Coin-Op Doom?

Could it have ever worked?
If it were to have happened how do you think it would have been pitched?
Rail Shooter or some kind of '1 credit = X minutes/levels?'

I'm making a MAME cabinet sometime in the future and was toying with the idea of somehow loading doom onto it for giggles. (I seem to recall some kind of 'Arcade: DOOM' mod floating around, correct me if it dosen't exist and I was just dreaming.)

And possibly the most important of questions... would you have played it if it did exist?

I've thought about this before. One idea of mine was to set up a wii-mote and get rid of vertical autoaim. If the cursor was in the left or right side 25% of the screen, that'd be equivalent to using the left or right arrow keys.

Maybe make use of the unused 32 lines of the weapon sprites for when the cursor is above the center, leaving 64 movement lines total, while the weapon would horizontally shift when the cursor moves.

Probably have a trackball for forward/backward and strafing.

Hmm very interesting, perhaps use something like the 'Demon Destroyer Gun' for aiming?
(Not actually a light gun, but much like many 'shooters' that were in the arcade they would actually use a gun shaped joystick for aiming... see 'Jurassic Park' and 'Alien 3: The Gun')

How do you think you would 'Coin-Op' DooM?
Stick it on UV or Nightmare and charge per life (Maybe some kind of continue system where you didn't boot to a pistol start each death)

Or pay per time/level?

Breahahahhahah I KNEW I wasn't going mad!

http://www.doomworld.com/doomarcade/

And the bloomin thing was right under my nose the whole time, going to give it a play now.

Knew I didn't dream it.

How I would do it:

1 credit = 1 life. UV -fast, respawn player instead of restarting level, co-op items enabled, keep keys between lives.

Give the player 3 minutes, kill them if the time is up. Reset the timer back to 3 if the player kills a monster. That way, they have time to explore, but will be booted if they're not actively hunting or are really sucking.

Have a score system where monsters are worth their HP*10 (like in October 93 beta), bonus and powerups are worth some amount (can't remember).


One could actually commercially exploit Freedoom this way. :P

Track score, time and give the player 3 lives for X monies- loose all lives and back to MAP01. Reach a certain score and gain a life, and perhaps even a time limit too...UV of course!

I think that actual FPS games (not lightgun/rail shooters) were one of the few action genres that never made it to the form of a coin-op arcade -at least not in a form where they didn't overlap with vehicular combat simulators, e.g. like Tokyo Wars, which is effectively a sort of Doom deathmatch with tanks -pretty good game BTW.

Controls would have definitively been an issue, as well as adapting the gameplay to be more "arcade", aka short and profitable without being perceived as unfair, or resorting to forced time limits (can you imagine playing Doom with a constantly backwards-running timer and inserting coins to continue, like e.g. House of the Dead?). It would also be much more complicated to implement a multi-player mode, compared to a rail shooter/lightgun game.

The only time I saw a true FPS in "arcade" form was some kind of crude "VR" system which had a "walking platform" with a hand rail and a crude set of 3D goggles, in 1997, where you could play -among others- a time-limited Duke 3D map. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Maes said:

Controls would have definitively been an issue

Doom was designed to be playable with poor controls and/or poor grasp on them. It's hardly a twitch shooter, not the IWAD maps at least.

Maes said:

can you imagine playing Doom with a constantly backwards-running timer and inserting coins to continue

Perhaps it's because I know the levels so well now, but I can picture it for myself at least. 3 minutes is actually a long time in games, is it not actually rather forgiving to totally reset the timer every enemy killed, even the lowly former human? The consequence of failing that simple task being taking just 1 life, not all of them.

Maes said:

It would also be much more complicated to implement a multi-player mode, compared to a rail shooter/lightgun game.

Networked cabinets, or perhaps a sort of "roundtable" cabinet where they're in the middle of the floor instead of against the wall. A sort of "4-in-1" deal. Yeah, it'd require assembly, but inconvenience is much more the concern of a consumer than a business operator - the true customer in the arcade environment. They're the ones that bought the machine for their purposes (to make money at their venue).

No one?

;)

Come on, you know I mean real ones ;-)

Seriously though, the controls would be the single biggest issue even if the gameplay could be adapted in an acceptable way. Traditional joystick? Trackball? Or simply a rudder and a set of pedals? The latter would actually work much, much better and more intuitively for Doomguy's movement capabilities, essentially turning it into a Hovertank 3D battle.

Regarding the gameplay now, certainly the player cannot be left wandering or idling in a safe spot forever in a (well designed) arcade game, so a timer or other kind of mounting pressure would need to be added, which would mean that the game would not be the Doom we knew. This could be worked around if the gameplay was reduced to deathmatch-only (plus a ticking timer).

As for networking, sure, it could be done (think about e.g. all those Sega driving games), but it increased management costs a lot. In comparison, rail-shooter games could accomodate 2 or more players with just one screen, and with less establishment real estate. Guess which ones operators would prefer to invest on?

Now that I think about it, other than Tokyo Wars (which is pretty much a semi-1st/3rd person perspective deathmatch), I can't really think of any other arcade game EVER (except pure driving games) that put a player in 1st person view with at least two degrees of freedom, in a fully 3D environment. There's Panzer Dragoon, but that's in 3rd person view, and not really a shooter or a driving game. That should really get you thinking.

Ninja edit: a very brief google search reverals that, for all effects and purposes, arcades regarded rail shooters/lightgun games as "FPS" and that was pretty much it.

Except for...

FWIW, that finally answered my question how/if/when a polygon-based FPS was ever made (which was not a driving/sim/etc. game). :-)

More info on this page:

http://arcadeheroes.com/2013/06/28/the-short-lived-life-of-first-person-arcade-shooting-games/


Very interesting info, and as I suspected, many, MANY different control schemes were proposed, including conventional control sticks, trackballs, rudders, pedals, special hand/arm controlled "guns", you name it, as well ac combinations of the above.

There actually are a few FPS-like games in arcades; they're just really obscure.

Gun Buster (presumably no relation to the anime series) was controlled using a fixed gun controller (analog stick) and a standard arcade joystick for movement. It plays more like a boss rush, honestly; the levels aren't especially complicated (the first level is barely even a map, it's a little glass box).

War: Final Assault had a setup consisting of an analog stick for aiming, and buttons for movement and jumping, as seen in the photos at System16. It appears to be playable in both FPS and TPS perspectives.

Here's the only video I could find of an arena shooter called The Grid; it appears to be pretty similar to War: Final Assault, taking place primarily in third-person perspective. The control scheme appears to consist of an analog stick for movement and a trackball for aiming, and a single button on the console for jumping.

This video of Half-Life 2 Survivor - bizarre Japan-only arcade adaptation - is the only one I could find that demonstrates the unusual cockpit-style controls. The analog flightstick on the right appears to control aiming and firing, there is a multi-directional "throttle" on the left for movement, and some foot pedals whose purpose I can't identify (possibly for jumping, crouching, or sprinting?).

I think this may be the arcade mod you're thinking of. In fact it's a source port not a mod.

I don't know what the hell is going on with these mods he's got running either.

I think the problems with adapting any pure "PC Style" FPS to a coin-op arcade game are:

1. Making the gameplay intuitive enough for everyone to pick up and have a brief but satisfying run. All other problems are really sub-problems of this one.
   
2. The controls haven't been standardized, and it really isn't easy to pick a combination which would be intuitive for everyone and robust enough to survive in an arcade cabinet. No wonder combinations of trackballs, double joysticks, rudders, pedals, gun-like joysticks etc. are used. My opinion is that since Doomguy in particular handles (and runs) EXACTLY like a ground-hugging hovercraft, and there's no separation between turning and aiming (except when freelooking), the controls should reflect that, with a 2-axis rudder/yoke for movement/strafing and pedals for turning (aircraft-like), with triggers and other useful action buttons on the rudder itself, so the player never needs to take his hands off it. Such a control scheme would even allow for sustained strafing.
   
3. Many PC-based FPSs are based around exploration and key/switch/event hunting. Quite honestly, I couldn't imagine someone playing E2M2 or E2M4 in a hypothetical Arcade Doom for the first time: there's no fucking way one unfamiliar with the layout finishing them in a reasonable time (like 5 minutes each). So there would need to be a system of onscreen/vocal directions constantly directing the player, levels would need to be resized/redesigned in order to discourage idling/losing oneself, and the gameplay should shift to goal-driven with pressing time limits, in order to be considered a profitable arcade game by operators. A game (Doom) where you can easily waste 1 hour in a large unfamiliar level or barricade yourself behind a door and fend off hordes would be a no-no for most arcade room operators
   
4. Solutions to the above would be limiting the gameplay to just PvP deathmatches, have a goal-oriented "timed run" change in gameplay which extends playing time when monsters are killed/objectives are reached etc.
   

Just my 2 cents ;-)

What about Invasion mode for arcade? Would save the 'player getting lost' problem, and would also stop camping by keeping the pressure up.

You could pay for each life with no time-limit.

Skulltag coin-op anyone?

Yup, practically only high-pressure modes would work, in order to ensure an "arcade" experience. Using the original gameplay and mapsets verbatim wouldn't work for the reasons I mentioned.

In that respect, modern, linear shooters with a "plot on rails" would be much easier to port.