Summary[]
The concept of Doom was created by John Carmack in complete secrecy as the rest of id Software was busy creating Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny. Carmack's intention is to have Doom be Wolfenstein's spiritual successor and improve on the concept of Wolfenstein.
Story[]
Taken place on the Martian moon called Phobos which is surveyed by humans, they have found a special transportation device which was made to travel to Heck. But while experimenting on the device, something goes horribly wrong. The Martian moon was suddenly over-run by monsters from Heck and the colonies have been destroyed. The only man alive on the moon is a lone, nameless marine who was sent to prison on the moon and now has escaped and must survive in order to get back to the safety of Earth.
Gameplay[]
Like it's sister game: Wolfenstein, Doom is a shooter from the first person. But as stated before, it's an improvement graphic-wise. As the buildings are much more dynamic with stairs, ceilings at a different levels and even outside environments in those stages as well as different textured walls in the same level. The game even features toxic slime pools which drain the player's health when in these toxic pools. Like it's predecessor, Doom features different types of enemies to kill as well as having a large system of weapons and items to use.
Reception[]
Doom is what made first person shooter games well known in the 1990's. But, what brings along is a good amount of admiration it also brought along a good deal of controversy. Not only did it have high depictions of blood and gore, but it also had heavy depictions of Satanism as it shows on some of those wall textures with circles with upside down 5-wedged star shapes.
Trivia[]
- The early versions of Doom only had 4 difficulty levels (I'm too young to die, Hey, not too rough, Hurt me plenty, and Ultra-Violence) the Nightmare difficulty was hidden in the game's code and was originally considered a bug in the game by the developers. But it was discovered that some gamers hacked into the game and found the fifth difficulty level, and some loved it, and later versions of the game featured this difficulty level.
- One of the game's associate developers: Tom Hall has written the early stages of the game's story which is known as the Doom Bible. According to the Doom Bible, it had a cast of 5 characters, taken place on a planet un-naturally surveyed by humans named Tei Tenga and featured Heck-based monsters. The story would have these 5 characters (with back stories told) would liberate the colonies of these monsters and even going to Heck to destroy the threat once and for all. Unfortunately for the characters, they would be held responsible for the destruction of Tei Tenga and were sent to jail for it. Though, John Carmack would reject the Doom Bible's story and the story itself would not be implemented in the game (stating that "A story in a video game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but its not that important.") but a good number of concepts and references from the Doom Bible would be used for the game.
- Heck-based monsters to kill.
- Taken place on a humanly surveyed world.
- Traveling to and from Heck.
- The first episode Knee-Deep in the Dead is the name of a chapter in the Doom Bible.
- The player character being an imprisoned Marine.
- Some wall textures in military base-based stages in the game had the title: Tei Tenga.
- Doom's game engine was more popular than the Windows 95 operating system. The game was also so compatible, it can even run on some professional versions of computers for the time. This led to a lot of terminations of office workers in the United States and even led to a lot of offices imposing rules against playing the game even on the worker's break. The game was also so popular that this led to Microsoft's founder and CEO: Bill Gates wanting to buy id Software and use the Doom game engine, Gates even made a commercial for it as well.
- The background of the first Episode Knee Deep in the Dead is actually the mountains of south-central China.
- Doom was updated around a year after the original game called Ultimate Doomm, it featured a secret episode called Thy Flesh Consumed, the episode's title as well as 8 out of the 9 stages are words taken from proverbs from the King James Version of the Christian Bible.