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Professor Sir

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

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We'd all be trying to tune our shitty 12" TVs (in colour!) to get a decent picture. Remember the fun and games of manually tuning your telly to the right channel? You'd have to be careful not to spill the lava lamp. The television would be made from wood.

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KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

But what if the game was released in 2193

Then it would be a simulation where if you die in the game you die in real life.

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MajorRawne said:

We'd all be trying to tune our shitty 12" TVs (in colour!) to get a decent picture. Remember the fun and games of manually tuning your telly to the right channel?

Then there's the problem of maladjusted RF modulators in computers, so you're tuning for best picture, best sound or some compromise in-between.

Gez said:

I can see death exits being a lot less popular.

Not amongst the terminally ill. I'm sure Dr Nitschke would approve, since assisted suicide will probably still be illegal in many countries. ;)

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MajorRawne said:

We'd all be trying to tune our shitty 12" TVs (in colour!) to get a decent picture.

Oh, god, NTSC. Never the same color. Unless, that is, you lived in a region that used PAL or SECAM instead.

Eh, composite and especially RF suck anyway.

MajorRawne said:

The television would be made from wood.

Weren't some of the cheaper ones wood finish on plastic?

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Sodaholic said:

Weren't some of the cheaper ones wood finish on plastic?

Down here the cheaper ones tended to be imitation timber veneer wallpaper glued to particle board, I've also seen a lot of 3-in-1 sound systems with cabinet work like that.

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I am indifferent to Doom's role in videogame technological evolution. Quake 3 was a pretty important engine, but the game doesn't interest me much. Actually, I don't even enjoy classic Quake 1 as much as I used to. Doom's gameplay stands above them all, and mostly (i feel) because gameplay design trends were at a certain point when the id boys were in their passionate, fresh-faced fighting prime.

Are you wondering if the stimulus of the advanced engine would have been qualitatively different? Do you want to pull out some detailed history about the state of videogames in 1978? For example, I'm partial to the view that the golden age of arcade games started with Space Invaders in '79. What if Doom had appeared on that landscape a year before?

Honestly, I think arcades would have ceased to exist if home computers could have done this in '78. No pacman grossing billions of quarters, and later no street fighter . . . no Neo-Geo . . . it would have had a tremendous cultural impact.

Perhaps home computing, as a result, would have accelerated dramatically and Monica Lewinsky and Johnnie Cochran would have been all over Facebook.

'78 is also years before Berzerk and Robotron.

Years before the Famicon console renaissance.

And, as someone else mentioned, years before cultural influences like Aliens. (Before Alien even).

I suppose, to put it another way, in what way does this hypothetical make sense? Are we wondering if the technological leap had simply been another fifteen years ahead of its time?

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Macblain said:

I suppose, to put it another way, in what way does this hypothetical make sense? Are we wondering if the technological leap had simply been another fifteen years ahead of its time?


I already mentioned that whatever magical box containing Doom was transported back in 1978, it would cause nothing short of a technological singularity. Unless there was some scary "Pandora clause" attached to it e.g. "You may play it, but not peek inside the magical box....the world is not ready for it".

Alternatively, I suppose that if Romero & Co. were research scientists with access to a decent (super)computing center and cutting-edge development tools, even in 1978 it would be possible to code something like Doom (there were computers that had 256-color displays and the necessary "computrons" to run Doom, e.g. very expensive workstations used in TV, simulation or early VR production). The question is who would play it, and it's doubtful whether it would influence arcade/home gaming, with their much more constrained budget.

Now, if you consider that whatever technology you're using today existed at least in prototype form 10-15 years ago into some research lab (perhaps classified), it's not unthinkable that something like Doom (engine-wise) could have existed. The gameplay however....that takes a man like Romero to finetune.

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Clonehunter said:

What if Doom was released in the middle ages?


They'd have burned it at the stake, for it would be -quite literally- the work of the devil. Now, why the devil would endorse a game where you kick his ass again and again, is beyond me.

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I would imagine it causing quite an upset due to the violence in it at the time and peoples views of violence at the time. I mean, there was uproar over the video game version of The Texas chainsaw massacre (which was shit. Unbelievably shit.) And that had you use a lot of your brain power...
In order to figure out what the mess of squares and pixels meant! Truly games were more educational back then!!! But on a serious note, I'd imagine it being an above average title, being unceremoniously shot down by the Mary Whitehouse types.

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FreddBoy said:

I'd imagine it being an above average title


I think the media would use something more technical and "cyberspace-y" to describe it, like "realistic combat simulator", "virtual reality combat training", "cyber military combat trainer" etc., rather than seeing it as a game. Considering that the military and aerospac industry had access to fully 3D simulators at that time, it would probably be considered more similar to those, than to arcade games.

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