Doom (1993 video game)

Doom is a 1993 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by id Software for MS-DOS. Players assume the role of a space marine, popularly known as Doomguy, fighting his way through hordes of invading demons from Hell. The first episode, comprising nine levels, was distributed freely as shareware and played by an estimated 15–20 million people within two years; the full game, with two further episodes, was sold via mail order. An updated version with an additional episode and more difficult levels, Ultimate Doom, was released in 1995 and sold at retail.

Along with its predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, Doom helped define the FPS genre and inspired numerous similar games, known as Doom clones. It is one of the most significant games in video game history, frequently cited as one of the greatest games of all time. It pioneered online distribution and technologies including 3D graphics, networked multiplayer gaming, and support for custom modifications via packaged files (WADs). Its graphic violence and hellish imagery also made it a subject of controversy.

Doom has been ported to numerous platforms. The Doom franchise continued with Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994) and expansion packs including Master Levels for Doom II (1995). The source code was released in 1997, inspiring further adaptations. Id returned to the franchise with Doom 3 (2004), a horror-focused retelling using the id Tech 4 engine, followed by a 2005 Doom film. A new series, returning to the fast-paced action of the originals, began with the 2016 reboot Doom, followed in 2020 by Doom Eternal.

Description
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 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 through 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, that, 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 especially 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 degree. 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.

Gameplay
The player armed with a chainsaw confronts an undead sergeant on a bridge over a chemical waste storage in "Knee-Deep in the Dead" Doom is a first-person shooter presented with early 3D graphics. The player controls an unnamed space marine—later termed the Doomguy—through a series of levels set in military bases on the moons of Mars and in Hell. To finish a level, the player must traverse through the area to reach a marked exit room. Levels are grouped together into named episodes, with the final level focusing on a boss fight with a particularly difficult enemy. While the levels are presented in a 3D perspective, the enemies and objects are instead 2D sprites presented from several set viewing angles, a technique sometimes referred to as 2.5D graphics. Levels are often labyrinthine, and a full screen automap is available which shows the areas explored to that point.

While traversing the levels, the player must fight a variety of enemies, including demons and possessed undead humans, while managing supplies of ammunition, health, and armor. Enemies often appear in large groups, and the game features five difficulty levels which increase the quantity and damage done by enemies, with enemies respawning upon death and moving faster than normal on the hardest difficulty setting. The monsters have very simple behavior, consisting of either moving toward their opponent, or attacking by throwing fireballs, biting, and clawing. They will fight each other if one monster is accidentally harmed by another, though most monsters are not harmed by other monsters of the same kind. Levels can also include pits of toxic waste, ceilings that lower and crush anything below them, and locked doors which require a keycard, skull-shaped key device, or a remote switch to be opened. The player can find weapons and ammunition placed in the levels or can collect them from dead enemies; weapons include a pistol, a chainsaw, a plasma rifle, and the BFG 9000, among others. The levels also feature power-ups such as items that give health or armor points, increase the player character's maximum ammunition or health, fill out the automap, give partial invisibility, or allow the player to survive in toxic waste. There are also items which apply time-limited effects such as invulnerability or a berserker status.

In addition to the main single-player game mode, Doom features two multiplayer modes playable over a local network: "cooperative", in which two to four players team up to play through the main game, and "deathmatch", in which two to four players play against each other. Online multiplayer was later made available a year after launch through the DWANGO service. Doom also contains cheat codes that allow the player to be invulnerable, obtain every weapon, be able to instantly kill every monster in a particular level, and several other abilities.

Plot
The unnamed protagonist of the Doom series as he appears in The Ultimate Doom

Doom is divided into three episodes: "Knee-Deep in the Dead", "The Shores of Hell", and "Inferno". A fourth episode, "Thy Flesh Consumed", was added in an expanded version of the game, The Ultimate Doom. The game itself contains very few plot elements, with the minimal story instead given in the instruction manual and short text segues between episodes.

In the future, the player character (an unnamed space marine) has been punitively posted to Mars after assaulting a superior officer, who ordered his unit to fire on civilians. The space marines act as security for the Union Aerospace Corporation's radioactive waste facilities, which are used by the military to perform secret experiments with teleportation by creating gateways between the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Three years later, Deimos disappears entirely and "something fraggin' evil" starts pouring out of the teleporter gateways, killing or possessing all personnel. The Martian marine unit is dispatched to investigate, with the player character left to guard the perimeter with only a pistol while the rest of the group proceeds inside the base and is killed. Being unable to pilot the shuttle off of Phobos by himself, he realizes that the only way to escape is to go inside and fight his way through the complexes of the moon base.

As the last man standing, the player character fights through the onslaught of demonic enemies to keep them from attacking Earth. In "Knee-Deep in the Dead", he fights through the high-tech military bases, power plants, computer centers and geological anomalies on Phobos. It ends with the player character entering the teleporter leading to Deimos, only to be overwhelmed by monsters. In "The Shores of Hell" he fights through installations on Deimos, similar to those on Phobos, but warped and distorted from the demon invasion and interwoven with beastly architecture. After defeating the titanic Cyberdemon, the marine discovers the vanished moon is floating above Hell. "Inferno" begins after the marine climbs off Deimos to the surface. The marine fights his way through Hell and defeats the Spider Mastermind that planned the invasion. A hidden doorway back to Earth opens for the hero, who has "proven too tough for Hell to contain". However, a burning city and a rabbit's head impaled on a stake (named in The Ultimate Doom as the marine's pet rabbit, Daisy) show that the demons have invaded Earth. In "Thy Flesh Consumed", the marine fights the demons on Earth through a variety of disconnected high-tech bases and demonic temples, though ultimately the forces of Hell prevail in the invasion of Earth, setting the stage for Doom II: Hell on Earth.

Development
John Carmack in 2006 Main article: Development of Doom

Concept
In May 1992, id Software released Wolfenstein 3D, later called the "grandfather of 3D shooters", specifically first-person shooters, because it established the fast-paced action and technical prowess commonly expected in the genre and greatly increased the genre's popularity. Immediately following its release most of the id Software team began work on a set of episodes for the game, titled Spear of Destiny, while id co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack instead focused on technology research for the company's next game. Following the release of Spear of Destiny in September 1992, the team began to plan their next title. They wanted to create another 3D game using a new engine Carmack was developing, but were largely tired of Wolfenstein. They initially considered making another game in the Commander Keen series, as proposed by co-founder and lead designer Tom Hall, but decided that the platforming gameplay of the series was a poor fit for Carmack's fast-paced 3D engines. Additionally, the other two co-founders of id, designer John Romero and lead artist Adrian Carmack, wanted to create something in a darker style than the Keen games. John Carmack then came up with his own concept: a game about using technology to fight demons, inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns the team played, combining the styles of Evil Dead II and Aliens. The concept originally had a working title of "Green and Pissed", but Carmack soon renamed the proposed game "Doom" after a line in the film The Color of Money: "'What's in the case?' / '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 offices to a dark office building, which they named "Suite 666", and drew inspiration from the noises coming from the dentist's office next door. They also decided to cut ties with Apogee Software, their previous publisher, and to instead self-publish Doom.

Development
John Romero in 2012 Early in development, rifts in the team began to appear. At the end of November, Hall delivered a design document, which he named the Doom Bible, that described the plot, backstory, and design goals for the project. His design was a science fiction horror concept wherein scientists on the Moon open a portal from which aliens emerge. Over a series of levels the player discovers that the aliens are demons while hell steadily infects the level design over the course of the game. John Carmack not only disliked the idea 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 the technological innovations of the game, dropping the levels and episodes of Wolfenstein in favor of a fast, continuous world. Tom 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. Hall was forced to rework it again in December, however, after the team decided that they were unable to create a single, seamless world with the hardware limitations of the time, which contradicted much of the document.

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 game features that John Carmack had created, as well as other features, including multiplayer gaming features, that had not yet even been designed. Early versions of the game were built to match the Doom Bible; a "pre-alpha" version of the first level included Hall's introductory base scene. Initial versions of the game also retain "arcade" elements present in Wolfenstein 3D, like score points and score items, but those were removed early in development as they were out of tone. Other elements, such as a complex user interface, an inventory system, a secondary shield protection, and lives were modified and slowly removed over the course of development. Sandy Petersen in 2004 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 game design was removed. By early 1993, levels were being created for the game and a demo was produced. John Carmack and Romero, however, disliked Hall's military base-inspired level design. Romero especially believed that the boxy, flat level designs were uninspiring, too similar to Wolfenstein, and did not show off the engine's capabilities. He began to create his own, more abstract levels for the game, which the rest of the team saw as a great improvement.

Hall was upset with the reception to 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 in order to get what he saw as obvious gameplay improvements, such as flying enemies, and began to spend less time at work. In July the other founders of id fired Hall, who went to work for Apogee. He was replaced in September, ten weeks before the game was released, by game designer Sandy Petersen. The team also added a third programmer, Dave Taylor. Petersen and Romero designed the rest of Doom 's 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, after the multiplayer component was coded, the development team began playing four-player multiplayer games matches, which Romero termed "deathmatch". According to Romero, the game's deathmatch mode was inspired by fighting games such as Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury, and Art of Fighting.

Engine
See also: Doom engine A NeXTstation computer Doom was programmed largely in the ANSI C programming language, with a few elements done in assembly language. Development was done on NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The data used by the game engine, including both level designs and graphics files, are all stored in WAD files, short for "Where's All the Data". This allows for any part of the game's design to be easily changed without needing to adjust the engine code. Carmack designed this system specifically to enable fans to be able to easily modify the game; he had been impressed by the modifications made by fans of Wolfenstein 3D, and wanted to support that with an easily swappable file structure along with releasing the map editor online.

Unlike Wolfenstein, which had flat levels with walls at right angles, the Doom engine allows for walls and floors at any angle or height, though two traversable areas cannot be on top of each other. The lighting system was based on adjusting the color palette of surfaces directly: rather than calculating how light traveled from light sources to surfaces using ray tracing, the game calculates the "light level" of a small section of a level based on its distance from light sources. It then modifies the color palette of that section's surface textures to mimic how dark it would look. This same system is used to cause far away surfaces to look darker than close ones. Romero came up with new ways to use Carmack's lighting engine such as strobe lights. He also programmed engine features such as switches and movable stairs and platforms. After Romero's level designs started to cause problems with the engine, Carmack began to use binary space partitioning to quickly select the portion of a level that the player could see at a given time. Taylor, along with programming other features into the game, added cheat codes; some, such as 'idspispopd', were based on ideas their fans had come up with while eagerly awaiting the game. Model of the Spider Mastermind Adrian Carmack was the lead artist for Doom, with Kevin Cloud as an additional artist. They designed the monsters to be "nightmarish"; their intent was to have graphics that were realistic and dark as opposed to staged or rendered, so a mixed media approach was taken to the artwork. The artists sculpted models of some of the enemies, and took pictures of them in stop motion from five to eight different angles so that they could be rotated realistically in-game; the images were then digitized and converted to 2D characters with a program written by John Carmack. Adrian Carmack made clay models for a few demons, and had Gregor Punchatz build latex and metal sculptures of the others. The weapons were toys, with parts combined from different toys to make more guns. They scanned themselves as well, using Cloud's arm as the model for the player character's arm holding a gun, and Adrian's snakeskin boots and wounded knee for in-game textures.

Music and sound
As with Wolfenstein 3D, id hired composer Bobby Prince to create the music and sound effects. Romero directed Prince to make the music in techno and metal styles; many tracks were directly inspired by songs by metal bands such as Alice in Chains and Pantera. Prince believed that ambient music would be more appropriate, and produced numerous tracks in both styles in the hopes of convincing the team; Romero put both styles in the game. Prince did not make music for specific levels, as they were composed before the levels were completed; instead, Romero assigned each track to each level late in development. Prince created the sound effects based on short descriptions or concept art of a monster or weapon, and adjusted them to match the completed animations. The monster sounds were created from animal noises, and Prince designed all the sounds to be distinct on the limited sound hardware of the time, even when many sounds were playing at once. He also designed the sound effects to play on different frequencies from those used for the MIDI music, so they would clearly cut through the music.

Release
Because id planned to self-publish, as Doom neared completion they had to set up the systems to sell it. Jay Wilbur, who had been brought on as CEO and sole member of the business team, planned the marketing and distribution of Doom. He believed that the mainstream press was uninterested in the game, and as id would make the most money off of copies they sold directly to customers—up to 85 percent of the planned US$40 price—he decided to leverage the shareware market as much as possible, buying only a single ad in any gaming magazine. Instead, he reached out directly to software retailers, offering them copies of the first Doom episode for free, allowing them to charge any price for it, in order to spur customer interest in buying the full game directly from id.

Doom 's original release date was the third quarter of 1993, which the team did not meet. By December 1993, the team was working non-stop on the game, with several employees sleeping at the office; programmer Dave Taylor claimed that working on the game gave him such a rush that he would pass out from the intensity. Id began receiving calls from people interested in the game or angry that it had missed its planned release date, as hype for the game had been building online. At midnight on December 10, 1993, after working for 30 straight hours, the development team at id uploaded the first episode of the game to the internet, letting interested players distribute it for them. So many users were connected to the first network that they planned to upload the game to—the University of Wisconsin–Madison FTP network—that even after the network administrator increased the number of connections while on the phone with Wilbur, id was unable to connect, forcing them to kick all other users off to allow id to upload the game. When the upload finished thirty minutes later, 10,000 people attempted to download the game at once, crashing the university's network.

Within hours of Doom 's release, university networks were banning Doom multiplayer games, as a rush of players overwhelmed their systems. After being alerted by network administrators the morning after release that the game's deathmatch network connection setup was crippling some computer networks, John Carmack quickly released a patch to change it, though many administrators had to implement Doom-specific rules to keep their networks from crashing due to the overwhelming traffic.

In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 95, even with Microsoft's million-dollar advertising campaigns. Microsoft hired id Software to port Doom to Windows with the WinG API, and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates briefly considered buying the company. Microsoft developed a Windows 95 port of Doom to promote Windows as a gaming platform. The development team was led by Gabe Newell, who later founded the game company Valve. One Windows 95 promotional video had Gates digitally superimposed into the game.

In 1995, an expanded version of the game, titled The Ultimate Doom, was released, containing a fourth episode.

Ports
Main article: Official versions of Doom

Numerous ports of the game have been released by other companies. An unofficial port of Doom to Linux was released by id programmer Dave Taylor in 1994; it was hosted by id but not supported or made official. Official ports of Doom were released for Sega 32X, Atari Jaguar, and Mac OS in 1994, SNES and PlayStation in 1995, 3DO in 1996, Sega Saturn in 1997, Acorn Risc PC in 1998, Game Boy Advance in 2001, Xbox 360 in 2006, iOS in 2009, and Nintendo Switch in 2019. Notable exceptions in the list of official ports, as well as Linux, are AmigaOS and Symbian. Some of these were bestsellers even many years after the initial release. Doom has additionally been ported unofficially to numerous platforms; so many ports exist, including for esoteric devices such as smart thermostats and oscilloscopes, that variations on "It runs Doom" or "Can it run Doom?" are long-running phrases and memes.

Mods
The ability for others to create custom levels and otherwise modify the game using WAD files turned out to be a popular aspect of Doom. Gaining the first large mod-making community, Doom affected the culture surrounding first-person shooters, and also the industry. Several future professional game designers started their careers making Doom WADs as a hobby, among them Tim Willits, who later became the lead designer at id Software.

The first level editors appeared in early 1994, and additional tools have been created that allow most aspects of the game to be edited. Although the majority of WADs contain one or several custom levels mostly in the style of the original game, others implement new monsters and other resources, and heavily alter the gameplay; several popular movies, television series, other video games and other brands from popular culture have been turned into Doom WADs by fans, including Aliens, Star Wars, The Simpsons, South Park, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon, Beavis and Butt-head, Batman, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Some works, like the Theme Doom Patch, combined enemies from several films, such as Aliens, Predator, and The Terminator. Some add-on files were also made that changed the sounds made by the various characters and weapons.

Around 1994 and 1995, WADs were primarily distributed online over bulletin board systems or sold in collections on compact discs in computer shops, sometimes bundled with editing guide books. FTP servers became the primary method in later years. A few WADs have been released commercially, including the Master Levels for Doom II, which was released in 1995 along with Maximum Doom, a CD containing 1,830 WADs that had been downloaded from the Internet. Several thousand WADs have been created in total: the idgames FTP archive contains over 18,000 files, and this represents only a fraction of the complete output of Doom fans. Third-party programs were also written to handle the loading of various WADs, since the game is a DOS game and all commands had to be entered on the command line to run. A typical launcher would allow the player to select which files to load from a menu, making it much easier to start. In 1995, WizardWorks released the D!Zone pack featuring hundreds of levels for Doom and Doom II. D!Zone was reviewed in Dragon by Jay & Dee; Jay gave the pack 1 out of 5 stars, while Dee gave the pack 1½ stars.

In 2016, Romero published two new Doom levels - E1M4b ("Phobos Mission Control") and E1M8b ("Tech Gone Bad"). In 2018, for the 25th anniversary of DOOM, Romero announced an unofficial 5th Episodic pack of 9 levels. The 5th episode is titled Sigil. The music for the 5th episode is composed entirely by Buckethead.

Reception
Doom became a problem at workplaces, both occupying the time of employees and clogging computer networks. Intel, Lotus Development, and Carnegie Mellon University were among many organizations reported to form policies specifically disallowing Doom-playing during work hours. At the Microsoft campus, Doom was by one account equal to a "religious phenomenon". Doom was #1 on Computer Gaming World 's "Playing Lately?" survey for February 1994. One reader said that "No other game even compares to the addictiveness of NetDoom with four devious players! ... The only game I've stayed up 72+ straight hours to play", while another reported that "Linking four people together for a game of Doom is the quickest way to destroy a productive, boring evening of work". To promote Windows 95, Bill Gates, aware of the video game's popularity, showcased a video presentation while digitally superimposed into Doom Although Petersen said Doom was "nothing more than the computer equivalent of Whack-A-Mole", Doom received critical acclaim and was widely praised in the gaming press, broadly considered to be one of the most important and influential titles in gaming history. Upon release, GamesMaster gave it a 90% rating. Dragon gave it five stars, praising the improvements over Wolfenstein 3D, the "fast-moving arcade shoot 'em up" gameplay, and network play. Computer and Video Games gave the game a 93% rating, praising its atmosphere and stating that "the level of texture-mapped detail and the sense of scale is awe inspiring", but criticized the occasionally repetitive gameplay and considered the violence excessive. A common criticism of Doom was that it was not a true 3D game, since the game engine did not allow corridors and rooms to be stacked on top of one another (room-over-room), and instead relied on graphical trickery to make it appear that the player character and enemies were moving along differing elevations.

Computer Gaming World stated in February 1994 that Wolfenstein 3D fans should "look forward to a delight of insomnia", and "Since networking is supported, bring along a friend to share in the visceral delights". A longer review in March 1994 said that Doom "was worth the wait ... a wonderfully involved and engaging game", and its technology "a new benchmark" for the gaming industry. The reviewer praised the "simply dazzling" graphics", and reported that "DeathMatches may be the most intense gaming experience available today". While criticizing the "ho-hum endgame" with a too-easy end boss, he concluded that Doom "is a virtuoso performance".

Edge criticized the "fairly simple" gameplay but praised the graphics and levels. The review concluded: "You’lI be longing for something new in this game. If only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances... Now, that would be interesting." The sentiment attracted widespread mockery, and "if only you could talk to these creatures" became a running joke in gamer culture; however, a 2016 piece in the International Business Times defended the review as anticipating the dialogue systems of games such as Skyrim, Mass Effect and Undertale.

In 1994, PC Gamer UK named Doom the third best computer game of all time. The editors wrote, "Although it's only been around for a couple of months, Doom has already done more to establish the PC's arcade clout than any other title in gaming history." In 1994 Computer Gaming World named Doom Game of the Year.

In 1995, Next Generation said it was "The most talked about PC game ever – and with good reason. Running on a 486 machine (essential for maximum effect), Doom took PC graphics to a totally new level of speed, detail, and realism, and provided a genuinely scary degree of immersion in the gameworld."

In 1996, Computer Gaming World named it the fifth best video game of all time, and the third most-innovative game.

In 1998, PC Gamer declared it the 34th-best computer game ever released, and the editors called it "Probably the most imitated game of all time, Doom continued what Wolfenstein 3D began and elevated the fledgling 3D-shooter genre to blockbuster status".

In 2001, Doom was voted the number one game of all time in a poll among over 100 game developers and journalists conducted by GameSpy.

In 2003, IGN ranked it as the 44th top video game of all time and also called it "the breakthrough game of 1993", adding: "Its arsenal of powerful guns (namely the shotgun and BFG), intense level of gore and perfect balance of adrenaline-soaked action and exploration kept this gamer riveted for years." PC Gamer proclaimed Doom the most influential game of all time in its ten-year anniversary issue in April 2004.

In 2004, readers of Retro Gamer voted Doom as the ninth top retro game, with the editors commenting: "Only a handful of games can claim that they've changed the gaming world, and Doom is perhaps the most qualified of them all." In 2005, IGN ranked it as the 39th top game.

On March 12, 2007, The New York Times reported that Doom was named to a list of the ten most important video games of all time, the so-called game canon. The Library of Congress took up this video game preservation proposal and began with the games from this list.

In 2009, GameTrailers ranked Doom as the number one "breakthrough PC game". That year Game Informer put Doom sixth on the magazine's list of the top 200 games of all time, stating that it gave "the genre the kick start it needed to rule the gaming landscape two decades later." Game Informer staff also put it sixth on their 2001 list of the 100 best games ever. IGN included Doom at 2nd place in the Top 100 Video Game Shooters of all Time, just behind Half-Life, citing the game's "feel of running and gunning", memorable weapons and enemies, pure and simple fun and its spreading on nearly every gaming platform in existence.

In 2012, Time named it one of the 100 greatest video games of all time as "it established the look and feel of later shooters as surely as Xerox PARC established the rules of the virtual desktop," adding that "its impact also owes a lot to the gonzo horror sensibility of its designers, including John Romero, who showed a bracing lack of restraint in their deployment of gore and Satanic iconography." Including Doom on the list of the greatest games of all time, GameSpot wrote that "despite its numerous appearances in other formats and on other media, longtime fans will forever remember the original 1993 release of Doom as the beginning of a true revolution in action gaming."

The game has been ported to numerous console gaming platforms both domestically and abroad where it maintained its popularity, receiving generally favorable critical reception.

Commercial and spreading performance
With the release of Doom, id Software quickly found itself making $100,000 daily. Sandy Petersen later remarked that the game "sold a couple of hundred thousand copies during its first year or so", as piracy kept its initial sales from rising higher. Experts estimate that the game sold approximately 2-3 million physical copies from its release through 1999. According to PC Data, which tracked sales in the United States, the Doom shareware edition sold 1.15 million copies by September 1999. The Ultimate Doom SKU reached sales of 787,397 units by that date. At the time, PC Data ranked them as the country's eighth- and 20th-best-selling computer games since January 1993. In addition to its sales, the game's status as shareware dramatically increased its market penetration. PC Zone 's David McCandless wrote that the game was played by "an estimated six million people across the globe", while other sources estimate that 10–20 million people played Doom within 24 months of its launch.

Controversies
See also: List of banned video games Doom 's intense level of graphic violence made the game highly controversial. This screenshot shows the effects of a rocket hitting a group of enemies. Doom was notorious for its high levels of graphic violence and satanic imagery, which generated controversy from a broad range of groups. Doom for the Genesis 32X was one of the first video games to be given an M for Mature rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board due to its violent gore and nature. Yahoo! Games listed it as one of the top ten most controversial games of all time. It was criticized by religious organizations for its diabolic undertones and was dubbed a "mass murder simulator" by critic and Killology Research Group founder David Grossman. Doom prompted fears that the then-emerging virtual reality technology could be used to simulate extremely realistic killing.

The game again sparked controversy in the United States when it was found that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, were avid players of the game. While planning for the massacre, Harris said in his journal that the killing would be "like playing Doom", and "it'll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, World War II, Vietnam, Duke Nukem and Doom all mixed together", and that his shotgun was "straight out of the game". A rumor spread afterwards that Harris had designed a Doom level that looked like the high school, populated with representations of Harris's classmates and teachers, and that he practiced for the shootings by playing the level over and over. Although Harris did design custom Doom levels (which later became known as the 'Harris levels'), none have been found to be based on Columbine High School.

In the earliest release versions, the level E1M4: Command Control contained a swastika-shaped structure, which was put in as a homage to Wolfenstein 3D. The swastika was removed in later versions; according to Romero, the change was done out of respect after id Software received a complaint from a military veteran.

Doom franchise
Main article: Doom (franchise)

Doom has appeared in several forms in addition to video games, including a Doom comic book, four novels by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver (loosely based on events and locations in the games), a Doom board game and a live-action film starring Karl Urban and The Rock released in 2005. The game's development and impact on popular culture is also the subject of the book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner.

The Doom series remained dormant between 1997 and 2000, when Doom 3 was finally announced. A retelling of the original Doom using entirely new graphics technology and a slower paced survival horror approach, Doom 3 was hyped to provide as large a leap in realism and interactivity as the original game and helped renew interest in the franchise when it was released in 2004, under the id Tech 4 game engine.

The series again remained dormant for 10 years until a remake, simply titled Doom and running on the new id Tech 6, was announced with a beta access to players that had pre-ordered Wolfenstein: The New Order. The game held its closed alpha multiplayer testing in October 2015, as closed and open beta access ran during March to April 2016. Returning to the series' roots in fast-paced action and minimal storytelling, the full game eventually released worldwide on May 13, 2016. The project initially started as Doom 4 in May 2008, set to be a remake of Doom II: Hell on Earth and ditching the survival horror aspect of Doom 3. Development completely restarted as id's Tim Willits remarked that Doom 4 was "lacking the personality of the long-running shooter franchise".

Clones
Main article: First-person shooter The phrase "Doom clone" was initially popular to describe the style of gameplay in Doom-style games, but was gradually replaced by "first-person shooter" after 1996. By 1998, the phrase "first-person shooter" had firmly superseded "Doom clone".

Doom was influential and dozens of new first-person shooter titles appeared following Doom 's release, and they were often referred to as "Doom clones" rather than "first-person shooters". The term "Doom clone" was used to describe the style of gameplay in Doom-style games. While the term was initially popular, it was, after 1996, gradually replaced by "first-person shooter", and the phrase "first-person shooter" had firmly superseded "Doom clone" around 1998. Some of these were certainly "clones", hastily assembled and quickly forgotten, while others explored new grounds of the genre and were highly acclaimed. Many of the games closely imitated features in Doom such as the selection of weapons and cheat codes. Doom 's principal rivals were Apogee's Rise of the Triad and Looking Glass Studios' System Shock[citation needed]. The popularity of Star Wars-themed WADs is rumored to have been the factor that prompted LucasArts to create their first-person shooter Dark Forces.

The Doom game engine was licensed by id Software to several other companies, who released their own games using the technology, including Heretic, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Strife: Quest for the Sigil, and Hacx: Twitch 'n Kill. A Doom-based game called Chex Quest was released in 1996 by Ralston Foods as a promotion to increase cereal sales, and the United States Marine Corps released Marine Doom.

When 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, a tongue-in-cheek science fiction shooter based on Ken Silverman's technologically similar Build engine, id Software had nearly finished developing Quake, its next-generation game, which mirrored Doom 's success for much of the remainder of the 1990s and reduced interest in its predecessor (Wolfenstein 3D).

Community
In addition to the thrilling nature of the single-player game, the deathmatch mode was an important factor in the game's popularity. Doom was not the first first-person shooter with a deathmatch mode; Maze War, an FPS released in 1974, was running multiplayer deathmatch over ethernet on Xerox computers by 1977. The widespread distribution of PC systems and the violence in Doom made deathmatching particularly attractive. Two-player multiplayer was possible over a phone line by using a modem, or by linking two PCs with a null-modem cable. Because of its widespread distribution, Doom hence became the game that introduced deathmatching to a large audience and was also the first game to use the term "deathmatch".

Although the popularity of the Doom games dropped with the release of more modern first-person shooters, the game still retains a strong fan base that continues to this day by playing competitively and creating WADs, and Doom-related news is still tracked at multiple websites such as Doomworld. Interest in Doom was renewed in 1997, when the source code for the Doom engine was released (it was also placed under the GNU General Public License on October 3, 1999). Fans then began porting the game to various operating systems, even to previously unsupported platforms such as the Dreamcast. As for the PC, over 50 different Doom source ports have been developed. New features such as OpenGL rendering and scripting allow WADs to alter the gameplay more radically.

Devoted players have spent years creating speedruns for Doom, competing for the quickest completion times and sharing knowledge about routes through the levels and how to exploit bugs in the Doom engine for shortcuts. Achievements include the completion of both Doom and Doom II on the "Ultra-Violence" difficulty setting in less than 30 minutes each. In addition, a few players have also managed to complete Doom II in a single run on the difficulty setting "Nightmare!", on which monsters are more aggressive, launch faster projectiles (or, in the case of the Pinky Demon, simply move faster), and respawn roughly 30 seconds after they have been killed (level designer John Romero characterized the idea of such a run as "[just having to be] impossible"). Movies of most of these runs are available from the COMPET-N website.

Online co-op and deathmatch play are still continued on fan created services.

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

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.

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)
 * Other
 * 2001 - The Greatest Game of All Time voted by industry insiders (according to GameSpy)

Gallery
Game Screenshot

Promo Pictures

Several Screenshot

Development Crew

 * Doom 3DO Crew
 * Doom DOS Crew
 * Doom GBA Crew
 * Doom Jaguar Crew
 * Doom Sega 32X Crew
 * Doom SNES Crew
 * Doom Windows Crew