It was a game that clearly advanced the state of the art. Even in the month before it came out, people were claiming it simply could not be done technically on the underpowered PC technology of that time. Even after it came out, it took others a year to catch up.
Expectations at release were sky high, and Doom still overdelivered. The tech, the gameplay, the esport aspect, the gritty graphics theming. It was all new and daring.
The BSP was an obscure thing nobody understood. It took the DEU people months to wrap their heads around the NODES datastructure.
When the modding tools were finally available, the whole world became 1 big modding community for the same game. That amount of focus on 1 game has never happened before or since. Modding continues to this day, 30 years later.
Then the source code was delivered, for free, to everyone. It was easily readable and told every secret. We all went crazy. It was studied by every programming student. Even today, no other codebase has the same amount of scrutinity, with every bug and detail documented.
Myhouse.wad was a great example of how far a doom mod can be pushed. But it is also a testament to the collective midlife crisis of the doomers from that age, all of us yearning for the good old days.
It was a game that clearly advanced the state of the art. Even in the month before it came out, people were claiming it simply could not be done technically on the underpowered PC technology of that time. Even after it came out, it took others a year to catch up.
Expectations at release were sky high, and Doom still overdelivered. The tech, the gameplay, the esport aspect, the gritty graphics theming. It was all new and daring.
The BSP was an obscure thing nobody understood. It took the DEU people months to wrap their heads around the NODES datastructure.
When the modding tools were finally available, the whole world became 1 big modding community for the same game. That amount of focus on 1 game has never happened before or since. Modding continues to this day, 30 years later.
Then the source code was delivered, for free, to everyone. It was easily readable and told every secret. We all went crazy. It was studied by every programming student. Even today, no other codebase has the same amount of scrutinity, with every bug and detail documented.
Myhouse.wad was a great example of how far a doom mod can be pushed. But it is also a testament to the collective midlife crisis of the doomers from that age, all of us yearning for the good old days.