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Doom: 15 Years Later

13 January, 2009 (21:00) | Emulation and Vintage Gameplay | By: admin

In 2007, Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, presented a video game canon in order to encourage initial preservation efforts by the Library of Congress.  On this list of ten important video games is the 1993 DOS-based game Doom, and rightly so.  Doom is one of the earliest, and still one of the best, entries in the first-person shooter genre, a genre that continues to succeed in the market in such forms as the Halo and Resistance franchises.  Despite monumental advances in graphics technology and more efficient control schemes, Doom continues to be considered one of the finest first-person shooters of all time, thanks to the thoughtful level design and the exciting array of weaponry that is still copied by successful first-person shooters today.  Nevertheless, video gaming has certainly changed in the 15 years since the game’s initial release, and thus, so has the Doom experience.

The changes begin immediately with the installation of the game, the ease of which depends upon the version of Doom that you possess.  Indeed, there are many versions of Doom to be found, and the easiest version to access is the recent release of the game on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 online marketplace.  With this version, the player does not have to worry about setting the game controls or toggling the sound options.  Additionally, playing Doom online with other players is far easier on the Xbox than with any of the current versions of the PC.  Ironically, a game that was created for the PC in order to utilize its multiplayer network capabilities is now easier to play online with a console than with an actual PC.  Concerning the PC versions, one can still purchase the most recent official release of the game from internet marketplaces and local game stores.  This version is called The Ultimate Doom, which adds an additional fourth episode to the DOS version’s original three and, unfortunately, works best on Windows 95.  In order to play this version on Windows XP or Vista, one must go through a great deal of trouble, resetting certain display options for Windows and even manually downloading plugins and adding them to system folders.  Thus, if a gamer purchases The Ultimate Doom and is unable to play it on his or her Windows operating system, I would suggest that the PC user find an original DOS version of Doom and utilize the DOSBox program.

To install and use DOSBox and the DOS version of Doom, simply follow the same instructions as in the previous post for Ultima, except for an additional step.  If you try to play this DOS version of Doom immediately, you will have no sound.  Thus, after completing step 5 from the Ultima instructions (mount the “dosprog” folder), type “c:\” and press enter.  Then, type “setup”, which will bring you to the setup menu for Doom.  Here, you will need to choose “Select Music Card,” then choose “Sound Blaster” and press enter through the remaining choices.  Then, choose “Select Sound FX Card” and again choose “Sound Blaster” and press enter through the following options.  Now, choose “Save Settings and Run Doom.”

When starting the game, one immediately encounters a difference between Doom and many of today’s games.  Because the gameplay in a first-person shooter relies upon quick reflexes and hand-eye coordination, Doom offers five choices of difficulty so that the player can toggle the game to match the player’s experience with the genre.  With the higher difficulty options, the enemies become more accurate and deal more damage to the player, and, at the highest difficulty setting “Nightmare,” the enemies will actually “respawn” soon after being killed.  Today, many games are eschewing difficulty settings in favor of a more flowing experience in which the player initially fights only a few, easy enemies and slowly begins to face stronger opposition as the player’s ability naturally progresses through practice.  Because the difficulty decision for Doom is made at the beginning of the experience, a good player may become bored if the difficulty was set too low or an overzealous player may set the difficulty too high and find the game too hard.  This is an example of an early game’s willingness to interrupt the story’s flow; if the gamer was too confident in choosing a difficulty, the game was all too happy to humble the player, initiating a “game over” that forced the player out of the narrative flow and back to the beginning.

Not that Doom has a grand narrative to interrupt.  Unlike modern first-person shooters, which rely on the storyline to propel players from one level to another through cinematic scenes and lengthy discussions between characters, Doom contains very little story and absolutely no character development.  The gamer is simply told that he or she is playing as a future Marine who, while experimenting with teleportation on the moons of Mars, accidentally opens a gateway to Hell.  Thus, the Marine must fight his way through Phobos, Deimos, and finally Hell to beat the game.  The only references to this narrative occur between each level, when an overview of the surface of the moon (or Hell) is shown and the recently beaten location is marked off as the Marine moves to the next location, and upon the successful completion of a moon (or Hell), when some text or a single image appears, telling the story of how the Marine moves from one chapter to another.  Therefore, the game relies almost entirely on the pure enjoyment of the gameplay to encourage the player to continue.

Because the game is fairly linear, Doom, unlike Ultima, does not demand a walkthrough to be defeated.  However, a walkthrough will likely be necessary if the player wishes to find all of the “secret locations” hidden in each level.  Because the game is not interested in narrative, these secret locations do not provide the player with additional information on the plot or characters like modern games often do.  Instead, these hidden areas usually give the player massive health upgrades or a better weapon a few levels earlier than the player would have otherwise found it.  Again, the player’s motivations for finding these locations are not drawn from narrative but from gameplay; how fun it will be to start blowing up enemies with the rocket launcher starting in level 3 instead of waiting for level 7!.  After each level, the player is told how many of the secret areas he or she found, so the player can feel pride in knowing that 100% of the secret areas were discovered.  Also, since the game is mostly interested in the player enjoying the gameplay, Doom is happy to provide the player with cheat codes, unlike many modern games.  These codes allow the player to gain invincibility, accumulate all weapons, and walk through walls.  With these codes, the player need not play a minute of the game without his or her favorite weapons.

The final key difference between Doom and newer PC first-person shooters is the control scheme.  Because Doom was made in the DOS years when many PC users did not yet own a mouse, the game is played with both hands on the keyboard.  The left hand operates the Left-Ctrl button (fire weapon) and spacebar (open door), and the right hand uses the arrow keys to move: up moves forward, down moves backward, left turns the player in a counter-clockwise circle, and right turns the player clockwise.  In modern games, thanks to the ubiquity of the mouse, the player now uses the left hand to move (usually, ‘w’ moves forward and ‘s’ moves backward) and the right hand controls the mouse.  Rather than using the left and right arrow keys to turn the player, ‘a’ and ‘d’ are used to “strafe,” moving the player to the left or right while continuing to face the same direction.  Thus, the player is now able to continue firing at an enemy while moving aside from that enemy’s line of fire.  To turn, the player now uses his or her right hand to operate the mouse, spinning the character’s view with the movement of the mouse and using the mouse buttons to fire the weapon.

Because the controls are now more efficient, the player is required to exhibit even greater hand-eye coordination in modern games.  In Doom, because the player did not have the mouse and thus could not easily look up or down, the player’s aim was adjusted by the game.  If an enemy was standing on a ledge above the player, the player needed only to look in that general direction and start firing, and the game would send the bullets upward to strike the enemy.  In modern games, now that the player has a mouse, the player must not only move the weapon’s aim left and right but also up and down to zero in exactly on the enemy’s position, making the experience more difficult.  Since players could not aim so efficiently or strafe in Doom, the game assumes that the player will take some unfortunate damage as a result of these unavoidable control inefficiencies and provides the player with more health items in a level than many modern games provide in an entire game.  Thus, the designers of these games recognize that the ability, or inability, of the player to translate his or her reactions to the in-game character relates directly to the difficulty of the game, and the games are designed accordingly.

Finally, the spacebar, used to open doors in Doom, is now most often used to jump, an ability that Doom players were not given.  The lack of jumping in Doom contributed heavily to its linear design; the player was like a rat running through a labyrinth.  In modern games, the player is able to jump over ledges and up to greater heights, which increases the player’s feeling of control over the gameplay and changes the experience substantially from that of playing Doom.  In newer games, when a player sees an item on a ledge, the first instinct is, “How do I jump up there?”  Playing Doom, the gamer would think, “Where is the passage that will allow me to walk up there?”

After a decade of jumping, strafing, and mouse-aiming, one realizes how much these control innovations, as well as stronger narratives and flowing difficulties, have changed the first-person shooter.  It is a testament to the eternal joy of playing Doom that these innovations are soon forgotten after stepping back onto the moons of Mars and revisiting all those secret places you used to know.

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