Documenting the history of Doom community

I have been recently reading a lot about videogame history and this took me to the Doom wiki, particularly about source ports, and that got me to the 10-years of Doom special about the genealogy of source ports...

It dawned on me that a book or a set or articles, or anything about the history of the Doom community is in order... In my mind at least, this is the first community formed around a game, that has survived for almost 25 years, evolving the game after its release thorugh source ports.

How where the first days? How it was to see released DEU? And when DEU 5 could finally build nodes? How about the time when the source code was released? The first wad? The history of the Doom community is so full of landmarks, it has helped shape other communities, this was the first time a game could be modded on such scale, it was this game which got me into game programming, which allowed me to see its innards...

Maybe I am rambling, but I really think this should be documented, but it is a task that I hardly could do alone...

To sum it up.. does any of you think the same?

Belt onions!

Kidding aside, I like the idea but as you pointed out, that would be a whole lot of work. Isn't a lot of it documented already in one or more ways?

Maybe the problem lies in the difficulty of getting it straight, in an orderly manner.

Biggest problem is narrowing the subject, I would like to have something about the first steps of the community.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/86023-history-of-doomworld-comprehensive-version/

Many people come and go in this community so there aren't very many Doom historians who have "been there" for every cool event that happened and can explain it with certain objectivity.

I'm interested in this stuff too which is why I have invited all kinds of members from around the community to talk on my doom podcast about what it is about Doom that's particularly special to them. Some pretty cool discussions happen and ive learned a lot of stuff from it.

Problem is, as the community endures it becomes much more difficult to trace its origins. There have been many important milestones, but not everybody would agree on them.

Maybe a detailed timeline, a sort of table of contents for an hypothetical book, will start things rolling.

Or focusing on some aspect, such as editing and editors, source ports, map making (this topic will even be more divided, before and after the source release, etc.), demo making and even demo editing, source code analysis, history of Doom development...

There are SO many topics... Doom was a pioneer in many senses.

The wiki supports this IMO. We have many articles about narrow, specific topics, and very few big-picture overviews to tie them together. (Understandable because listing numbers is easy, and writing large blocks of coherent text is hard.) Each of the wiki's timelines, for example, could be complemented by a narrative outline:

• Timeline: history of websites and community gathering places, reactions to commercial releases, relationship of Doom fandom to other FPS fandoms
• Timeline of mod releases: prominent authors and their legacies, rise and fall of "1994 WADs", style/size trends in different time periods, ascendancy of gameplay-only mods
• Timeline of source port releases: overall influence of development progress on modding practices and vice versa, scripting and other experimental features gradually becoming mainstream, multiplayer-focused vs not (and community reaction to that), programmer drama

It would be a ton of work and, as you say, people who remember different eras would all have to chip in (I certainly know very little myself!), but the historical importance is immense.

I agree that it deserves to be documented, I have a hard time believing that anyone would want to read a book about it. The wiki is probably the right place to document this stuff.

As far as "how was it?" anecdotes, DEU +  first wads were before I hit the interwebs but as far as source release, that was an exciting time that charged the community. Actually it got gamers in general interested in doom again; consider the pace that which gamers consume media and things become "old", it was surprising to encounter friends and schoolmates well into the life of even quake3 still mentioning boom and doom legacy. I think zdoom took a few more years to get nice features and content to show them off, the early source port days were very much boom + legacy from where I was standing.

16 hours ago, fraggle said:

I agree that it deserves to be documented, I have a hard time believing that anyone would want to read a book about it. The wiki is probably the right place to document this stuff.

It should be written in a friendly way, along the lines of 'Masters of Doom'. A great deal of raw data is there, in the wiki as have been pointed out, it's just that the sequence of events and the way they are presented would have to form a cohesive narrative.

13 hours ago, LordMeow said:

It should be written in a friendly way, along the lines of 'Masters of Doom'

Even Masters of Doom had a relatively niche audience. You're talking about a niche within a niche. Wikis are a good format for documenting such material; books not so much. But I'm happy to be proved wrong.

I'm sure if a book was made about the history of Doomworld it would make the New York Times Best Sellers, the author would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and there would eventually be a film adaptation of it, maybe even directed by the Coen Brothers.

Someone has to do a proper book of Doom with some history and important events or something like that but obviously, it needs time :(.

Would be neat to have noclip make a documentary in the Doom community, similar to how they made the three part documentary of Doom 2016.

It's obvious that such a book would be a labor of love, not for profit.

On 7/6/2017 at 7:51 AM, fraggle said:

I agree that it deserves to be documented, I have a hard time believing that anyone would want to read a book about it. The wiki is probably the right place to document this stuff.

i actually pitched a book to Boss Fight Books a few years back about this subject (the Doom modding scene), but they turned me down. maybe they felt like it was too niche of a subject or something. i still think you could make it interesting to a wider audience if you frame it the right way.

On 2017-07-09 at 4:47 AM, Piper Maru said:

...and there would eventually be a film adaptation of it, maybe even directed by the Coen Brothers.

Starring George Clooney as Brandon D. Lade and Denzel Washington as Joe-Ilya! I would totally watch it!