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I played Doom on DOS as a kid and it was amazing. I played it again on DOS Box a few years ago and immediately downloaded GZDoom. Nostalgia can blind you.
Not saying Doom on DOS is better. Just whenever people talk about what it was like 30 years ago, GZDoom is not a good representation of the game that changed the industry forever.
This was the 'killer app' for PC in 1993/94. I still remember playing multi-player with a friend using a patch cable as a kid which was mind blowing at the time. Nostalgia!
It's really not that bad. once you set up WASD it still plays perfectly fine. If you need a modern port to play on, try Crispy Doom or DSDA Doom, since they're still reasonably accurate to the original behavior.
Back in the DOS days, DooM was much harder. Not because the game was harder, but because we as players were far less skilled. We didn't have circle strafing, many of us played with only a keyboard, and we didn't have the years of FPS experience. We were also running into the game blind. These games still destroy unsuspecting players that don't know all the traps and surprises.
0:14 i count myself lucky that my dad was OCD about editing adverts out of his "tape" and he recorded the original cut of the Star Wars trilogy on VHS. I quite literally played that tape to death. It was of the very first VHS tapes I would come to love and collect as an adult. Alas, a tape is only so durable and it ceased functioning around 2004 I think. Some of the SFX are definitely scuffed such as the original saber duel and lasers in general are so blindingly white that none of the red appears. Still, worth it due to how bizarre the later cuts of the film are. Imo it kinda adds to the lived in, oppressive atmosphere in the galaxy that is so important in SW without the distraction of pointless CGI. Thanks for making this comparison!
back in 1995, my dad bought a PC. It ran on pentium and windows 95, and it also came with two shareware CD - one with Doom on it and the other with Rise of the Triad. I remember booting up the game, with no music but only PC speaker noises. If I am not playing I just let the game's demo run until those PC Speaker noises just run in my head to this day. Game used to scare the shit out of me, but reading the manual even as a kid I realize what I am missing, though too bad we don't have credit cards back then and no way to get it from store shelves (keep in mind I don't live in the US and sending check to the US is still very alien to me). The other thing is I used to remember dad playing Rise of the Triad and getting me past the moving flamewalls.
Yeah, I live in South Africa, and trying to order the full game was a no-go. When we played Doom 1, it was just episode 1, and then we played Doom 2. Decades later, I'd finally play episodes 2 and 3.
I'm almost 27 and doom was my first game, I grew up with it and carry it on me everywhere. GzDoom and mouse look and the HRXTC hud is the best ways to play.
@@GTXDash I mean, sure why not? By then I'd imagine NightDive Studios or somebody else would release another version of Duke Nukem 3D to celebrate the anniversary.
As someone who still owns my original 3DO, and my copy of Doom for it, yes the game ran like shit, but I still got through it, and that soundtrack ROCKED.
The very first video game I ever played 30 years ago. While people say "When I was a little kid I played Super Mario" or something like that, I played this. I have played every DOOM title and continue to do so to this day. I remember always saying "I hope I have a bad ass PC that came run games like DOOM", fast forward 30 years later, as I watch this video and sip my scotch, I look over at my top tier PC build (not meant to be a flex) and say "hell yeah, I did it." All because of the influence this game had on me. Fantastic video and very informational, I enjoyed it very much!
I could talk about my first experience with doom, I had a big brother and they gave him a computer in 2001, someone came out and installed doom to him. He also had a bunch of consoles (atari, nes, sega 16-bits) so I kinda grew up with nes and sega games. My brother was older, so he enjoyed the game and eventually kinda grew up over it. I on the other hand, made the jump from sega into doom directly and it was a feeling like never seen before. Trying to put my mind into the feelings from back then: People talk nowadays about interactive movies as games, doom was like a cinematic experience from beggining to end. Regarding pc's, those graphics were top-notch. Like, half-life alyx, but in 1993. The 3d inmmersion, the strobbing lights, the smooth render for such a complex design, the tension and threat no cinema was capable to give you. Like, imagine jumping from mario to this. The shareware felt like a complete game, so you could imagine that. (there was a intermission where my brother deleted the game, so I was unable to play the game for 5 years, but never forgot about it. So, one day when I found the game on my brother's girlfriend computer, i burned a cd and brought it back home and the madness started all over again =P) my brother quickly grew up over computers, but that marked me way too hard, learned how to program some stuff, modify games, made bunch of doom mod's over the past 17 years and even have a demo released on steam for a game I was hired to program, using gzdoom sourceport. Would my life had been better if I never played doom? Maybe, I feel like I could had been doing comics (which I was doing back then, but stopped to do this instead), but either way, I don't think i would change it that much given the chance (perhaps focus a bit more on drawing and a bit less on programming, like keep a balance) So, i'm 32 years old, and been modding doom for 17 years, so you could say I've spent half of my life modding doom, that's wild =P
They released Hovertank 3d and Catacombs 3d before Wolfenstein 3d under the name id Software. Only published by Softdisk. You can also consider those games as FPS. And the Jaguar version had no music because the DSP was used for collision detection.
I did not know that about the jaguar DSP thing. Interesting. Hovertank and Catacombs 3D wasn't released under the id name. They had to remain subservient to Softdisk until their debt was paid, which is why there is no id Software logo in both these games.
@@uriel666marco I can't seem to find it, when I boot up the game, I only see Softdisk and Gamers Edge. I think it would be great if there is in fact a rerelease of the game that does include the id software branding, is your copy different?
I have never heard of this explanation as to the reason for the lack of the music in Jaguar Doom. From everything i've seen, the Jaguar Doom music was a licensing issue due to the way the artist wanted pay to be allocated (same compensation for Jaguar license as much as the PC release) and thus was simply not published in that version.
This is why i care so much about semantics when it comes to seeing or playing old stuff. Because i want to experience such things like the makers envisioned us doing so. ID Software didn't expect us to play with full mouse look and heavily modified versions of Doom, they expected the player to play with probably WASD for movement and horizontal mouse look (even tho most people at the time were used to looking with arrow keys for being used to that).
WASD not sure. But mouse look 100% yes. Even the Doom manual suggest you to use mouse look. And there's even footage of early 90s of Romero playing Doom with mouse, he even tweeted it was for mouse. And the recorded demos seen in the main menu, the player there is clearly using mouse movement. So yes, mouse was used as soon as the game launched. At least by the devs and some minority. Not sure about WASD though, that was more likely made popular in Quake or Half-Life.@@MalitiaHDOfficial
@@damsen978 you are right, the manual does mention mouse look. I guess keyboard only was just considered standard since a lot of people didnt use mouse back in the day.WASD was not a thing back then though. The manual mentions the arrow keys for turning and moving forwards and backwards. The Alt key was used for strafing.
@@damsen978 so you could technically use it since there was some configuration that let you change some keys. (Although, strafing would still be locked to Alt + arrow keys) but, WASD had not been discovered yet as a viable movement input yet since mouse look was not widely used yet. That was def closer to Quake.
One thing about "what Doom was 30 years ago" is that it varied *wildly* depending on what kind of machine you had. A 386DX with 4MB of RAM and a PC speaker (could technically run Doom but did so very poorly), the classic 486DX2/66 with 8MB and a Sound Blaster clone, and a Pentium 66 with 16+ MB, Sound Blaster 16, and an external synth connected by MPU-401 (basically the equivalent of a Threadripper with a 4090 today) gave experiences far more different than different classes of gaming PC tend to give today. The framerates most players had to accept back in the day would be completely unacceptable today--unless you were the lucky bastard with the $7000 Pentium rig you weren't going to get anywhere near the maximum of 35 fps at full detail. Even the music sounded completely different if you had a Gravis UltraSound or (better) a Roland MT-32 or SC-55--the latter two pieces of hardware costing nearly $1000 on their own. EDIT: note that you specifically DID NOT need an internet connection to download the Doom shareware, and most people who acquired Doom shareware did not! For those without access to the real internet, they had two options. One was to dial into what was called a BBS, a remote server you accessed with a modem by a phone number, likely getting reamed with long distance charges, and download the file at some ungodly speed like 9600 baud (a bit more than 1 kilobyte per second, and many modems were slower than that, so you're tying up a phone line potentially for hours). The other option was to go to a computer or video game store, where you would pay $5-10 for the shareware version on two floppy disks. E: I ran the numbers, the Doom v0.99 download would take around 30 minutes at 9600 baud, and at a fairly generous long distance rate of 25¢ per minute, downloading from a non-local area code meant the phone company would charge you $7.52. Modems could be slower than that, the download was by no means guaranteed to always be at full speed or be free of corruption, and long distance was often even more expensive, so this is a very conservative estimate. Downloading from BBSes outside of major cities could get really expensive really fast.
Great text, well crafted, well well written with great research. It deserves a video edit with scenes following what the audio is presenting. Anyway, well done, love it!
I remember buying the first episode on floppy disk back in 94 or 95 found it at a supermarket of all places The only time I ever remember purchasing any video game at a grocery store
This is good stuff, I remember how it was in 96...for the SNES version I may have gotten to just before Phobos anomaly...but on PC Wolfenstein and quake seemed to be the rage
Even though the 3do port was a disaster, the music for it was anything but. When I run through GzDoom now, I usually run the 3do soundtrack. It's fantastic!
One thing the SNES port of Doom had over its 16 bit competition was online multiplayer on console. Though you had to get Catapult revolutionary X-Band cartridge for the SNES to do it. Couldn’t do that on Sega Genesis or it’s tumor shaped 32X add on.
Doom had a big box retail release here in Australia, I know because that's how I got Doom! The first time I saw Doom playing it looked (to 13 year old me) like HD video does today, compared to Wolfenstein 3D Doom looked amazing.
Yes indeed. It was the standard big box of the day and came on four, if memory serves, black floppies. I don't remember if it came with a manual, but it was bare bones inside the box. This would have been somewhere around '93 or '94. Only the original three episodes, I later bought the big box of The Ultimate Doom but I don't think I've ever played the new levels in it. Getting Doom home and installing it on my 386 was a great day! I didn't even have a sound card in those days so no cool Doom music!@@GTXDash
Shareware was the most amazing, but also baffling, business model. Imagine giving out fully one third of your game for nothing -- and, oftentimes, having some of the most memorable and best designed parts of your game in the free episode. I often bought the full versions of shareware games, but they usually never quite hit the heights of the free shareware episodes.
That is so true. There were several games I was disappointed in when playing the full version. Like Hocus Pocus. Does anyone remember that game? The full game added nothing new to the shareware release.
I still remember to this day the moment I saw DooM: it was shown on a monitor in a shop's window. The owner used to put demos of various games there (Strike Commander was one of them). I was 13 or so back then and the shop was near my middle school. The feeling of something monumental was there: we had arcades with all sorts of great games (mostly Japanese) but the feeling of immersion of the FPS was unrivalled. I also remember the smoothness and fluid motion of the sprites (even in 30 or so fps).
Yeah, calling it the internet is a big stretch. But since you didn't need to be on campus to access the server, I guess it was a smaller version of what would eventually become the internet.
5:20 I was only a few months old when Doom came out but I am very interested in playing 90s games. Calling chapters of a game "episodes" seems to have been very common gaming jargon. It seems like gaming was a much more niche activity in this time but Doom was a phenomenon and a lot of new people might have had their first experience with gaming be that Doom game everyone's talking about. I can see people just getting introduced to gaming being confused by the "episode" labling but it also sounds like retailers were kindddda misleading people about what exactly they were buying. At the very least, they don't seem to have been really motivated to clear up the misconception
3:09 Not the only way. Newly bought PCs would usually come with game demos pre-installed already. Doom shareware came installed when my dad bought our first PC. It was already there. The year was 1994. Perhaps id was also sending out shareware copies to computer retailers to help spread it even more.
Doom is the reason I'm a PC gamer 30 years later. A co-worker (and now friend of 30 years) had a PC with a shareware copy of Doom. I was spellbound and shortly thereafter purchased a $2000CAD 386 PC that could barely run it even with some cleaver BAT files to free up system resources but I was hooked. I even dabbled with the level editor and got pretty good at it but it was easier to just buy those CD-ROMS of homemade WAD files and play those for hours and hours looking for the best ones. Maybe I should be blaming DOOM for still being a PC gamer at 50! 😄
Doom was my first game. Not only what Doom made was impressive, it was also visible impressive. If you get games of that time, none would match doom, it looked "from the future" near most games from the early 90's. People should take in mind that most people wrote their own engine for a game, normally a small team, if not a single dev, and programming skill was such a thing at the time, that is why in the 90's there is a very visible difference between games and the quality. Nowadays, any coder can get an engine and do a game with great graphics and physics, lot of games looks very alike each other. The experience of seeing Doom in the 90's was really like you were seeing something different, something beyond, it is like there was only indie games (not literally) and Doom was the first AAA that appeared. And i could say the same for Quake... Quake looked like it came from the future.
Remember kids, we didn't have the fulidsynth your used to nowadays. We had crunchy as hell PC noises for the music and the fact that Booby Prince made such a kickass soundtrack by basically ripping off Megadeath, Metallica ,ACDC and so on shows how much Talent ID Software had along with the usual suspects...oh yeah and we had 35 FPS.
I was born in 1996, and when I was old enough to use a computer, there was already newer windows systems, newer games. But my father, decided to introduce me to the world of games and technology, practically from beginning. So my first PC was Amiga 500, but the one that you were connecting to the TV. And my first console was Atari 2600. And I was going then through evolution of those devices, missing some truthfully. So I got to MSDos and I played Doom. Same as many people, I didn't knew you could set keys, to more modern setup. I mean, I didn't even knew about wasd setting for quite some time, so I played Call of Duty, for example with arrow keys. Having jump on enter, crouch on right shift, prone on right control and use on num Ins. But back to Doom. I was still playing it with keyboard and mouse. But I was using keyboard for moving forward and backward, and to sprint. Mouse, I was using for looking left and right, and also to strafe with right mouse button. I was also using rmb to open doors. And obviously I was shooting with lmb. Also weirdly, this game never scared me. But I was scared of Wolfenstein 3D, specifically of moments, when I found chaingun, as I always thought, that boss is near and I was scared of them.
Wolfenstein 3D often made me jump out of my seat when I was shot dead from a soldier I didn't see. Not really something I experienced often in Doom surprisingly.
You got one major thing wrong. When doom first came out, a lot of people were still using 386s or slow 486s. Not to mention sound cards. Many were still happy to play it in a smaller screen area with a slower frame rate though.
The claim about PCs not having games that matched console games before doom is fairly suspect even if we are talking just about IBM PC clones IMO. There were plenty of games that stood up to console games on PCs before Doom. There were also PCs like the Amiga that did have specialized hardware well-suited for gaming purposes.
Yes that is true. It was indeed more of a gradual thing and not an overnight thing of "games were worse" and now "they're better than console". Even some machines like the Amiga 500 had games that looked way better than any NES or Master System could when they were new. But there was always a tradeoff. It had to run on an expensive computer. Doom only needed a 486 which at the time was already 4 and a half years old. The more powerful DX2 was coming to 2 years old, with the Pentium already out. I used to run Doom, set to the "Low" setting, on a 486SX 25Mhz, an even slower, more budget version of the DX, which I got for free. And it ran at over 30FPS, without the need to shrink the screen size. But the thing is, even on 'Low' it still was a much higher resolution than the SNES or 32X, but about the same as the Jaguar version except that the Jaguar version had reduced visuals compared to the PC original.
I think it's funny how many retrospectives mention both the botching of the SNES Wolfenstein port by an outside contractor and the 3DO port of Doom and never mention that both were Heineman.
Your comment caught me off guard, so I had to look this up first. So, according to her, Heineman apparently worked with id to help them navigate the porting of Wolf3D to the SNES. So I don't think she was that 3rd party that abandoned the project without telling anyone.
@@GTXDash The story as I've always heard it, and as it's reported in Masters of Doom, was that she thought she had the right to do independent work while being employed by Interplay, but this ended up not being true, so the work Heineman did on the port belonged to Interplay. Romero confirmed most of this in his book without using her name, but she was employed by Interplay and they had a relationship.
6:55 I don't know where the idea that Tom Hall didn't put his heart and soul into Doom comes from. My impression has for a long time been that he was overly ambitious and wanted to expand the game's scope to a level that just wasn't plausible (and probably wouldn't have been as enjoyable). As was outlined in his Doom Bible, he wanted 5 or 6 episodes worth of maps with actual story and plot twists, four playable characters, stealth elements and backstab damage, more realistic environments, etc.
That's absolutely true. He was not keen on the direction of the game, and as a result, Carmack felt that he didn't have the passion for this new direction, which I can't blame him.
Normally I wouldn't make such a pedantic comment, but this is a pedantic video, so I feel compelled: you''ve got it all wrong about how shareware was usually acquired. Almost nobody had the means to actually download games from the Internet at that time. Some people could get the files second-hand, from BBS systems, but MOST people got shareware games from third-party distributors who copied them onto floppy disks and charged a nominal fee for them. This was actually allowed in the terms of Apogee's shareware license, as it gave these secondary distributors the right to charge a fee for the time, materials (floppies, packaging, etc), and effort they put into packaging the releases. I remember buying the shareware version of DOOM in early 1994 at a local computer expo for $4.95; it came in a cardstock sleeve with the DOOM title screen awkwardly printed on the front using a laser printer and a sticky label sealing the sleeve shut. The sleeve was clearly meant for one diskette, but shareware DOOM required two, so they were wedged in there. We also paid $17 for a CD-ROM (fairly fancy in Jan. 1994) containing a huge pile of other games, both shareware and not so shareware, lol. Thanks for jogging that memory free.
@@GTXDashYep! I recall a section where you addressed people dishonestly selling the shareware version as the full game, but I also recall you saying that "the only way to get the game was to download it from the internet." Which is very wrong. There were some other comments, too, like -- while you're right about the 32X version being horribly rushed and the 32X platform being much more capable than its version of Doom would imply (kudos for mentioning Resurrection, by the way), it was in fact Carmack himself who did the port for the SEGA 32X, not a third-party developer as you implied. Still, it was a nice enough video. The fairly static shot of your monitor while you played the 1.1 release is okay, but I do wish you had edited in footage of the different versions to illustrate what you were talking about. That would've made it harder to listen to the video while gaming, though, so I guess I shouldn't complain! (*'▽')
Ahhh playing doom when it was first released. Seeing the armour go above 200% brings back memories. Also I think the health only went to 199% as well Am I "misreading" it or when he's going through the maze bit in E1M2 he gets to a dead end which isn't there in later releases? I don't remember that dead end full stop. I'll have to crack open the shareware version again.
I think you're giving Sandy a bit too much credit - many of Tom Hall's levels were pretty near completion if you check out the alphas/betas. But yeah, “Doom is the vortex nexus nucleus at the centre of the idea of video games themselves.” - Action Button
Wait....why didn't you take the secret exit in the refinery? You unlocked it but just as you got into the secret area you turned and went to the regular exit? Why? Whoa...you're playing on an old CRT?! That's freaking crazy man. Now I have to know, what are you playing Doom on? Whatever it is you're using a mouse....
Viewers should note, that the original Doom had a blue bar in the loading screen instead of the later red from Ultimate. If I remember correctly, Final Doom had a white bar with red text. Note also, that health caps at 199% and Armor is (theoretically!) uncapped!
What Doom was 30 years ago was ground breaking. What Doom has evolved into today is phenomenal! I'm talking old school Doom. I don't play old "Vanilla Doom" anymore, even though I could play it on DOS Box. I prefer GzDoom nowadays.
I actually have shortcuts to zdoom, gzdoom, chocolate doom, and dosbox for the times I want to try out a different flavour of Doom, depending what mood I'm in. But yeah, generally I use gzdoom for PWADs.
That is the version that came out in 1993. Later patched versions capped the health and armor at 200. Some levels that accidently trapped the player which would require a restart or a noclip cheat is fixed in later versions (particularly in map E2M4 and E3M9). There are some presentational differences, like the soulsphere picking up sound effect and title music is different, and the sound effect pitch variability was removed, plus a few more other differences.
@GTXDash yep Art Data the 3do port was a shitshow. I bought it on 3do back in the day. Interestingly though if you run the 3do port via the 3do emulator you can overclock the virtual 3do cpu and it runs pretty solid in full screen.
Problem was, I got to play Descent before Doom and when I finally got to play Doom, I was not impressed. At all. In fact, I wasn't impressed by other shooters until the first Unreal came out. I played a lot of Duke3D before, but that was mostly due to the humor and babes. I couldn't care less if DN3D was a shooter or pac man clone with oneliners and tits lol.
Going to have to disagree with you on the "PCs weren't as good at games" in the early 90s. They were decent at some, bad at others and blew consoles away at some, particular what would evolve into the RTS genre.
Well yeah. RTSs, point 'n click adventures, text based games, etc were preferable on PC. But I wasn't really talking about what was "better". Just that PCs were finally able to keep up and then surpass consoles from a technical ability.
@@GTXDash I'm not really sure if that's accurate. Did you play any FPS from the 16-bit era? They were uniformly horrible due to the control scheme. I wasn't until what, Golden Eye on the N64, that the consoles had a real solid FPS. PCs had trouble on some game types due to poorer scrolling and sprite handling but the idea that home computers were lagging behind technologically somehow, especially if you consider the 8-bit micros and even the Amiga is mostly a myth.
Concerning Shareware: You may be right, and that seems to be the case after a quick look at Wikipedia. I was too young to know about shareware before Scott Millar's implementation, so most of my assumptions are based on research I've found in several documentaries and the Biography, Masters of Doom. I don't know everything about this subject, so I can't really challenge that assessment. I used to also call Id Tech 1 a 2.5D engine, until Carmack (or it could be Romero) said that faking 3D is what polygons do too, so the appearance of 3D is what defines the engine. Therefore they call Doom 3D. However, I personally feel that calling it 2.5D is correct as well.
@@GTXDash have a look for freeware and beerware, too. My personal definition of a 3D game is one that you can move along the 3 axis, x, y, z. You can't freely move up and down in doom, so I don't think it's 3D. Doesn't have anything to do with the renderer. Cheers for the reply. Good video
"Doom was the first time a PC game was better than console games" Um, no it wasn't? Ultima games were always better on PC than consoles, especially Ultima 7. The SNES version was so downgraded that it was basically a whole different (and vastly inferior) game. In fact, that was the reason they didn't start making console ports of Ultima until '87. Because consoles couldn't handle them. And even then, the first Ultima console ports were of games that had come out 4 years earlier. And there was Ultima Underworld, which was even more advanced than Doom in many areas (having a less limited 3d engine with more "3d" gameplay), and it couldn't be ported to consoles until the PS1 came out.
It was just a poor choice of words. What I meant was that from a technical perspective, not gameplay, PC games could outdo consoles. Commander Keen evened the playing field. Wolfenstein 3D beat the SNES but not the Atari Jaguar, but Doom outdid them all, even the Playstation. Edit: I read your message again and maybe you are talking about the technicals and not just gameplay. But still, Ultima Underworld, although looked good, it ran slow. I do think with an FX chip, it could run on a SNES because framerate doesn't need to be high.
doom gets too much credit. the idea of a game where you walk around and shoot badguys was already a staple. first person games also existed already. combining them wasn't even new, it was the controversy and popularity that caused more developers to try making a first person shooter of their own, doom wasn't that innovative, it was just culturally very important. games like call of duty and halo probably would have existed either way, albeit with a butterfly effect of difference. the idea of a first person shooter is very very generic. it would have been done regardless of doom.
I mean, yeah, Street Fighter 2 wasn't the first fighting game, but it was Street Fighter 2 that spawned Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, and Mortal Kombat. Where were all the clones when Street Fighter 1 came out? Nobody said Doom was the first, did you even watch the video? And even though Wolfenstien 3D was kinda big at the time, not that many people really plays that game all too often anymore, especially its clones like Blake Stone, Ken's Labyrinth, or Corridor 7. But a lot of people do play games that were directly inspired by Doom like Heretic, Blood, and Duke Nuken 3D. I mean, Marathon practically ows its existence to Doom, and if there was no Marathon, there sure as hell wouldn't have been any Halo. The butterfly effect doesn't mean little things causes little effect, rather that little things can be the cause of something big. But Doom wasn't little. Its influence wasn't just big. It moved mountains.
just because something inspired something else, doesn't mean it owes it's existence. it would be like saying without elvis you would have no avenged sevenfold. you would, they just might sound a little different.@@GTXDash
@bananieldiamonds1921 A lot of it is better execution more than innovation from a gameplay perspective, but I would still argue that from an engine standpoint, innovation is center stage just how technologically impressive it was on a humble 486 cpu.
Played this game back in the day on PC, I thought it was dogshit, I revisited it later, still hogshit. I put on brutal doom? Real Shit, even the old devs say that's the game they would have released back then.
