DooM - E1M1 on eight floppy drives

[Architecture]

[clyde]

I posted this in the Random thread but wanted to include it here incase a conversation about DOOM occurs. I've been really enjoying it lately.

 

I just bought Ultimate DOOM on Steam and have found myself enjoying it far more than I thought I would. My previous experience with the game was playing the first two(?) of the shareware-levels on a friend's PC at his house in 1996 or so. I remembered the game being frustratingly hard, but graphically impressive and ghoulish.
So when I got the Steam version, I went in and I was like "This shotgun is the best weapon I've ever used in a first-person-shooter!" and just feeling like the momentumy movement and the 0-90mphness was surprisingly satisfying. I assumed that in the time since trying it briefly decades ago and now playing it this week, was that I had become skilled at first-person-shooters and keyboard/mouse controls. Then I went back into the game and saw an option for "classic controls" and was like

Call me crazy, but I feel like I want to experience the game as the creators originally intended.

The game suddenly became not fun at all. No wonder I thought the game was hard at my friend's house in 1996. It's impossible to play this way and in retrospect just seems like a really misguided design-choice. When did WASD become standard and why wasn't it an obvious control-scheme when DOOM came out?

Also: Knee-Deep in the Dead is significantly more interesting to me than The Shores of Hell is there a story behind that? The first levels feel like they have secret doors everywhere, the corridors are easy to orient yourself in, but weave together in exciting ways. The levels in The Shores of Hell seem like they weren't given as much thought.

 

Ninety-Three responded with:

 

Doom was released with the first episode free, so the designers were incentivized to put the best levels at the beginning to hook people for the full version.

 

Oh, and I just watched this interview with John Romero:

[Reyturner]

That version of E1M1 sounds more like how I remember it than the re-releases do. 

 

Of all the episodes, Knee Deep in the Dead always had the best sense of place to me and I wonder if it's the result of the more narrative focus the game had at first. 

 

Also, there were many designers with different design aesthetics. Tom Hall and John Romero were more narrative focused and did a majority of Knee Deep where as Sandy Peterson was more into encounter design and didn't give the setting a lot of thought, and a lot of the later levels were his work. (at least, that's how I remember the process being described in Masters of Doom, but it's been a decade since I've read it). He also made / finished 19 levels in the 10 weeks before Doom was released after Tom Hall left, which probably accounts for the rough edges. 

 

That said, my fave level in Doom is E2M7 (a Tom Hall / Sandy Peterson joint). 

[Vorlonesque]

I posted this in the Random thread but wanted to include it here incase a conversation about DOOM occurs. I've been really enjoying it lately.

 

 

 

If it makes you feel better, Romero and most of the id guys played DOOM with kb/mouse (Romero played Wolf3d with a mouse as well...I remember reading something that mentioned it in passing in the Wolf3d strategy guide that came with my boxed copy years and years back).  An article about DOOM2 before it was released mentioend he was circle strafing press guys from CGW in DOOM1 DM.  I think it may be the first description of circle strafing I ever read or saw.  I'll see if I can go dig it up here in a little big.

 

Edit: ok it was the July 1994 issue of CGW...I weirdly remember getting that issue vividly (couldn't remember if it was 1993 or 1994, but now that I think about it I should have known because DOOM2 came out in '94 and I think I ended up getting into DOOM1 shareware sometime in early-mid 1994 when I was still in the 8th grade and becoming obsessed with it).  It was summer and we were visiting my Grandma in Clarksburg (WV) and maybe were up there to get my weekly allergy shot (which during the school year I got on Saturdays, but during Summer I'd get on Thursday when we visited my Grandma and Grandpa before he passed away), and we were in Walden books or whatever the bookstore was at the time at the Meadowbrook Mall and I saw DOOM2 and flipped through the issue and knew I had to have is and asked my Mom thinking she'd probably say no (and I would have been ok with that), but she said yeah so I was really excited and poured over this huge magazine about something I only knew a little bit about (PC Gaming) but was wanting to dive deep into at the time after having played Civilization and DOOM and some other stuff (before that most of my gaming was with the NES and SNES and Gameboy, with the Atari 2600 before that).  There were ads for all sorts of crazy things like System Shock and flight sim controls and RPGs and all sorts of stuff.  That article probably further cemented my weird quasi-religious obsession or love or whatever I had regarding DOOM...I think its probably best compared to the way some people are into Nirvana or The Beatles or Kanye West or The Rolling Stones or NIN or Pink Floyd or whatever band...I have that weird part of my brain that will always regard 90's id and DOOM in that same light as a Beatles fan does the fab four and Revolver, or Sgt Pepper, or "the white album" or a Pink Floyd fan does that band and Dark Side of the Moon, or Wish You Were Here, or The Wall.

 

Sorry, got on a crazy rambling detour there (just ignore that wall of text), basically that article on DOOM2 is seared into my brain like some other stuff from the time period and I actually re-bought that magazine off ebay recently as a weird impulse buy.  I have no clue where it is now, its probably in a box under my bed from when I was putting stuff away recently and throwing away stuff I didn't want or need anymore (and taking old books I'd read to the local library; they have a metal cabinet shelf thing where you can...dammit I'm getting off-topic again).  I found it on CGW Museum which appears to be legit given that they were mentioned by CGW themselves in 2005 (January issue, page 40 at the very bottom of the page) and have interviewed people who worked there at various points so I'm thinking they're probably ok to post (if not, feel free to remove the link or to tell me to remove the link):

 

http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1994&pub=2&id=120

 

The following quote is from page 24 describing a DOOM2 Deathmatch with Romero (I'm transcribing this from the page so it may have errors and if so they are likely my fault):

 

"Over the next few hours, Romero taught us the delicate art of the slaughter, racing around the map at supernatural speeds and using the mouse with such skill that he could, literally, run circles around us while keeping his weapon aimed at our spinning heads."

 

Edit2: I played around with the quote to try to get the quotes in the quote and then gave up...so I just removed the redundant video link that made this huge post even bigger on a screen.

[Ben X]

So a video game music floppy drive rendition that could have gone in the Video Game Music Rendition thread next to the other floppy drive renditions, and a discussion of DooM^TM that could have gone in the FPS playthrough thread.

 

[Architecture]

Yes, let us complain that there simply too many topics on which to click. Let us consolidate everything into a single thread.

[namman siggins]

Goldeneye 007 us being remade with the Doom engine 

 

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/goldeneye-007-is-being-remade-in-the-doom-engine-and-it-looks-great

 

Also, do we have an all encompassing Doom thread? Can't find one

[Ben X]

There's a fair amount of discussion of it in my FPS thread (linked above), but I don't know if there's a proper Doom thread though.

[brkl]

I still can't get over the video in the original post. I still get a huge kick from it.