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NicoTheMarine

What if Doom was never released?

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Now someone already made a wad that sort of dives into this concept, except thats Doom 2 in name only. So what if Doom 1 was never released? Now lets go through the obvious stuff that is a side effect of this: Doom 2, Doom 3, The Doom Movies, Doom 4, Doom Eternal, Doom 64, And all the wads made would never exist. also Hexen and Heretic would likely not exist. Also F-Zero would still be my favorite game of all time. There is MANY MANY Side effects, Id Software likely would be struggling to make ideas as 1997 comes around, Id has no ideas, They are going bankrupt, By now they've pumped out so many Wolfenstein games, so not only would Doom  never release, but Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein The New Order, And all the other Id Software Bethesda games wouldn't exist. Id Software would be an obscure company that went out of business years ago by now. Or possibly they'd come up with a bad idea, and the same thing would happen, Maybe they'd come up with a good idea, and that ends up becoming the main Id franchise. Commander Keen might take over, Or we can go on the route of Id still making a 3D Engine and making an incredible game that ends up having fan wads made for it. There are many things that could happen if Doom never released. Soon I'll make another forum post about Doom 2 never releasing. I was reading comments, and I had an idea, If you didn't know, Id software originally wanted to make an aliens licensed game, The only reason we have Doom is because they lost the license. So possibly one of the ways Doom wouldn't be made is them not losing the license.

Edited by NicoTheMarine : I had an idea

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John Carmack's intellectual agency, unrestrained by its focus on the id tech engine, would have become increasingly unruly and unstable, eventually leading to a world order governed by the madman's own doctrine of irrefutable logic and undeniable genius.

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These guys were really driven at the time, it's hard for me to imagine. I think if there was no Doom, we would have gotten a Wolfenstein 3D sequel with variable floor/ceiling heights and non-orthogonal walls.

 

Now if we're saying what if they'd never thought of Wolfenstein, or if we're following with what if they'd never thought of Quake, then things get pretty bad. Wolf, Doom and Quake were the 3 big money makers for id.

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If doom had never happened, I feel like Marathon would have taken Doom's place as the groundbreaking FPS.

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The way I see it, something using the doom engine would've still been made, had doom not been made. John Carmack was working hard on the engine while the rest of id software was working on spear of destiny. I don't think anyone in id would want that work to go to waste.

What would've been made instead is an entirely different question, however.

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6 hours ago, Toilet_Wine_Connoisseur said:

We would be going to TekWarCon Cosplaying as the Corridor 7 Guy 

 

Unreal 1 becomes the first fully 3D game engine in the PC sphere in 1998.

 

Duke 3D becomes a multi-million selling hit now that there is no competition from IDs groundbreaking Quake I

Duke Nukem forever comes out in 2001 and smashes every sales record in gaming leading to a Duke Nukem Movie in 2005 starring Karl Urban as Duke Nukem and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as The Mighty Boot.

 

Shadow Warrior and Blood also become best selling titles.

 

Half Life is built on Unreal 1 and is released in 2000 instead of 1998, but by this point System Shock 2, Deus Ex and Thief I&II have already defined first person gaming for The next 20 years in its place. (games become more systems-driven with a focus on emergent game-play as opposed to Linear narratives and set-piece driven design)

 

Pretty much all of this.

 

I'd also (probably) play more Build engine games instead of Doom, which would not exist.

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  • No Quake
  • Duke Nukem has no competition whatsoever(it would also be missing the Doomed Space Marine and Earthquake Easter-eggs)
  • We will have to use Hello World to test our devices
  • A lot less clever programmers (A whole bunch of the game engines you see on GitHub are inspired by Doom)
  • I would be posting on DukeWorld
  • the modding community would be crippled
  • HUGE chunk of game developers started from making Doom, Quake, and Half-Life mods, so countless games and companies would not exist(Including Valve Software, so no Steam)
  • no Steam means a lot less indie developers, people would have to create their own websites for downloading their games for a while, or game downloading would not be as popular for a few more years.
Edited by BBQgiraffe : grammar fix

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id was ahead of the curve on the tech side of things. Corridor 7 got poor reviews for still relying on the Wolf3d engine. Star Wars: Dark Forces was released after Doom 2, and being a Star Wars game it already might only appeal to a more specific audience. I won't consider Heretic because it was created with direct involvement from id software. The early Build engine games like Witchaven, Tekwar and Powerslave didn't really catch on, so that leaves Marathon and System Shock as the main contemporaries to Doom. I would consider both of these games more 'cult status' but I wonder what caused that. If Doom didn't exist would these games have been more popular? Or would they not be made at all in the way that we know?

 

Wolf3d and Doom really established fast-paced action in FPS early on because of the capabilities of the tech. These types of arcade shooters would probably have been developed at some point, but there's no way they would work out in the same fashion. Doom was a cultural phenomena that went past boundaries and made gamers out of normal folk. Doom was highly accessible in its controls and gameplay, not to mention the shareware distribution model. I remember people upgrading their computers to run it more smoothly, and of course this would happen regardless of the game, but it speaks to the influence Doom had at the time.

 

the System Shock engine, the Dark Forces engine and Build engine later on were all developed independently as far as I'm aware. FPS would most likely happen in some way regardless but I think Doom's popularity really pushed the concept of arcade style action, carrying on with the 'minimalist' gameplay design of Wolf3d. Doom also firmly established the FPS weapon meta over the next decade or so, probably longer. The progression of weapons in Doom is only simple and logical but it became a formula that seemed very difficult for games to deviate from for a very long time. 

 

Edited by reflex17 : grammar edit

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16 hours ago, Alper002 said:

The way I see it, something using the doom engine would've still been made, had doom not been made. John Carmack was working hard on the engine while the rest of id software was working on spear of destiny. I don't think anyone in id would want that work to go to waste.

What would've been made instead is an entirely different question, however.

probably just Wolfenstein but with better graphics.

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20 hours ago, Toilet_Wine_Connoisseur said:

Duke 3D becomes a multi-million selling hit now that there is no competition from IDs groundbreaking Quake I

Duke 3D would not exist without Doom

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2 minutes ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

This site won't be existed.

Thats not a word, Plus as someone said, it'd either be Duke World or Wolfenstein World, Possibly Quake World

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My recollection is that Doom burned very brightly, but it also burned very quickly - Doom II was slightly disappointing, and by the time Duke Nukem 3D came out in 1996 the Doom games felt really old-fashioned. The pace of change was very rapid at the time. Duke Nukem 3D had transformable environments, security cameras, novelty weapons, speech samples etc, some of which had already appeared in System Shock, but that required a monster PC. Even after source ports came out I remember that Doom was self-consciously retro in the late 1990s, e.g. it was a well-respected classic game, but it belonged to the past.

 

Doom 3 got a lot of press but in gameplay terms it was overshadowed by Far Cry and Half-Life 2, specifically the "driving a vehicle down a long track" elements of those two games. It didn't have much influence on the subsequent course of games development. Doom 2016 is a classic but again its influence on other games is very small.

 

At the same time I remember a lot of my friends buying a PC specifically to play Doom, at a time when a decent 486 cost more than £1,000 and you needed to take out a loan to afford it. The switch to the PC as a viable gaming platform stamped out interest in the Amiga, although Commodore was already in financial trouble. Why spend a lot of money on a powerful Amiga when you could instead get a PC and play Doom? But again outside the UK the Commodore Amiga was dead as a dodo and if it wasn't Doom that made the PC a gaming platform it would have been something else. From what I remember the first wave of 3D graphics accelerators were optimised for things like Mechwarrior 2 and Tomb Raider - console ports - and in fact neither Doom nor Quake had official GL / PowerVR / Glide ports.

 

A lot depends on whether Id would have gone on to make Quake. I think the biggest risk would have been for them to make Doom "good enough", e.g. Wolfenstein with variable light levels and some spooky textures, but fundamentally an incremental step, rather than a revolution. Faced with a damp squib of a game they might have decided to go all-out for Quake, thus leapfrogging the Build engine. Who knows. As mentioned above Quake indirectly gives us Half-Life and by extension Valve Software and Steam, which until recently dominated the PC gaming market. Didn't Gabe Newell work on Doom 95, the port of Doom to Windows 95? Without that contact with Id he might have decided not to leave Microsoft.

 

Perhaps in an alternative 2019 we would be moaning that The Outer Worlds is a 3DRealms store exclusive. I know that Valve gets a lot of stick, but I shudder at the thought of 3DRealms dominating the PC gaming market.

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On 10/25/2019 at 12:21 AM, Toilet_Wine_Connoisseur said:

We would be going to TekWarCon Cosplaying as the Corridor 7 Guy 

 

 

*throws William Shatner into the freezer.*

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On 10/26/2019 at 3:23 AM, Noiser said:

Duke 3D would not exist without Doom

 

It would still exist as the engine was in development for a pretty long time (even though it originally had little resemblance to the Build we know today).

 

No way the engine would've gone to waste, the question is just how different Duke would've been without Doom to take inspiration from. The Quake and Doom easter eggs would be gone for sure, the rest, I dunno. It all depends on whether 3DR would have found the same formula or not. The other Build games would most definitely also still exist. SW would have still been made regardless since it was originally going to be quite different from Duke, Blood, and the rest of the Build games.

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Well, in this alternate universe, id still exists and made Wolfenstein 3D. (I guess ShadowCaster also got made).

 

Carmack wanted to take the 3D thing further, and remember that there were different ideas for that game before it became Doom as we know it. So if Doom never happened, id Software would probably have made another product nearly as successful, or as successful, as Doom. There's three possible scenarios that I am aware of at the moment:

 

One idea was that id makes a deal with 20th Century Fox and creates an Aliens-themed shooter.

Another was making a new Wolfenstein game.

Or, id could listen to Tom Hall and create a new Commander Keen game.

 

We can assume that the Aliens game would probably be technologically comparable to the real id Tech 1 engine. Because they'd be working with the Alien franchise, the game would likely be even more horror-oriented than Doom, and early would-be-Doom-clone FPS games would be more horror oriented than action-oriented (even if Doom was pretty scary itself back then). However I imagine this game would not be nearly as mod-friendly as Doom, because it was licensed from Fox, which (I'm assuming) wouldn't take as kindly to people hacking and modifying the product, and especially selling those modifications in stores. Co-op would probably still exist, but deathmatch (as we know it) would be less likely. Perhaps, competitive multiplayer is instead imagined as marines vs xenomorphs, and therefore PvP gets its start as an asymmetrical mode similar to Ghouls vs Humans. If we take this path, Quake, Build engine, Marathon, and Dark Forces all could still exist (though they might be different, because the butterfly effect is a thing), however modding support probably wouldn't be as mainstream for quite a while and standard deathmatch as we know it today might take longer to become prominent.

 

If they made a Wolfenstein game, it'd probably be a lot like Laz Roja's WolfenDoom games. This path is the most similar to the modern Doom timeline. However, this game would probably have far less horror elements than Doom, because Wolfenstein's graphic style is far less gritty and dark than Doom's, and more cartoony. In a reverse scenario from the Aliens game, horror elements would hardly be present, like in Wolfenstein 3D.

 

Perhaps those scrapped stealth elements from Wolfenstein 3D would get implemented- if so, this influence would show up in later FPS games for sure, and the genre becomes slower-paced and cover-based. The military shooter as we know it today might show up as early as the late 90s, and the shift to realistic-style FPS games overall would start earlier than the real timeline (with Goldeneye 007, Half-Life, etc).

 

If not, then the game keeps the arcade influences of Wolfenstein 3D, and later FPS games keep this lives/high-score approach as well, for a while anyway. In either case, the game would still probably be a hit, and again there's no reason Build engine, Marathon, or Dark Forces couldn't exist (though while similar technology would be there, the lack of horror elements might mean Quake or its counterpart would end up as a very different game, stylistically).

 

Things would be very different if id went with Tom Hall's idea and made a Keen game. There's all kinds of ways this one could go.

 

If this new 3D Keen game kept Wolfenstein or would-be-Doom-style gameplay, we'd probably get something similar in atmosphere to Chex Quest, without the product placement. The first person shooter market doesn't receive its violent reputation to quite the same extent (early on, at least), and the hysteria is more focused on, say, Mortal Kombat. However, since Wolfenstein still put M-rated violence on the table, violent shooters could still be made (the Capstone Wolfenstein engine games like Corridor 7, Operation Body Count, etc still happen).

 

E-rated, kid-friendly FPS games probably become common. Dark Forces might still happen. The Build engine could still be created as well, and Duke Nukem 3D might still happen- except this time, possibly staying stylistically similar to its platformer predecessors, instead of its M-rated turn, with its graphic violence and nudity.

 

Marathon might still exist in this case, because it started as a sequel to Pathways into Darkness, (which was influenced by Wolfenstein 3D). So perhaps, Marathon would pave the way for violence in FPS games- still not quite as gory as Doom in its satanic, ultraviolent glory. And if people who liked Wolfenstein were turned off by id's return to kid-friendly, cutesy old Commander Keen, then perhaps Marathon might be a bigger hit than "Keen 3D," and be seen as the true continuation of the genre after Wolfenstein. This comes with many implications- for example, FPS games taking influence from Marathon would mean that the genre would become more story-based.

 

An even more drastic change would be that the Mac computer becomes more prominent in the computer gaming market-if Bungie was more successful than id by a wide enough margin, and Marathon becomes the alternate universe Doom equivalent, we might see an alternate universe where Macs are more popular for FPS gaming than Windows PCs.

 

If Keen 3D stayed a platformer, then freelook and jumping would almost certainly be implemented, and the z-axis limitations of Doom would not be present. However, making a first person platformer with sprites would be very difficult, for all kinds of reasons (90 degree freelook, sprite billboarding, 3D floors, etc). So, if this game were a platformer, it'd probably be a third person platformer. Therefore, the FPS genre would be set back a while, but, if the game was successful, id would have a hit 3D platformer game in late 1993 - early 1994- about 2 years before Super Mario 64 (though, still sprite-based and 2.5D, unlike Super Mario 64). Again, Marathon might take the place of Doom as the game-changing FPS game, keeping the violent FPS alive and well. Quake wouldn't exist, but Dark Forces still might. Build engine would probably still exist, though with Marathon as the dominant FPS game, its "hit" shooter would probably be different from Duke Nukem 3D as we know it.

 

With Keen 3D bringing the 3D platformer to computers, and Marathon dominating the FPS genre, Duke could either be an FPS game like today, or it could possibly be a 3D platformer, following the success of id's Keen 3D.

 

Some other points I didn't mention:

* System Shock probably releases. Looking Glass was doing its own thing around this time, and had its own 3D engines separate from what id was doing. System Shock probably wasn't too influenced by Doom, since it was kind of RPG-ish, like Looking Glass's Ultima games before it. It probably sells better, not being overshadowed by Doom, and Looking Glass doesn't lose money on the project. System Shock 2 would also be more successful, and overall we'd probably see Looking Glass surviving a lot longer than it did in the real timeline.

* Blake Stone probably still exists, as would Corridor 7, Operation: Body Count, Super 3D Noah's Ark, and even Nitemare 3D probably.

* Rise of the Triad would either not exist or be different beyond all recognition in all of these timelines. In the Keen timelines, Tom Hall probably sticks around for a long time, his ideas being realized. In the Wolfenstein timeline, there is no scrapped Wolfenstein 3D sequel or Doom Bible to serve as the base for the real timeline's ROTT, and Tom Hall might not even leave. In the Aliens timeline, since it keeps the dark, gory nature that turned Tom Hall away from Doom, he might go on to make his own game with Apogee, but again, without a Doom Bible it would be very different.

*Heretic, Hexen, and Strife might still exist in the Aliens and Wolfenstein timelines, because id would still probably license out id Tech 1 (which, for these games, would be very similar to the real thing- the differences in the games are more gameplay style and atmosphere than the actual technology) to other developers. However, in the Keen 3D timelines, they probably don't exist.

 

There's probably a ton of stuff I didn't take into account here. They might have made a totally different game than Aliens, Wolfenstein, or Keen. Anything could happen, to be honest, these are just a few ideas I had over the past hour I've spent typing this out. But most likely, these things are still true:

 

*id Software makes a lot of money

*John Carmack still becomes widely known as a genius programmer

*FPS games and 3D gaming in general blows up in the 90s

 

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I definitely would not be the same person that I am today if Doom had never been released lol. That wouldve started a whole different chain of events that wouldve made me different. Kinda scary lol

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If DOOM never existed:

 

1: Most of what's out wouldn't be out now, and what has come out, would've come out a lot later

2: There would be no Cbine until much, much later, if at all.

3: id sofware goes out of business, (Commander Keen was not going to compete with Mario)

4: No Daikatana

5: I don't think the mod community would be what it is.  Does Duke get this much attention?

6: The build engine comes out much later, and by that time, it's out dated, and almost obsolete, (more than likely, no Duke, Blood, etc)

7: No Occulus

8: Ion Fury is never a thing

9: Bethesda probably buys Duke... maybe

10: Videogames aren't blamed for violence.

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