You’re a space marine. The mission is to shoot your way through a monster invasion unfolding on the moons of Mars. And the monsters? They come from hell.
When Id Software — six mostly 20-somethings at the time — pitched this gleefully unhinged premise to prospective recruits in 1993, millions answered the call. The technically masterful, thrillingly glib video game that Id released online crashed Carnegie Mellon University’s network within hours because so many students were playing. Two years later, actual Marines were using a version of it for training exercises, and it had purportedly been downloaded onto more computers than Windows 95, the newest PC operating system. The game was called Doom.
Sequels, prequels and offshoots inevitably followed, including this month’s Doom: The Dark Ages, with each new title bringing more resources to the pursuit of mass exorcism.
But Doom’s most entertaining developments happen in the shadow of the franchise, where fans resurrect the original game over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign.
These esoteric achievements quickly became a meme. Now they look more like a legacy.
Doom defined the first-person shooter genre, put computer games on the map and helped ignite a graphics war. But what many hard-core tech hobbyists want to know is whether you can play it on a pregnancy test.
The answer: positively yes. And for the first time, even New York Times readers can play Doom within The Times’s site. (Start by hitting the button below. The game is rated Mature for both violence and blood and gore.)
Id had programmed Doom to be easily modifiable by players. Four years after its debut, the company took the radical step of releasing the game’s source code to the public for noncommercial use; an international community of fans suddenly had access to the guts of the game, and could retrofit it to all kinds of hardware. “It was not only a gracious move but an ideological one — a leftist gesture that empowered the people and, in turn, loosened the grip of corporations,” David Kushner wrote in his book “Masters of Doom.”
Coders called it the hacker ethic, and it also led to moments of inspired cross-cultural exchange. Doom has appeared on Dutch payment terminals and Australian ticket readers. Someone tracked down and refurbished a laptop from a “Friends” episode in which the character Chandler Bing refers to Doom, and then put Doom on it.
Some fans simply cannot resist the pull of a Doom port — industry lingo for transferring software from one platform to another. Their ambition is not necessarily to play the game on these devices; it is more in line with the beckoning of Everest, or the draw of a Guinness World Record.
Even the idea of Doom was itself a kind of port, a way to bring the speed and action of arcade games to a machine made for text documents and spreadsheets. A jaunty metal soundtrack, punctured only by the howls of the undead, drives players forward through industrial settings while they dispatch imps, zombies and Hell Knights.
“Everything in Doom pushes you toward strafing and sprinting, constant movement,” said Dan Pinchbeck, the creative director of the acclaimed games Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. He compared the inexhaustible pleasure of Doom’s pace to entering a flow state, or performing ballet (with a double-barreled shotgun).
“The genius of it was saying, ‘What if we get rid of anything which slows this experience down and we just put our foot to the floor and drive this thing as fast as we can?’”
None of this happened by accident, of course. Ports were not incidental to Doom’s development. They were a core consideration.
“Doom was developed in a really unique way that lent a high degree of portability to its code base,” said John Romero, who programmed the game with John Carmack. (In our interview, he then reminisced about operating systems for the next 14 minutes.)
Id had developed Wolfenstein 3D, the Nazi-killing predecessor to Doom, on PCs. To build Doom, Carmack and Romero used NeXT, the hardware and software company founded by Steve Jobs after his ouster from Apple in 1985.
NeXT computers were powerful, selling for about $25,000 apiece in today’s dollars. And any game designed on that system would require porting to the more humdrum PCs encountered by consumers at computer labs or office jobs.
This turned out to be advantageous because Carmack had a special aptitude for ports. All of Id’s founders met as colleagues at Softdisk, which had hired Carmack because of his ability to spin off multiple versions of a single game.
The group decided to strike out on its own after Carmack created a near-perfect replica of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 — Nintendo’s best-selling platformer — on a PC. It was a wonder of software engineering that compensated for limited processing power with clever workarounds.
“This is the thing that everyone has,” Romero said of PCs. “The fact that we could figure out how to make it become a game console was world changing.”
Younger gamers, born into a world already consumed by software, may find Doom’s subversiveness appealing even when they lack nostalgia for its original context.
In January, a high school junior named Allen Ding stumbled across a version of Tetris that someone had built to run as a PDF. Although he did not have much history with the Doom franchise, most of which preceded his birth, Ding’s thoughts immediately ran there. So did a swarm of online commenters.
“There was kind of a large demand to see if it was possible,” Ding said. It took him about 10 hours to make it. (Around the same time, the creator of the Tetris port also developed his own version of Doom in a PDF. The culture of Doom ports is littered with latter-day Newtons and Leibnizes.)
Ding posted his accomplishment to a Reddit community where more than 100,000 “slayers” applaud gratuitous new ports. “It runs poorly and plays even worse,” Ian Walker, a journalist, wrote about Ding’s feat. “But it’s a marvel to see in action.”
The science fiction writer William Gibson once wrote that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones: unmonitored spaces where risk-takers can follow their interests and theories to the fullest extent. So when those on the nascent Id team “ported” their work computers, via the trunks of their cars, to a shared house on weekends to hotwire their new venture in secret, you could argue they were doing it on behalf of gamers everywhere. And they practiced what they preached.
When Carmack’s boss at Softdisk learned that his star employee had cracked the code to sidescrolling on a PC — the innovative feature that underpinned Super Mario Bros. and other console titles — he encouraged Carmack, then 19, to patent it. Carmack threatened to quit instead. Patents could be obstructive, snuffing out creativity before it had a chance to flower. Ports, on the other hand, were cross-pollinating. Ports were liberating.
Ports also provided opportunities to learn. Carmack has said that while he fulfilled a contract to bring Wolfenstein 3D to the Super Nintendo, he discovered a method that drastically lowered the computational burden of rendering the graphics onscreen.
The team immediately applied it to Romero’s groundbreaking level design in Doom, which was already in development. Sloping floors, cavernous rooms and the illusion of verticality could funnel players through finely plotted spaces at speed, assuming that the game’s engine kept up. Like the rigidity of a sonnet, hardware limitations inspired creative solutions.
“We were looking for speed on another platform,” Romero said. “This was the way to do it.”
Everything was downstream of speed. Faster rendering meant more sophisticated lighting and more gruesome carnage. It meant more intricate environments and more adrenalized gameplay. And it enabled a distribution model that made the Doom file ubiquitous on desktops from Little Rock to Ljubljana.
The first episode of the game was released by Id as a free digital download, with a phone number to call if you wanted to buy the rest. Less than 10 percent of users paid for the full game, but millions engaged with a large enough piece of it to propel Doom’s popularity without a single dollar spent on marketing.
“The Doom shareware version was everywhere in Slovenia, just like everywhere else around the world,” said Marko Stamcar, the head of laboratory at the Computer History Museum Slovenia in Ljubljana, the country’s capital.
While Stamcar is not an active Doom porter, he thought the phenomenon illustrated the pervasiveness of computers in cars and appliances, in health-care devices and industrial tools. Doom’s meme status has spurred deeper discussions about the penetration of tech into our everyday lives. It is a useful proxy for issues that resonate beyond gaming; the will to Doom abuts longstanding principles like the right to repair.
“It’s like an itch,” Stamcar said. “Why can’t I own my own hardware?” In other words, why can’t I sit in the John Deere tractor I paid for and use its digital interface to chain-gun some imps?
In a world of constant tech encroachment, Doom is often hoisted as a flag of resistance. Optimize exercise? Eat my lead. Enhance productivity? Let it burn. The game’s anti-corporate ethos and punk aesthetic give it a level of credibility rarely accorded to the medium. Pinchbeck compared Doom to the metal scene, which its creators idolized. They shared a core tenet: “Don’t accept rules at face value.”
Romero founded a series of game studios after leaving Id in 1996 and is working on a new first-person shooter, the genre he and Carmack practically invented. He has no illusions about how it may stack up.
“I absolutely accept that Doom is the best game I’ll ever make that has that kind of a reach,” he said. “At some point you make the best thing.”
Thirty years on, people are still making it.
Produced by Jon Huang.
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