04 Jun 07
Doom Gaming
The daddy of all 3D computer games; Doom.
I was 8 years old when Doom was released in 1993 by id Software. The company was responsible for many of the games I played as a child, among them Commander Keen, Quake and Doom. I probably shouldn't have been playing such violent games as a child, but there have been no ill effects other than a warm fuzzy feeling and an itchy trigger finger when I hear the word "Doom".
Although the game is not true 3D, in that it is not possible to look up and down properly, and that two "sectors" cannot be placed above and under each other, it still is a fairly convincing 3D world. Many of the tricks that allowed its pseudo-3D rendering are still used in gaming today, which has kept the continuing legacy of the game alive today and it is still widely played. This is probably the result of the fact that not only is it free, but copies of the game have been easier to pick up than a nymphomaniac on a desert island, and that the enduring charm of blasting hundreds of space monsters seems undiminished after more than a decade.
Being a first-person shooter, Doom is experienced through the eyes of the main character. The plot is simple, you are a space marine who finds himself the only human on Mars, after some top secret military experiments resulted on the death of everyone and creatures from Hell come out of the teleportation gates and overrun the place. You have to kill them all to make it out alive.
Possibly because this is one of the first games I remember playing, I still enjoy it today. Voted by industry insiders to be the #1 game of all time, Doom is available to play on almost every imaginable platform including Windows, Mac, Linux and indeed mobile!
The source code of the game was released to the public in 1997 and dozens of unofficial Doom source ports have since been created. ZDoom is one of the more popular ports of Microsoft Windows, whilst DooM Legacy seems to be the best way to go for Mac users.
In 2004, Doom 3 was released which was actually pretty scary in places. I got rather bored after the first few levels, and never got round to completing it. Best not to make comment of the 2005 movie adaptation of the game, featuring Karl Urban and The Rock.