   #copyright

Doom

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Computer & Video games

   Doom
   "The Ultimate Doom" title artwork, painted by Don Ivan Punchatz,
   depicts the lone hero, a space marine, fighting demonic creatures.
   Developer(s) id Software
   Publisher(s) id Software, GT Interactive, Activision
   Designer(s) John Romero
   Engine Doom
   Release date(s) December 10, 1993
   Genre(s) First-person shooter
   Mode(s) Single player
   Multiplayer ( cooperative)
   Multiplayer ( deathmatch)
   Rating(s) ESRB: M
   ESRB: T ( GBA)
   BBFC: 15
   OFLC: MA15+
   RSAC: V3: Blood and gore
   L1: Mild expletives
   Platform(s) PC ( MS-DOS)
   Other versions and ports of Doom
   Media 3½" floppy disk, CD (1)

   Doom (or DOOM) is a 1993 computer game by id Software that is among the
   landmark titles in the first-person shooter genre. It is widely
   recognized for its pioneering use of immersive 3D graphics, networked
   multiplayer gaming on the PC platform, and the support for players to
   create custom expansions ( WADs). Distributed as shareware, Doom was
   downloaded by an estimated 10 million people within two years,
   popularizing the mode of gameplay and spawning a gaming subculture; as
   a sign of its impact on the industry, games from the mid-1990s boom of
   first-person shooters are often known simply as " Doom clones". Its
   graphic and interactive violence has also made Doom the subject of much
   controversy reaching outside the gaming world. According to GameSpy,
   Doom was voted by industry insiders to be the #1 game of all time.

   The Doom franchise was continued with Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994) and
   numerous expansion packs, including The Ultimate Doom (1995), Master
   Levels for Doom II (1995), and Final Doom (1996). Originally released
   for PC/ DOS, these games have later been ported to many other
   platforms, including nine different game consoles. The series lost
   mainstream appeal as the technology of the Doom game engine was
   surpassed in the mid-1990s, although fans have continued making WADs,
   speedrunning, and modifying the source code which was released in 1997.
   The franchise again received popular attention in 2004 with the release
   of Doom 3, a retelling of the original game using new technology, and
   an associated 2005 Doom motion picture.

Game features

Story

   Doom has a science fiction/ horror theme, and a simple plot. The
   background is only given in the game's manual, and the in-game story is
   mainly advanced with short messages displayed between the game's
   episodes.

   The player takes the role of a nameless space marine (referred to as "
   Doomguy" by many fans), "one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat
   and trained for action", who has been deported to Mars for assaulting a
   senior officer when ordered to kill unarmed civilians. He is forced to
   work for the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), a military-industrial
   conglomerate that is performing secret experiments with teleportation
   between the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Suddenly, something goes
   wrong and creatures from Hell come out of the teleportation gates, or
   "Gateways". A defensive response from base security fails to halt the
   invasion, and the bases quickly get overrun by demons; all personnel
   are killed or turned into zombies. At the same time, Deimos vanishes
   entirely. A UAC team from Mars is sent to Phobos to investigate the
   incident, but soon radio contact ceases and only one human is left
   alive — the player, whose task is to make it out alive.

   In order to beat the game, the player must fight through three episodes
   containing nine levels each (see Episodes and levels of Doom).
   Knee-Deep in the Dead, the first episode and the only one in the
   shareware version, is set in the high-tech military bases on Phobos. It
   ends with the player fighting the Barons of Hell and afterwards
   entering the teleporter leading to Deimos, there getting overwhelmed by
   monsters and seemingly killed. In the second episode, Shores of Hell,
   the player journeys through the Deimos installation, whose areas are
   interwoven with beastly architecture. After encountering the
   Cyberdemon, the truth about the vanished moon is discovered: it is
   floating above Hell. The player climbs down to the surface, and the
   final episode, Inferno, begins. After destroying the final boss, the
   Spider Mastermind, a hidden doorway opens for the hero who has "proven
   too tough for Hell to contain", leading back home to Earth. The
   expansion pack Ultimate Doom adds a fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed,
   chronicling the marine's return to Earth.

Gameplay

   Being a first-person shooter, Doom is experienced through the eyes of
   the main character. The objective of each level is simply to locate the
   exit room that leads to the next area (usually labeled with an inviting
   red EXIT sign), while surviving all hazards on the way. Among the
   obstacles are monsters, pits of radioactive slime, ceilings that come
   down and crush the player, and locked doors for which a keycard or
   remote switch need to be located. The levels are sometimes labyrinthine
   (the automap is a crucial aid in navigating them), and feature plenty
   of hidden secret areas that hold power-ups as a reward for players who
   explore.

   Doom is notable for the weapons arsenal available to the player, which
   became prototypical for first-person shooters. The player starts armed
   only with a pistol, and brass-knuckled fists in case the ammunition
   runs out, but larger weapons can be picked up: these are a chainsaw, a
   shotgun, a chaingun, a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle, and finally the
   immensely powerful BFG 9000. There is a wide array of power-ups, such
   as a backpack that increases the player's ammunition-carrying capacity,
   armor, first aid kits to restore health, the berserk pack (a black
   first aid box that puts the character into berserk mode, allowing them
   to deal out rocket launcher-level damage with their fists and
   potentially splattering former humans and imps), and supernatural blue
   orbs that boost the player's health percentage beyond 100%, up to a
   maximum of 200%.

   The enemy monsters in Doom make up the central gameplay element. The
   player faces them in large numbers, on the higher of the game's five
   difficulty levels often encountering a dozen or more in the same room.
   There are 10 types of monsters ( Doom II doubles this figure),
   including possessed humans as well as demons of different strength,
   ranging from weak but ubiquitous imps and red, floating cacodemons, to
   the bosses which survive multiple strikes even from the player's
   strongest weapons. The monsters have very simple behaviour, consisting
   of either walking toward the player or attacking by throwing fireballs,
   biting, and scratching (though they can also fight each other).

   Many versions of Doom (and its sequels) include secret levels which are
   accessed by the player discovering alternate exits, often hidden behind
   secret doors or in difficult-to-reach areas. In some versions of Doom
   II two of these secret levels incorporate level design and characters
   from Doom's precursor, Wolfenstein 3D.

   Aside from the single-player game mode, Doom features two multiplayer
   modes playable over a network: "co-operative", in which two to four
   players team up against the legions of Hell, and " deathmatch", in
   which two to four players fight each other.
     * Doom single-player gameplay demonstration
          + Video of a single-player game, in the level E3M6: Mount
            Erebus.
     * .

Development

   Some of the Doom monsters were digitized from sculptures. Here, Adrian
   Carmack creates the Baron of Hell in clay.
   Enlarge
   Some of the Doom monsters were digitized from sculptures. Here, Adrian
   Carmack creates the Baron of Hell in clay.

   The development of Doom started in 1992 when John Carmack developed a
   new 3-D game engine, the Doom engine, while the rest of the id Software
   team finished the Wolfenstein 3D sequel Spear of Destiny. When the game
   design phase began in late 1992, the main thematic influences were the
   science fiction action movie Aliens and the horror movie Evil Dead II.
   The title of the game was picked by Carmack:

          There is a scene in " The Colour of Money" where Tom Cruse [sic]
          shows up at a pool hall with a custom pool cue in a case. "What
          do you have in there?" asks someone. "Doom." replied Cruse with
          a cocky grin. That, and the resulting carnage, was how I viewed
          us springing the game on the industry.

   Designer Tom Hall wrote an elaborate design document called the Doom
   Bible, according to which the game would feature a detailed storyline,
   multiple player characters, and a number of interactive features.
   However, many of his ideas were discarded during development in favour
   of simpler design primarily advocated by Carmack, resulting in Hall in
   the end being forced to resign due to not contributing effectively in
   the direction the rest of the team was going. Most of the level design
   that ended up in the final game is that of John Romero and Sandy
   Petersen. The graphics, by Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud and Gregor
   Punchatz, were created in various ways: although much was drawn or
   painted, several of the monsters were built from sculptures in clay or
   latex, and some of the weapons are toy guns from Toys "R" Us. A heavy
   metal- ambient soundtrack was supplied by Bobby Prince.

Engine technology

   Doom's primary distinguishing feature at the time of its release was
   its realistic 3D graphics, then unparalleled by other
   real-time-rendered games running on consumer-level hardware. The
   advance from id Software's previous game Wolfenstein 3D was enabled by
   several new features in the Doom engine:
     * Height differences (all rooms in Wolfenstein 3D are at the same
       altitude);
     * Non- perpendicular walls (all walls in Wolfenstein 3D run along a
       rectangular grid);
     * Swaying of the weapon (in Wolfenstein 3D the arms stay fixed in
       front in the screen no matter what the character does), this gives
       the impression of fluidity while walking or running;
     * Full texture mapping of all surfaces (in Wolfenstein 3D, floors and
       ceilings are not texture mapped);
     * Varying light levels (all areas in Wolfenstein 3D are fully lit at
       the same brightness). While contributing to the game's visual
       authenticity by allowing effects such as highlights and shadows,
       this perhaps most importantly added to the game's atmosphere and
       even gameplay; the use of darkness as a means of frightening or
       confusing the player was an unseen element in games.

   In contrast to the static levels of Wolfenstein 3D, those in Doom are
   highly interactive: platforms can lower and rise, floors can raise
   sequentially to form staircases, and bridges can raise and lower. The
   life-like feeling of the environment was enhanced further by the stereo
   sound system, which made it possible to roughly tell the direction and
   distance of a sound's origin. The player is kept on guard by the grunts
   and growls of monsters, and receives occasional clues to finding secret
   areas in the form of sounds of hidden doors opening remotely. Monsters
   can also become aware of the player's presence by hearing distant
   gunshots.

   Carmack had to make use of several tricks for these features to run
   smoothly on home computers of 1993. Most significantly, Doom levels are
   not truly three-dimensional; they are internally represented on a
   plane, with height differences added separately (a similar trick is
   still used by many games to create huge outdoor environments). This
   leads to several limitations: it is, for example, not possible for a
   Doom level to have one room over another. This two-dimensional
   representation does, however, have the benefit that rendering can be
   done very quickly, using a binary space partitioning method. Another
   benefit was the clearness of the automap because it could be displayed
   with 2D vectors without the risk of overlapping.

   Another important feature of the Doom engine is a modular approach that
   allows the game content to be replaced by loading custom WAD files.
   Wolfenstein 3D was not designed to be expandable, but fans had
   nevertheless figured out how to create their own levels for it, and
   Doom was designed to take the phenomenon further. The ability to create
   custom scenarios contributed significantly to the game's popularity
   (see the section on WADs below).

Release and later history

Initial popularity

   The development of Doom was surrounded by much anticipation. The large
   number of posts in Internet newsgroups about Doom led to the SPISPOPD
   joke, to which a nod was given in the game in the form of a cheat code.
   In addition to news, rumors, and screenshots, unauthorized leaked alpha
   versions also circulated online. (Many years later these alpha versions
   were sanctioned by id Software because of historical interest; they
   reveal how the game progressed from its early design stages.) The first
   public version of Doom was uploaded to an FTP run at the University of
   Wisconsin-Madison on December 10, 1993.

   Released as shareware, people were encouraged to distribute Doom
   further, and did so: in 1995, Doom was estimated to have been installed
   on more than 10 million computers. Although most users did not purchase
   the registered version, over one million copies have been sold, and the
   popularity helped the sales of later games in the Doom series which
   were not released as shareware. In 1995, The Ultimate Doom (version
   1.9, including episode IV) was released, making this the first time
   that Doom was sold commercially in stores.

   In a press release dated January 1, 1993, id Software had written that
   they expected Doom to be "the number one cause of decreased
   productivity in businesses around the world". This prediction came true
   at least in part: Doom became a major problem at workplaces, both
   occupying the time of employees and clogging computer networks with
   traffic caused by deathmatches. Intel, Lotus Development and Carnegie
   Mellon University are 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".

   In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers
   worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system Windows 95, despite
   million-dollar advertising campaigns for the latter. The game's
   popularity prompted Bill Gates to briefly consider buying id Software,
   and led Microsoft to develop a Windows 95 port of Doom to promote the
   operating system as a gaming platform. One such presentation to promote
   Windows 95 had Bill Gates digitally superimposed into the game. The
   Microsoft 1995 release Excel 95 included a Doom-esque secret level as
   an easter egg containing portraits of the programmers among other
   things. It is speculated that Microsoft engineers took advantage of
   their experience working on the Doom Windows 95 port to place the code
   in the spreadsheet program.

   Doom was also widely praised in the gaming press. In 1994, it was
   awarded Game of the Year by both PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World. It
   also received the Award for Technical Excellence from PC Magazine, and
   the Best Action Adventure Game award by the Academy of Interactive Arts
   & Sciences.

   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— MIDI
   Maze on the Atari ST had one in 1987, using the MIDI ports built into
   the ST to network up to four machines together. However, Doom was the
   first game to allow deathmatching over ethernet, and the combination of
   violence and gore with fighting friends made deathmatching in Doom
   particularly attractive. Two player deathmatch was also possible over a
   phone line by using a modem. Due to 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").

WADs

   The ability to create custom levels and otherwise modify the game, in
   the form of custom WAD files, turned out to be a particularly popular
   aspect of Doom. Gaining the first large mod-making community, Doom
   affected the culture surrounding first-person shooters, and also the
   industry. Several to-be 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 and other brands from popular culture have
   been turned into Doom WADs by fans (without authorization), including
   Aliens, Star Wars, The X-files, The Simpsons, South Park, Pokemon and
   Batman. Some works like the Theme Doom Patch even combined enemies from
   several movies like Aliens, Predator and The Terminator.

   Some addon files were also made which changed the sounds made by the
   various characters and weapons. Notable ones were samples from Beavis
   and Butthead and the famous orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally....

   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 thousands of WADs
   have been created in total: the idgames FTP archive contains over
   13,000 files, and this does not represent 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 in order to run. A typical launcher would allow the
   player to select which files to load from a menu, making it much easier
   to start.

Clones and related products

   The phrase "Doom clone" was initially popular to describe the style of
   gameplay in Doom-like games, but after 1996 was gradually replaced by
   "first person shooter".
   Enlarge
   The phrase " Doom clone" was initially popular to describe the style of
   gameplay in Doom-like games, but after 1996 was gradually replaced by "
   first person shooter".

   The popularity of Doom led to the development of a sequel, Doom II:
   Hell on Earth (1994), as well as expansion packs and alternate versions
   based on the same game engine, including The Ultimate Doom (1995),
   Final Doom (1996), and Doom 64 (1997). Doom became a killer application
   that all capable consoles and operating systems were expected to have,
   and versions of Doom have subsequently been released for the following
   systems: DOS, Microsoft Windows, QNX, Irix, NEXTSTEP, Linux, Apple
   Macintosh, Super NES, Sega 32X, Sony PlayStation, Game Boy Advance,
   RISC OS, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Tapwave Zodiac, 3DO,
   Xbox as a feature of Doom 3: Limited Edition, and Xbox 360 on Xbox Live
   Arcade. The total number of copies of Doom games sold is unknown, but
   may be well over 4 million; Doom II alone has sold for over $100
   million.

   The game engine was licensed to several other companies as well, who
   released their own games based on it, including Heretic, HeXen, Strife
   and HacX. There is also a Doom-based game released by a breakfast
   cereal maker as a product tie-in called Chex Quest, and the United
   States Marine Corps released Marine Doom, designed to "teach teamwork,
   coordination and decision-making".

   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". Some of these were certainly "clones"—hastily
   assembled and quickly forgotten about—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 (which, unlike Doom, featured 3D gameplay).
   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.

   When, three years later, 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D, a
   tongue-in-cheek science fiction shooter based on Ken Silverman's
   technologically similar Build engine, id Software had nearly finished
   Quake, its next-generation game, which mirrored Doom's success for the
   remainder of the 1990s and significantly reduced interest in its
   predecessor. The franchise remained in that state until 2000, when Doom
   3 was announced. A retelling of the original Doom using entirely new
   graphics technology, Doom 3 was hyped to provide as large a leap in
   realism and interactivity as the original Doom, but received mixed
   reactions when released in 2004.

   Doom has appeared in several forms in addition to games, including a
   comic book, four novels by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver (loosely
   based on events and locations in the games), and a 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 by
   David Kushner.

Controversy

   Doom was and remains notorious for its high levels of violence, gore,
   and satanic imagery, which have generated much controversy from a broad
   range of groups. It has been criticized numerous times by religious
   organizations for its diabolic undertones and was dubbed a "mass murder
   simulator" by critic and Killology Research Group founder Lt. Col.
   David Grossman. Doom prompted fears that the then-emerging virtual
   reality technology could be used to simulate extremely realistic
   killing, and in 1994 led to unsuccessful attempts by Washington state
   senator Phil Talmadge to introduce compulsory licensing of VR use (in
   fact, according to a well-known graph from the USA Department of
   Justice, violent crime has plummeted since the early 1990s: )

   The game again sparked controversy throughout a period of school
   shootings in the United States when it was found that Eric Harris and
   Dylan Klebold, who committed the Columbine High School massacre in
   1999, were avid players of the game. While planning for the massacre,
   Harris said that the killing would be "like fucking Doom" and that his
   shotgun was "straight out of" the game. A rumor spread afterwards that
   Harris had designed Doom levels that looked like the halls of the high
   school, populated with representations of Harris's classmates and
   teachers, and that Harris practiced for his role in the shootings by
   playing these levels over and over. However, although Harris did design
   Doom levels, they were not simulations of Columbine High School (see
   Harris levels).

Continued legacy

   Doom is widely regarded as one of the most important titles in gaming
   history. It was voted the "#1 game of all time" in a poll among over
   100 game developers and journalists conducted by GameSpy in July 2001,
   and PC Gamer proclaimed Doom the most influential game of all time in
   its ten-year anniversary issue in April 2004. However, several game
   journalists have also contrasted the relatively simplistic gameplay in
   Doom unfavorably with more story-oriented first-person shooters such as
   Half-Life.

   Although the popularity of the Doom games dropped with the release of
   Quake (1996) and afterwards, the games have retained a strong fan base
   that continues playing competitively and creating WADs (the idgames FTP
   archive receives a few to a dozen new WADs each week as of 2005), 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 in 1999). Fans then began porting the game to
   various operating systems, even to previously unsupported platforms
   such as the Dreamcast, PSP and the iPod, and adding new features such
   as OpenGL rendering and scripting, which allows WADs to alter the
   gameplay more radically. There are well over 50 different Doom source
   ports, some of which remain under active development.

   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 Nightmare! difficulty setting, on which monsters are
   more aggressive, enemy projectiles are faster or, in the case of the
   Pinky Demon, 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.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom"
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