Doom Revisited

I recently found the shareware version of Doom as a flash app. This in itself is mind boggling as I’m old enough to remember when Doom was “it” and required a decent computer and all that jazz, hells I remember playing the SNES version and being slightly disgusted by how pared back it had to be. Now I can have it in a window while running something else, a fabulous modern age indeed.

Anyway, in its day Doom was groundbreaking which is odd, it wasn’t the first FPS, it had no look up or down and only managed a true 3D environment (compared to Wolfenstein’s flat rooms) in a graphics trick (It looked like there was an up and down but the effect was purely visual compared with later games such as Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D. What Doom had was atmosphere, first the setting, initially a rather standard “Abandoned base” SF setting slowly descends into a full on gothic hell. However this was only part of the atmosphere. Doom used darkness and light to great effect. Areas would be in near total darkness, or with flickering lights and often enemies would appear seemingly out of nowhere as the lights flicker on for a brief moment. This was helped by the extra trick of hiding enemies in secret rooms, often triggered by certain switches or passing over a specific area of floor, this meant that an area previously cleared may still be dangerous later on. Finally doom would also on occasion jump you with a small onslaught of enemies which gave a nice balance between a near survival horror experience of the one enemy in the dark and the full forces of the unread walking into your chain gun.

It’s odd to think, but Doom even had an effect on FPS weapons, it was one of the first to include the shotgun, groundbreaking at the time, hard to imagine these days not switching between machine gun and shotgun depending on the closeness of combat.

Doom was a massive success, which is odd. Not because it wasn’t that good, it was excellent, but because I never knew anyone who had bought a copy of Doom, Seriously pirate copies were swapped in every school playground but I never saw, heard of or even heard a rumour about anyone who actually purchased a copy. It must of happened, where did all the pirate versions come from, but I can’t fathom how it managed to be such a success with this level of illegal redistribution (Unless piracy isn’t as bad a thing as the companies selling games would have you believe eh?)

Now, this is the modern age, games are undoubtedly better looking, more cinematic and more complex, so how well does an old warhorse like doom fare in this age of motion captured 3D and near photo-realistic graphics. It fares very well, even in a small window you quickly get sucked in and soon forget that the foes on your screen are dumb (oh, very dumb, no intelligence at all) 2D sprites occupying a 3D world, no soon you are jumping as one of these sprites appears from the dark. Yes, you don’t need the spiffy graphics with a game as atmospheric as doom; in fact I think this is where many modern games are going wrong. Many games seem to lead with spiffy visuals and often gameplay suffers, developers may want to consider if the game would still be fun if it looked like Doom.

So, this has wetted my appetite for more old FPSs. Once I have my games out of boxes I may well look to playing Duke Nukem or Dark Forces under emulation, as well as hunting down Doom, hell I may even pay for it this time.