Posts Tagged ‘id software’
Documentary: G4’s “Icons” The History of Doom and Making of Doom 3
0:00-21:59 – G4’s “Icons” Documentary on Doom and the Making of Doom 3
22:00 – 26:23 – Developer Interviews
26:23 – 30:08 – Concept Art and Creature Development
Back when G4 was a thing, the channel would often delve into these short half hour documentaries on the making of upcoming games. Companies liked to include these documentaries in special editions of Xbox games. One of those is found on the special edition of Doom 3 for the original Xbox.
While it’s an interesting look at Doom 3, I have to apologize for the quality, which is a blown up and upscaled version of the video on the disc. That video takes up a small portion of real estate on the screen and the Xbox only outputs it at 480p. Either way, it’s fun and interesting so lets take a look at G4’s coverage of the History of Doom and the Making of Doom 3.
Doom Retrospective
As I said in a previous article regarding Wolfenstein 3D, “Wolfenstein 3D did it first and Doom did it best.” The same team, id Software, created both games so it’s less of a competition and more of an evolution. While I agree that all games are a team effort, the technology that runs these games can sometimes be credited to one person. In the case of Doom that one person is none other than John D. Carmack. By this point most of us are aware of John Carmack and what he’s contributed to video games as a whole, but back in 1992 he was the guy creating a new engine for a new game. That engine was called the Doom Engine. Carmack claims the name Doom came from the movie The Color of Money in which Tom Cruise describes a custom pool cue as “doom” when questioned as to what’s in his case. It was created to enhance the first person shooter to include different heights, distances, and even sound effects in stereo for a more realistic type of game. In truth the hardware of the time couldn’t handle rendering a 3D world so the game is actually all on a flat plane in the code, which is why rooms never overlap and you can shoot a guy on a ledge by just aiming at the wall beneath him. I don’t know about the rest of you, but in 1993 I hardly noticed. Doom had positional breathing of mutant men, lighting effects (including dark rooms), a hybrid cyberpunk and distopian Hell setting, and a ton of violence. It was the rock star of the video game world.
Version: Doom
I was gonna write a retrospective on this, but honestly in podcast form we’ve covered Doom not once, but twice! From those episodes came a project that has taken six months and over six hours to put together in one near 15 minute video. I compare the PC, 32x, Jaguar, SNES, PS1, 3DO, Saturn, and GBA versions of Doom so you don’t have to, complete with bad language and snarky remarks (sorry parents). Check out this version of Versions for Doom, but fair warning: there is some adult language.
Looking Back at Wolfenstein 3D
In truth the dawn of the first person shooter (FPS) and its popularity is more a case of luck as a group of intelligent designers got together and created pseudo-3D worlds. In 1991 John Carmack was accompanied by three others as the development team at id Software (that story was already told in our podcast) and funded by a company named Apogee (they also developed Rise of the Triad). Carmack had created the Catacomb 3D engine, which utilized ray casting to create 3D looking environments. In ray casting, basically lines are drawn in a grid and if they intersect a texture is placed at the intersection and over a grand enough grid, you get depth perception and a software-based flat image that looks like it’s in 3D. Combine that with the fact that Muse Software, developers of the innovative stealth-action Castle Wolfenstein title from the 80s, had let the license lapse and you have the building blocks of this innovation in game design. Apogee gave Carmack and his team $100,000 to develop a shareware title and they decided to move forward with Wolfenstein 3D.
Gaming History 101 