They structured Doom with three episodes named “Knee Deep in the Dead,” “The Shores of Hell,” and “Inferno.” Each episode had nine levels, and the first episode was free. Those nine levels were a huge helping of gaming to get through—even more than in Wolfenstein 3D, Epic Pinball, and Commander Keen—in a product that represented the cutting edge of what was possible on a PC.
Doom was coded mostly in C, with assembly language routines only for the fastest parts. This made porting the game to other platforms easy, as someone only had to redo the assembly routines, and as a result, within a few years you could play Doom on anything north of the control pad on an 1,100-watt microwave. The PC was always the best way to play. Install it on a fast PC, dim the lights, turn up the sound system, and prepare to be fragged. It didn’t get better than this.
This article was adapted from editor-in-chief Jamie Lendino’s book, Starflight: How the PC and DOS Exploded Computer Gaming 1987-1994.
