COMM 344: Doom Clones

Before there were games like Bioshock and Deus Ex making the FPS genre as diverse as it is derivative, FPS games were not generally called such, as evidenced by this chart of Usenet term usage frequency found on The Doom Wiki.

Blue is the use of FPS, red is the use of "doom clone"

According to this data, it wasn't until 1997 that the term first person shooter took hold, around the time that id released Quake. Between Doom and Quake, there were few types of first person shooter in the world. Most notably considered to be unauthorized Doom clones are System Shock, Star Wars: Dark Forces (which later became the massively successful Jedi Knight series, and Duke Nukem 3D (which also copied id's penchant for making a famous side-scroller into a 3D shooter ala Wolfenstein 3D). Also of note, however, were first person shooters that not only cloned Doom's style, but also used it's engine. These included Raven's Heretic and Hexen, as well as Rogue's Strife. It is the second variety of Doom clone that I wish to consider for a moment.

Doom was the first game with an engine-as-a-product mentality. Before Doom, game engines were disposable. If one game used the same engine as another, there was a good chance the second was a sequel to the first, this is the case with Megaman 1-6, Super  Mario Bros and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2, and many other sequels of the era. The idea of another game series, or even another game company, using the same engine was unheard of before Doom, and now, according to Mark Deloura of the CEDEC (That is, the CESA Developer's Conference, a conference held by the Japanese CESA or Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association to connect with game developers), 58% of games in development in 2011 used a premade engine of some sort. This path was forged by Heretic, Hexen, and Strife.  Unfortunately, id did not end up gaining much from their precedent. The idTech version included with Quake 3 was delayed just enough for Epic's Unreal Engine to come out and overtake idTech's market share and become the lead game engine in the world. idTech is now only used in games published by id's owners, Bethesda, who don't use it in their flagship games (i.e. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout).

COMM 344: The Level

The perfect level is one that challenges us, but does not frustrates us, one that is neither linear nor a hedge maze. id Software has made a lot of games: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and Rage are the ones that come to mind immediately. 3 of those 4 games are level based shooters, while Rage is an open-world shooter (there's a longstanding community rumor that Borderlands was more or less designed based on prerelease footage of Rage, based mostly on how similar the games feel, and how Borderlands was developed almost entirely in the eternity between when id first showed off Rage and when it shipped, a year after Borderlands). The goal of this post is to analyze the structure of game levels, particularly how id changed it's methods of making a first level between Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake.

Wolfenstein 3D's Episode 1, Floor 1

The first level of  Wolfenstein 3D is mostly linear. There are some corners for early weapon upgrades hidden here and there, and a set of connected rooms that provide at least 3 ways to complete the level. As far as general game levels go, it's fairly fun to play through, though the world is flat in every way. The level takes place on a single floor of a castle to compensate for the lack of variance in floor height that the Wolfenstein engine had. The engine also lacked diagonal walls, making everything feel somewhat square.

Doom's E1M1: Hangar

Doom's first level is even more linear than Wolfenstein's, on the surface. The main path of the level is such that it can be completed in less than 30 seconds, however, some early weapon and armor pickups, plus a secret area that takes up roughly a third of the map, give the level more replay value than Wolfenstein's three slightly different grey and blue square paths. Doom also adds floor height and diagonal walls, in addition to enviromental dangers. The look and feel of Doom's level is closer to the expectation we would have for real architecture than it's predescessor. The issue with the level design emulating reality is that idTech 1 could not do what is called floor over floor, that is, multiple levels on top of each other. Height could done, but a second story, or even a balcony or bridge, was out of the question.

Romero's sketch for Quake's E1M1

Quake changes things considerably. idTech 2 introduced floor over floor, as well as smooth slopes (rather than idTech 1's solution of doing slopes as really tiny stairs) and rudimentary support for curved walls (basically the really tiny stairs idea, but with walls). Quake's layout is pretty linear, but contains more bonus rooms, a bridge, and the introduction of switches to id's first level work. Doom 2 also contained switches in it's first level, and Doom had switches and keycards throughout most of it's levels after the first, the reason I count Quake's inclusion of the switch as novel is that it's the first a switch is introduced in the first level of an unfamilar game, as Doom 2 was so similar to Doom that the game could assume more knowledge of mechanics in it's first level.

While first levels are not always the most exciting in the game, they serve an important purpose as a benchmark for change in a developer's expectations of a player. id Software made their levels more interesting over time while also increasing the general scope and challenge of the levels.

COMM 344: The Sounds Of Doom

Doom's sound style is rooted in two places - heavy music, such as Soundgarden and AC/DC, and the popular Sound Design library of sound effects. Sound Design is notable for it's use in other media, particularly in episodes of Doctor Who and in 1994's The Santa Clause (where enemy death sounds from Doom are used as Reindeer grunts).

But more to the point, we look at Doom's music soundtrack. The primary source (both in the sense of it being the main source of information and a literal primary source) of information on the inspiration for Doom's music is in the music files themselves. The files reference, for instance, AC/DC's Big Gun as an inspiration for E2M1 of doom.wad.

We know this is true of the whole soundtrack because, in 2007, John Romero released Bobby Prince's unused tracks from Doom (doom.wad) and Doom 2 (doom2.wad) with notations as to which albums inspired which unused tracks, and which unused tracks were adapted into other tracks. We also know, from Romero's own admission, that he gave Bobby Prince a stack of metal CDs to work from for Doom's (doom.wad and doom2.wad) soundtrack.

(Author's note: references to doom.wad, doom1.wad, and doom2.wad are made in order to show the usage of a primary source while not being able to upload that source directly due to copyright concerns. All the information found in the WAD files can also be found dissected on The Doom Wiki, but people who cite wikis as sources belong in the setting of Doom's second episode [hell])

COMM 333: Black Music on MTV

The situation with black music in the early days of MTV is fascinating in several regards. While, in lecture, we focused on the contributions of Rick James and Micheal Jackson, there are some other interesting points that bear mention.

There's the issue of musical memetics (that is, the cultural genetics of music, herein seen meme as a form of musical genealogy), which is an interesting subject in and of itself, but takes on a new dimension when we look at it's impact on MTV's refusal to play black music.

To dig into this, lets consider the memetic genealogy of a given song, with black influences in bold.

Another One Bites The Dust

• Queen's biggest inspirations in general are The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
• John Deacon, Queen's bassist and writer of this song, however, was inspired heavily by disco band Chic, whose song "Goodtimes" would have it's riff adapted into Queen's Another One Bites The Dust as well as into Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight later on.
• Chic also inspired Duran Duran's song Rio. Themselves, they were inspired by Ben E King, Arethra Franklin, and Parliament Funkadelic.
• Those three artists track back to Otis Redding, and Chuck Berry.
• The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are born of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, respectively.

The point being that most music that MTV was perfectly fine with playing and representing is, in a memetic-genealogical sense, far more black than white. Yet MTV didn't want to represent black music on their network? It seems as if the real issue that MTV had was in representing black artists as equal to white artists. When they did support a black artist in Micheal Jackson, it was after he left his Motown roots behind to create pop music with Quincy Jones. The threat of Jackson's blackness was subdued by a music with mass market appeal. Jackson's physical features were softer, less tough than Rick James. He was, in essence, white washed. Which begs the question of whether the industry desire to make him seem less black is culpable for his plastic surgery later in life.