20 years of Doom. It itches. First time I heard and saw it, Joystick Magazine #37, April 1993. Page 118.
Thanks a ton to Abandonware-Magazines and my memory.
Then my PC game dealer –Ze Warez- obviously had it later on. I’m from that older Wolfenstein3D school so Doom was the iteration. What an iteration though. It’s almost like if Nintendo had done Mario and then, Mario World. In the article it says that it would perfectly run on my machine and I was amazed and skeptical that it would and it fucking did.
Bear with me, I was a kid who after years of playing on mom’s IBM PC some awful CGA games just wanted some cool games on his 386 DX 33, like all those fuckers in the UK on their Amigas and STs or my friends on consoles. Two years later Commodore is dead and I get to play Wolf and Doom, two games that were unique and quite impossible to make on any other platform at that time.
Talk about Revenge of The Nerd.
Also, tons of fun. Tons of customization and first taste of game dev tools. Just passing the language barrier in itself was some work (‘member, no internet, only books). I remember making an audio track of myself dying through the infamous Doom’s chainsaw sounds. The total freedom! It was a degamified game, it was fun being a god or a piece of shit in a room with no ammo.
Doom is important to the game culture because of the focus on technology and 3D. What people very fast forgot is that Doom was also optimized and run well on a large variety of machines. Most developers will not care about performance scaling for the next twenty years (also computer’s architecture evolution made it nearly impossible). Today as Moore’s law is now BS, they have to (or they do 2D).
ID Software made its name doing the costly optimization on its own. Sudden and huge trust and respect from millions of players? Priceless. People forget that aspect. ID cared. You never forget that.
I preferred Duke Nukem 3D to Quake because I didn’t care about more technology at that time. I was good having fun with what we had. Plus it was asking some hardware upgrade, the start of the out of control spiral where things get twice as fast every six months. That gave birth to the “PC Master Race” as Reddit call those guys who play on 7 GHz space shuttles with a keyboard and a mouse, but it also sent people to the super awesomely accessible Playstation so hard that Microsoft had to answer with their own box.
With game development being more platform agnostic than ever, It feels like we’ve seen it all and that now as it should have been from the start, hardware is hardware and the two lessons I’ll keep from Doom are:
– Make the best tech for the best game you want.
– Be nice.