23rd March, 2005

Doom - A Retrospective Glance

Ever since Id finally released Doom on the 19th of December 2004, I've been recieving numerous emails from folks wanting to know more about Doom's rumoured "predecessor". For those that don't know, there have been rumours that Doom was based on another, far older game by Id software, also known as "Doom". Now I had always dismissed these rumours as wild speculation and simple fantasy, but given the volume of mail I was recieving, I decided to investigate further, and what I found shocked me to the core. Here I present to you the results of my research, hopefully they will at least partially clear up Doom's murky history.

Starting at the beginning...
If I was going to find out about this rumoured Doom predecessor, It made sense to start go right to the top and ask Id direct about the game. Unfortunately the three members of the company who seemed most likely to know anything were uncontactable, John Carmack was still in cryogenic hibernation, Adrian Carmack was in the middle of a research trip to the moon, and Kevin Cloud was N/A Extended Away when I tried to contact him. Undeterred

I sent an email to a secret company mailing list which I had been given the address to, I didn't hold out much hope, but it was worth a try. You can imagine my suprise therefore, when a few days later I did recieve a reply. It was from an anonymous individual within the company, who told me that the rumoured Doom predecessor did infact exist although they had never seen a copy themselves. Now I was truly excited, the game existed! From then on I spent months tracking down all the information I could about this "Original Doom" and I will now present the game's history and content to you...

Kevin's away, how convienient

In the beginning...

...There was no Id. Id software was formed in 1985, when child programming prodigy John Carmack met long-haired-loon John Romero in his high school computer class. The two programmers had an instant rapport and set about creating their own software company. In these early days, their company was called "Softdisk" after the famous 80s band "Softcell", who produced such hits as "Tainted Love" and of whom Romero was a big fan. The fledgling company became more and more sucessful, selling almost one crappy shareware game a day to a spotty computer nerd with more money than sense in their computer class. Soon Carmack was spending eight hours a day coding games and it was putting terminal strain on his status as "Child programming prodigy." Eventually Carmack was forced to quit the band, in an interview in the NME the other

Soft Cell

members of the Prodigy explained what happened:

Liam: Look, John just wanted to go his own way okay?  We wanted to take copious
amounts of drugs and produce some fucked up techo, John wanted to code 2D
platformers in his bedroom. 

Carmack's early days

Carmack's work still influenced the band however, and it is rumoured the Prodigy's 1997 hit "Firestarter" was heavily inspired by an old Carmack track entitled "Fileserver." With Carmack now free to work, Softdisk's production rate stepped up, but their market of Comp-Sci students was fast reaching saturation point, they needed an app with mass markety appeal. Then one night the two programmers were refused into a club for being underage, Romero had an idea. Soon the renamed "ID Software" was producing fake ID creation software at vastly inflated prices to hundreds of grateful high-school students. However, the company was still missing something, an artist. Carmacks attempts at art were not very sucessful, his tendancy to adding bump mapping, surface caching and dynamic lighting to even the most simple of drawings, took far too long to be viable

In 1987 ID's art problems were finally solved when they met Art student Kevin Cloud and his friend and trainee psychologist Adrian Carmack. Both were keen artists and agreed to join up with the company. Adrian however insisted on changing the "ID" in ID Software to "Id", referring to the part of the human psyche (although some commented that given Romero's prescence in the company, the name "Ego Software" might have been more appropriate).

The newly renamed Id Software now set out on its first game to be entitled, "Doom". In an interview in 1995, John Carmack explained where the name came from:

Carmack: Well theres a scene in The Colour of Money where Tom Cruise is walking
along the street, it was pretty boring scene and when I was watching it I decided
to spank, just for the hell of it, I wasn't turned on by Tom Cruise like Romero 
keeps saying, that stupid bastard.  Anyway, after I'd spanked, I realised that I'd
managed to spell out the word "Doom" with my juices and that sounded like a pretty
cool name for the new game we were making.

Id worked on Doom for over five years, until eventually they were satisfied with the result. By the end of the development cycle, Id had gained another ten employees ("They just showed up," said Carmack, "I don't know where they came from to be honest, Romero thought they might be Cuban exiles.") The company decided to release Doom in the innovative new "Shareware" format, where-by the consumer paid for the first episode and got the next two absolutely free. This system was derided as "Like some kind of fucking supermarket special offer!" by many gamers and Id hastily changed the system so that you got the first episode free, then paid for the next two. This system was itself derided as "Like some kind of fucking drug-dealer's special offer!" by many parents, buy Id refused to budge, at least until after Quake when they produced a shit first episode by mistake, which somewhat gave it away that the rest of the game was also shit.

But what of the game itself?

You're probably wondering, "what about Doom itself? What was it like? ANSWER ME!!!" The answer is, unfortunately we're not sure. Most screenshots and copies of Doom were wiped out in the great .gif fire of 2002, when a group of fanatical extremeists from the "Burn all gifs" campaign took their philosophy a little too far, leading a worldwide campaign of computer arson, which resulted in the catastrophic loss of 99% of the worlds computer data. This meant copies of Doom became so rare as to be practically nonexistant and the same went for screenshots.

The only known photograph of the Burn all Gifs fanatics

As far as I know, this is the only remaining screenshot of the original Doom:

The picture is badly burnt, but we can still make out some details about the original game. Following extensive investigation and examination of the screenshot, I have drawn the following conclusions: