In Europe, video games have long been seen as something worthy of scrutiny. These or those titles become subjects of scientific discussion, monographs and dissertations are written about them. Often, more popular books are published about important personalities or games, designed for a wide audience. Fortunately, the approach is gradually reaching Russia – so far more and more in the form of translated materials. Among the worthy there are two books about Doom – the cult revolutionary shooter that forever changed the industry. The first to come out was Lords of Doom by David Kushner, a renowned nonfiction author specializing in video game research. The second book is in many ways even more interesting – let’s talk about it.
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Instead of introducing
Dear Esther was a kind of experiment in narrative design: how difficult can you build a narrative with almost no gameplay to keep the player following it?
“Doom. How a new genre was tempered in battles with demons ”by Dan Pinchbeck. The name is not that widely known, but his studio The Chinese Room has a much better chance of being recognized. From the pen of Pinchback came such games as Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. With the aforementioned titles being story-driven walking simulators, Pinchback’s choice as the book’s author seems even more surprising.
And nevertheless, the game designer not only signs his love for the adrenaline shooter, but also admits that without Doom there would not be the same Dear Esther, which may sound, to put it mildly, strange. It is widely known that when creating the original Doom, John Carmack threw away all attempts to add a complex plot to the game, but Dear Esther, in general, cannot boast of anything except the plot (and, possibly, an interesting design of locations). And to understand what Pinchback meant, it’s better to just read the book: the author’s analysis provides a peek behind the scenes of The Chinese Room’s workflow. Let it be literally with one eye.
The birth of a legend
Perhaps the most famous photograph of the Doom developers
Kushner’s book, as already mentioned, tells how the legendary id Software was created, lived and worked in the 1990s, with all its ups and downs. The main focus is on the “two Johnes” – Carmack and Romero, against which the rest of the names of the studio’s developers are lost. Pinchback, on the other hand, went on a completely different path and conducted a detailed analysis of Doom: instead of retelling for the hundredth time how a team of daring programmers, using bare enthusiasm and a charge of pizza, energy drinks and heavy metal, forever changed the gaming industry, the designer conducted a real vivisection, examining the work in detail a well-oiled mechanism like Doom.
In a large-scale exploration of the game, Pinchback starts with the basics, walking through the key predecessors of Doom – Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3-D and, of course, Wolfenstein 3D. They are touched upon superficially, only in order to clarify what technological leap id Software has made in just a couple of years. Equally important, Pinchbeck dwells on such a significant thing as the psychology of the authors, explaining why Studio so aspired to create a high-speed shooter. The secret, however, lies on the surface – a love for arcade machines and a desire to transfer a similar experience to personal computers.
It should be understood that in the late 1980s, no one seriously considered the PC as a gaming platform: video games dominated consoles that could show much more interesting pictures and speed. Carmack, on the other hand, had already managed to revolutionize a little earlier by implementing the technology of smooth side-scrolling on a PC, which seemed exclusively the lot of arcades and consoles, and was not going to stop there.
One of the first chapters also reveals the details of the early stages of Doom, from Tom Hall’s Doom Bible to the current state through various iterations and experiments. Superficially, you can learn about this from our articles, but Pinchback, not limited to signs, reveals much more interesting details, accompanying everything with personal comments from almost everyone involved in the development of people.
Technological progress in the service of war
Hovertank 3D. Pseudo-three-dimensionality is already in place, but textures are not yet observed
Pinchback devoted a separate chapter to the technological side of Doom. Today, the shooter’s achievements do not look so impressive, but at the time of release, the effect was similar to an atomic bomb explosion: unlike Wolfenstein 3D, the walls in Doom could not be located at right angles, have different heights, and the floors and ceilings were no longer strictly parallel throughout the entire level and could change in height, creating a more realistic picture. As if this was not enough, one could see full-fledged textures on them, and on the street one could recognize a prototype of a skybox. Pinchback talks about all these things in much more detail, devoting a separate chapter to the achievements of texturing and other technical tricks.
Most importantly, the game designer regularly draws parallels with another game released almost simultaneously with Doom – Ultima Underworld, which is often forgotten. The fact is that Ultima came out earlier and introduced many of Doom’s innovations like texturing horizontal surfaces, dynamic lighting and other technological innovations. The difference with Doom was that the shooter was corny much faster than first-person role-playing game, and ultimately it was the high-speed adrenaline experience that the audience remembered.
Pinchback pays no less attention to the soundtrack of the game, written by Bobby Prince. The picture is greatly expanded by inserts from an interview with the composer. In it, Prince not only reveals some of the secrets and tricks that had to go due to technical limitations, but also admits that some of the tracks that got into the game were unfinished demos. Probably, anyone who has played the original Doom is well aware of the inconsistency of the quality of the music in it (which does not mean that some of the tracks are bad – they are simply made somewhat simpler than others). From the interview, it becomes clear what the real reason is.
Bullet by bullet
E1M1. A view familiar to anyone who has run Doom at least once
The lion’s share of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of the original three episodes of Doom and the difference in approaches to their consciousness, as well as the logic behind the decisions of the designers. From here, for example, you can glean why it was the second episode of the three that was remembered less than the others, and the third one made such a strong impression. This is mainly due to the radically different approaches of John Romero, Tom Hall (whose levels, created back in the days of the “Bible”, became the basis for most of the maps of the second episode) and Sandy Petersen. The sick mind of the latter gave rise to the insane hellish levels of the final game.
Equally important, Pinchback analyzes each specific map in his work, often providing images of levels and describing how certain decisions depended on the immediate wishes of the team or the limitations of the engine – and in some cases, on the contrary, became the reason for code modification. As a starting point, I would like to give an example of why Mastermind became the final boss, and not Cyberdemon, who is much stronger: according to Petersen, it was a simple mistake, which he admits in a rather long tirade in an interview.
Steps into the unknown
Killing other players is not the same as fighting legions of AI-controlled dummies
The book doesn’t end there. Based on the things already written, the author explains why Doom remains the most alive of all living beings even after almost 30 years from the moment of release. In particular, he dwells on the phenomenon of modding and the fact that Carmack published the game’s source code in 1997. The latter led not only to an increase in the number of mods and total conversions, but also to the creation of engine modifications: any dummy is familiar with words such as GZDoom, Zandronum and Skulltag, which would not have been possible without access to the source code.
No less attention is paid to multiplayer. Yes, Doom was not the first multiplayer game with the ability to fight live opponents, but it seems impossible to overestimate the impact of the online shooter. And Pinchback devotes a separate chapter to online battles, examining why Doom (and after it Quake) laid the foundation for everything that continues to be the gold standard of online battles today.
Finally, in the end, the author conducts a serious analysis of Doom from a more scientific point of view: can the game be considered a “prototypical shooter”, that is, the fundamental principle of all modern FPS? And the answer is not so obvious! Pinchback has to not only classify shooter subgenres, but also look at them from a different angle. By the way, there was also a mention of Ultima Underworld here – and this is worth paying special attention to.
Dark, bleak future
Doom 3 is still a stumbling block among fans of the franchise, but from a technical point of view, id Software has reintroduced a masterpiece.
As a bonus, there are chapters from both Pinchback himself and from translators about the further fate of the franchise. The game designer only touches on the second and third parts, since the original text dates from 2013, and then there was no talk of a restart, let alone Doom Eternal. Mikhail Bocharov had to correct this, who translated the original text into Russian. Translated, by the way, excellent: some time ago, many texts about video games could boast of extremely low translation quality, reminiscent of a machine, and it is very pleasant to see a well-formed syllable and understanding of the topic. And for those who do not have enough hardware, at the end there is a dictionary that deciphers both purely gaming terminology and more highly specialized ones.
Perhaps, Dan Pinchback’s book can be safely recommended to just about everyone who loves video games – not even Doom. True, after reading it, it will be impossible to refrain from throwing a couple of imps or loading a rocket launcher into a friend’s face, even to someone who has never launched, perhaps, the most famous shooter on the planet.
P. S. For the sake of completeness, it is still worth reading Kushner’s book, which is straight from the pages of Doom. How a new genre was tempered in battles with demons ”also calls on Pinchbek.
