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Doom History
This section is very messy and needs to have more information and be more organised. Please E-Mail me if you want to help.
John Carmack was unhappy with Wolf 3D even before it was shipped. He knew that a much better 3D engine was possible, if only he had more time... While the rest of the crew at id worked on graphics and sounds for Wolf 3D, John Carmack went to work on the graphics engine. He devoloped a new, more advanced engine that was to be used by Raven for its game Shadowcaster. With that experience and even better ideas, he began work on the engine for what id was then calling They're Green and Pissed. The new engine allowed different floor and cieling heights, lighting changes, and texture-mapped floors and ceilings. Also, walls could now be placed at any angle. Then: there was conflict. Tom Hall, the Creative Director, got a little too creative, insisting on a detailed and consitent story line be given to the game. Romero and Carmack wanted it to be simple. The wise choice of avoiding complexity (which allows more focus on game play) meant that id and Hall parted ways. Hall went to work for Apogee as a project manager.
The idea of Doom started in September of 1992, right after Spear of Destiny was shipped. John Carmack, who came up with the name 'Doom' after watching a movie (The color of money) where Tom Cruise shows up at a pool hall with a custom pool cue in a case. "What do you have in there?" someone asks. "Doom." Cruise replied. He started making the engine while the rest of id worked on Spear of Destiny, which was later used instead for Shadowcaster. This engine was basically his initial research into coming up with the DOOM engine. Said Carmack.
The game was originally the game for the Aliens movie but that idea was scraped at the last minute because id wanted total creative control. Carmack said that instead of aliens we should use hellspawn.
When id started making maps for Doom they were very flat and didn't have much lighting effects, much like they created in Wolfenstein. Later on in the Beta version they were creating much more interesting levels.
John Romero:
"Well, during development on a game at id we always knew that our latest game was going to be better than our last game, so it was obvious to us all that DOOM was going to be better than Wolfenstein 3D/Spear of Destiny. Carmack's idea of adding netplay to DOOM was when i told the other id guys, 'This is going to be the most badass game in the history of the planet Earth.'"
"Our previous games had all used some form of compression in their data files that was very hard to crack (because some essential information was linked into the EXE file, which was compressed too). The fact that we removed all compression from DOOM data files was a large step toward making it easier to modify. Releasing the data specs was the other important aspect to helping others modify our game."
Doom was originally going to have bullet holes in walls and visible monster damage, but were scraped because it would use up too much memory on older computers.
A hub system like in hexen was going to be used too but taken out because it was too much to accomplish at that early of a date with the time frame they were aiming at.
The knife, bayonet, machine gun, Unmaker and Dark Claw. Anything else you might see in the design doc was not seriously considered; they were weapons that would have made it in if there was enough time and the balance would work out.
The BFG was changed because 8,000,000,000 fireballs (1) looked like Christmas and (2) slowed the engine down on a 386/33 because there were too many sprites on the screen. Additionally, it was cooler the way it turned out because it didn't look like we just modified the Plasma gun to make a more powerful weapon.
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