Doomguy is born on the ground

Or, to be exactly, player spawns at the zero level then the game started.

In vanilla engines (doom, doom2, doom2f and heretic) start the game with command "-warp" and press <pause> immediately after system startup screen. Then screen will look like these:

huh...interesting...is it that the view height hasn't been set? I'd think if the player spawned at 0 height, the view would be above that

I dunno why it happens, but it certainly looks interesting. The view is certainly lower than it is when you die. Maybe it doesn't get any height data, so it puts the camera at the z-origin. (at least, I THINK height is Z...)

I live... AGAIN!
*rises*

Doom never ceases to surprise me!

Yeah, you must have taken the screen capture before it adjusts the view height to 41 units over the starting sector's floor. The floors at E1M1 and E2M1 both have a height of 0 units, while the floor around the pit in E3M1 is 8 units under 0.

I've seen this phenomenon too.

In my recent doom2 wad our marine is lying on the ground 'cause he passed out.