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Professor Sir

A weird thought: What if Doom was released in 1978?

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Read the above. What i'm saying isn't that it wouldn't be a text game, but as if almost by magic, it could run just as smoothly on an Exidy Sorcerer as it could in 1993. I know that would be impossible, I don't need everyone to say that, but what if it somehow happened? Let's say it was released by a different crew. Something like Sid software, I don't know.

Personally, I think it would have hindered the game industry in the long run. Everyone would swarm to such an amazingly efficient engine like moths to a lamp, and I believe- in a paradoxical way- that no one would want to build something better.

Main Thought points:
Would such an efficient engine be beaten?
How would computer hardware change? Would it be more or less powerful when it doesn't have to accommodate more space for programs?
How much different would the game's controversy be when violence in games (what games?) didn't exist at the time?
Would the game engine be different due to the higher console abilities at the time? (hee hee)

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mrthejoshmon said:

It would probably look like shit.

What I meant was that it would run exactly the same as it did when it was released. I mean, completely identical.

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This is a seriously dumb question. It was a revolution in 1993 as it was; why would exacerbating the extent of how much of a revolution it was change anything?

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Convert some football fields into a computer capable of running Doom.

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The people at NORAD would be too busy playing Doom and America would lose the Cold War.

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Professor Sir said:

if almost by magic

That's what it would take. In 1978, Doom would either be a side-scrolling shooter or a text adventure, possibly an illustrated adventure.


Next question - If you could get Doom to run on a Babbage Difference Engine, what sort of frame rate would you expect from it?

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It would have been pretty much Maze War....so it kinda already did happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueloPa5b408

Violence did exist in games at the time and people were the same about it then as they are today. I forget the name of one example, it was a driving game and when you ran people over they splattered a bit and turned into tombstones. And I always thought the violence in defender was pretty harsh at the time...those massive mutant explosions....mutant bits going all over the screen....and the same thing when you shot human survivors.


And here is a video of clips from other FPS games, Maze War only gets a single image here...but in general FPS games have quite a bulky history. Yeah non of them looked like Doom at the time, or were Doom at the time....but still, they are Doom's ancestors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aipGP5oAuWQ

And I think Maze War gets those two dates because of different versions....even then, there were ports.

Shadow Hog said:

This is a seriously dumb question. It was a revolution in 1993 as it was; why would exacerbating the extent of how much of a revolution it was change anything?


Because the technology was lesser....plus it would have been a different point in history, resulting in a different reality today. How different? Dunno but different.

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Guess what? It wasn't, it was released in 1993. Doom was created with either the 386 or 486 in mind (I think) which, funnily enough, didn't exist in 1978. As for these "what if" threads, they are getting tiresome now and have no actual point of being here.

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There's no point to life in general, everything is pointless, but it's still fun to think about possibilities....what's wrong with having some fun thinking about things?

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Kind of see your point but I am in the middle with your statement there. What's wrong with having just one general "what if?" thread? Could have edited the first one and used it for those types of questions that relate to Doom, instead of a new one popping up.

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Hmm, that's understandable.

Perhaps they should make a new page for threads like these, like a Doom theory page or something. Or a Doom "alternate reality" page.

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"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a spectre."

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Lol @ Marnetmar. Except it would have to be made of wood. Everything that came out of America in those days had wood on it, even, for some completely insane reason, the cars.

If a game like Doom had come out in those days I'd have shat my pants, even though I wasn't born until 1979. Doubt I'd have been so impressed by the Commodore 16.

EDIT: Doom, the text adventure.

You are in the hangar access bay. N, W
> W

Shotgun zombies attack.
> shoot

Shoot what?
Zombies fire. Your health is 83%.
> shoot gun

Don't know how to shoot gun.
Zombies fire. Your health is 52%.
> shoot zombie

You kill a zombie.
> shoot zombies

Don't know what "zombies" is.
Zombies fire. Your health is 27%.
> fuck off

How about I come round to your house and fuck your mother like I did on Valentine's Day?
Zombies fire. You are dead.

Q to quit, R to restart
> q

You run away like a coward, yelling insults over your shoulder, just like I did after I shagged your mum.

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Xegethra said:

Violence did exist in games at the time and people were the same about it then as they are today. I forget the name of one example, it was a driving game and when you ran people over they splattered a bit and turned into tombstones. And I always thought the violence in defender was pretty harsh at the time...those massive mutant explosions....mutant bits going all over the screen....and the same thing when you shot human survivors.

Oh you mean Deathrace 2000?

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Aye that's the game!

You had to run them over for points, and it was a topdown perspective.

I completely forgot the name, thanks for the recall!

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Professor Sir said:

What I meant was that it would run exactly the same as it did when it was released. I mean, completely identical.


On what hardware? It could be done on some of the best mainframes/minicomputers of the time ( anything able to pump out 50 MIPS and having 4 MB of addressable RAM space, plus HD storage), not even requiring an actual supercomputer. In that case, it would be just another interesting proof of concept just like the early VR demos or CGI, but since it wouldn't be a mainstream product accessible to nearly everyone, it would just be a curiosity stuck in the lab or seen in a movie. Perhaps a millionaire's toy, if somebody wanted to buy the most sophisticated videogame of the next 15 years to come ;-)

If, OTOH, somehow a full-fledged 1993 486DX with Doom installed was transported back in 1978...well, I think everybody would be much more interested in what was inside the little magic box that's just as powerful as a $1.000.000 mainframe, rather than the applications that ran on it, and you'd have a different computer evolution timeline to our days :-p

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Guest

But what if the game was released in 2193

Pretty retro...

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Sodaholic said:

What if Doom was released in India as a Bollywood movie? Oh, wait...

That monstrosity is forever coming up in search results.

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Given that a large sum of the inspiration that is Doom comes from Aliens and Evil Dead II, two films that wouldn't come out for another seven years, I cannot even fathom the concept.

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It would be all Star Wars-inspired, that's for sure. Marnetmar's photo looks like Star Wars as well.

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Oh, man. The potential of this thread was so wasted. I guess I'll try and fix it.

If the 1993 version Doom was released on a 1978 personal computer and ran as well as it would on a 486...

Id would probably become one of the worlds largest technology companies for starters.

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To follow that up as its pure logic ;

ID would have been microsoft, developing the unbeaten OS after releasing doom, faster than linux, and definitely faster then windows crashalot.

Carmack, and romero would have both been the bil gates and richest people on earth.

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