Background Information (I)

To anybody that knows anything about DOOM, reading this will not be anything new to you. This is just the basis of DOOM, and its humble beginning.

To start off with, DOOM is one of the first good first-person-shooter games made originally for PC, but then expanded to many other platforms, only two of which are the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation 1.
DOOM was the first game with proper '3D' rendering. The first shareware release of the game contained many bugs, but after several new releases, there was a defection-free version let loose on the public. After a few months, it was the most popular game in 1993-1994. Even after Quake and Duke Nukem 3D came out, DOOM never lost its popularity, despite being technologically outdone.

Its inability to have rooms put over each other was offset by the other features it had. One of the better parts of the game was that it had the ability to use realistic sound - the sound doesn't stop at the end of the room - monsters could hear other monsters, switches being flicked and the player gunning down nasties from the other side of the level, unless a room was given special properties. At the time, it had seamless gameplay, and due to it being the first game to use varying light levels and traps, was fairly scary for a beginner. The first episode did not have terribly hard, dark levels, but as the player moved into Ep2 and especially Ep3, this all changed, with new textures and monsters, and lower amounts of light, with a more Hellish background. Many of the sounds were gruesome, such as the tearing apart of the bodies when a Zombieman or Shotgun Guy were hit by a rocket launcher, or BFG9000 (this will be included in many posts, as it is a Holy item in the DOOM world).
Another one of the better things in the original DOOM were that once a monster knew about the player, it continuously made a noise, growing louder or softer depending on the distance between 'you' and 'it'.
(It would be too difficult to mention everything good about the game in one paragraph...)

Despite the games' engine's technological limitations, DOOM outperformed many FPS games - ID Software pushed the game's engine to it's boundaries and beyond it, just so DOOM would be a popular game. Just having more than one height level was a great step-up from its predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D. Many things were changed since then - the fantastic ability (back then) to have rooms with various ceiling heights and floor depths. Rising stairs were some of the hardest things to make in the game, and now that there are many easy-to-use map editors, they don't seem very hard to create. A few of the only things harder to make in DOOM were when a floor changed texture and raised up to make a proper, safe floor (like that in Episode 1, Mission 3), and doing that, but also having a pillar or something similar come down to greet the rising floor at the same time.

This is all for now. The next installment will come soon.