We were enabling players to let us play their creations finally. We had hoped people would change textures, sounds, and make lots of new levels. We couldn’t wait to see what players would do with our game, so we made sure it was open and available to modify all the data we had. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D’s chaingun audio. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM would signal a new era. The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything about games. We were using high-end workstations, a brand-new 3D engine that allowed for incredible graphics and design expression, graphical scanning of our game sprites, and for the first time we were putting multiplayer into our game with a mode I called Deathmatch because that name just made sense. There was so much we did that was new, it was a little mind-boggling. Using these tools of the future helped us immensely. The fact that we had monitors at 1024x768 let us see our game in a way we couldn’t under DOS. I was finally using a real operating system with an incredible programming language, Objective-C, and getting to program in a way I had never known. Writing the DoomEd map editor to create levels was a dream. We felt even the storyline was slightly new because of it. Besides, the combination of Hell and science fiction was too great to ignore. This gave us the idea of a demonic invasion, but we decided to base it in the future where we could have some really powerful weapons. Our main campaign was destroyed by demons teleporting onto the material plane and destroying everything in it. We loved having this design palette to work with, and it fit well with the subject matter we based the game upon: Hell.Īs a group, we played Dungeons & Dragons for years. This was something new, with textured floors and ceilings, stairs, platforms, doors, and blinking lights. The application of Bruce Naylor’s binary space partition was a huge advance for 3D rendering speed, and the abstract level design style broke games out of the 90-degree maze wall design rut they had been in for 20 years. The game was far better for it, and those choices influenced our future designs. The items that supported a score were removed. Gone were the score and lives, remnants of the arcades we grew up in. Throughout the year we tweaked, and added, and removed elements of the game to make it just right. Today’s first-person shooters trace their lineage back to this game that bears the distilled essence of what a shooter should be: balanced weapons, insidious level design, a complementary enemy menagerie, and lots of fast action. A high-framerate nightmare some would call it, but it was a high octane blastfest that opened everyone’s eyes to the potential of the PC’s gaming future. Angled walls and halls that darken in the distance. The engine was revolutionary in that it represented a type of world that no one had seen on a computer screen before. He laid the initial design groundwork by creating the DOOM Bible which outlined several design concepts we never implemented, some of which were included in 2016’s reboot. We were creating a darker-themed game with our creative director Tom Hall who is an absolutely positive guy, and it was anathema to his design ethos. We wanted to use a video camera to scan in our weapons and monsters because we were using real workstations this time around – the mighty NeXTSTEP computers and operating system of Steve Jobs. It was our first 3D game to use an engine that broke away from the 2D paradigm we were in from the start of the company, and even stayed in with Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny, at least for the map layouts. We did so many new things while creating DOOM. I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, especially one like that. We truly believed it, and worked hard that year to make it happen. Incredibly, and perhaps a bit naively, we made a list of the technological wizardry we planned to create, and boldly stated in a press release in January 1993, that DOOM would be a major source of productivity loss around the world. It was the right time to shoot for the stars. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other.
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