days before doom, 1992-1993
doom was a watershed moment in gaming culture. it changed everything; it rocketed id software from stardom into super-stardom, making them one of the most well-known names in the western games industry. it redefined the discussion on video game violence, climaxing in the shitstorm that surrounded the 1999 columbine shooting. and it put the first person shooter firmly on the map for good, looming large over developers, serving as the chief example of what happens when you push the envelope just that extra bit. it’s impossible to overstate just how important doom is. but the key thing about watershed moments is that there is a status before them as well as after them. in the years immediately preceding doom, the first person shooter genre was starting to grow in size, and a variety of approaches to design were prevalent. here, then, are three of doom’s immediate predecessors.
the early years of modern PC gaming were a strange time; the burgeoning field of home PCs (at the time called IBM-compatibles) were replacing the multitude of home computers that ran with proprietary hardware and software, with increasing parity between brands when it came to internals and a slow gravitation towards plain beige boxes (not counting some of the more experimental models.) PC game development was something of a wild west, a career for hobbyists and isolated-but-brilliant coders. id software were no different, a motley four-man crew consisting of programmers, designers and an artist, who liked heavy metal and super mario, who met working in the games department for the computer magazine softdisk but chafed under softdisk's office culture. after proving that side-scrolling games could be done on then-underpowered PCs using a technique john carmack devised, they formed id software and began "borrowing" softdisk's computers over the weekend to design their own games, to be sold independently. after getting busted by the management, they left softdisk with no criminal charges under the stipulation that they write one game every two months for softdisk for a period of time, but without any direction from softdisk.
id software were now free to pursue their own avenues of game design, with john carmack's programming genius at the helm. alongside the now-classic platformer series commander keen, carmack's experiments in writing a first person engine had resulted in early landmark titles hovertank 3D and catacomb 3D. while catacomb 3D had been the result of carmack's assertion that he could write a faster texture renderer than the fully-textured ultima underworld, which he'd seen at a CES demo in 1990, wolfenstein 3D was intended to be the next step up -- faster, more action-packed, and -- most importantly -- violent.
similar to how catacomb 3D was a first-person followup to john carmack's softdisk title catacomb, the wolfenstein franchise goes back before its “3D” entry. the series began life in 1981 under the auspices of industry legend silas warner, whose apple II classic castle wolfenstein was a vastly different sort of game. a top-down shooter, castle wolfenstein is by all accounts the first stealth game, in which the player must hide from patrolling nazis, using stealth and subterfuge to complete their objective and escape from the castle. ammunition was scarce and the player was sometimes better off holding up guards and stealing their equipment, rendering them harmless. the game was a smash hit, with a followup coming three years later.
the idea to utilize the wolfenstein name was john romero's, but they ran through a number of alternate titles beforehand, among them "hard cell," "luger me now," and "how do you duseldorf?" after meeting with silas warner himself and getting his blessing, id software went ahead with the wolfenstein name and the rest is history.
on a technical level, wolfenstein 3D was the next step up from catacomb 3D. while the basics of the engine were unchanged (textured walls, but no floors or ceilings) there were several notable updates under the hood. the most visible difference is the switch from the EGA display standard, which allowed for up to 16 colors (out of a palette of 64) to VGA, which could display up to 256 colors. that this switch was done mid-development is made plain in the somewhat limited palette in the art assets, with an abundance of shades of blue, turqouise or purple, all of which were common colors in EGA programs and games.
the second big difference was speed; players could move at an almost inhuman rate around the mazes of the game, and the focus was on action over the more sedate tactical espionage of castle wolfenstein. the emphasis on speed figured into the game design; plans for features like dragging bodies out of sight of patrolling guards were scrapped for the sake of keeping up the breakneck pace.
perhaps the standout element, of course, was the violence. sex and violence in video games and other media was an increasingly hot topic; the 80s had been marked by controversies surrounding games like custer's revenge and splatterhouse, and the legacy of 1976's death race 2000 cast a bit of a shadow as well. but nothing could have prepared the industry for what was to come in the 90s. wolfenstein 3D managed to slip in ahead of the shitstorm that id's next game, doom would get embroiled in alongside mortal kombat, but even still it drew concern from id's retail publisher at the time, formgen. artist adrian carmack (no relation to john) had long been a fan of gory themes in his work; doing the art for the relatively kid-friendly commander keen had chafed him, and he relished the opportunity to do something grotesque. hovertank 3D had been a good start, but wolfenstein 3D gave him the opportunity to really cut loose, and in response to formgen raising its concerns, he added much more violence to the art assets, the levels being dotted with skeletons and corpses, and tom hall and john romero recorded themselves screaming almost random phrases in broken german to give voice to the enemy forces. the original three episodes of the game culminated in a final battle with hitler, resulting in one of the goriest deaths ever seen on a screen at the time. (it's worth noting that this isn't the first time hitler's been exploded in a video game...)
like doom, wolfenstein 3D saw a number of ports over the years; a mac version had updated graphics, but the one that most people remember is probably the SNES version, which is infamous for its censorship. gone were the nazis (hell, the bad guys didn’t even speak german anymore!) gone was the blood (it was sweat instead) and hitler himself was replaced by the generic “staatmeister.” the development of the SNES version is a particularly sore memory for id software, in part due to this censorship and in part due to the initial contractor (rebecca heineman) assigned to the porting project going AWOL.
wolfenstein 3D has a long legacy. the serious tone of castle wolfenstein had given way to a grindhouse vibe, stripping away complexity to leave one of the first pure action FPS games, where you go from point A to point B while killing everything in your way and occasionally using keys to progress. while its design was primitive compared to later games, with strictly orthogonal walls and an unchanging height, it proved the potential of the 3D engine for creating realistic environments. while the franchise has seen a couple of revivals, most recently in the utterly brilliant wolfenstein: the new order, it's wolfenstein 3D that laid the groundwork for the future, making the first person shooter popular and proving that shareware distribution was, for the time, a viable method of publishing games.
and besides, everybody loves dead nazis.
speaking of dead nazis...
if id software were once the rock gods of PC gaming, bungie were the jazz masters of mac gaming. formed by a pair of college students in the early 90s, they got their start assembling and shipping copies of minotaur: the labyrinths of crete by hand, which is a seriously humble origin given the legendary status bungie holds today as the creator of halo and destiny. their early focus on mac development was largely due to jason jones, who grew up on apple computers, but also because the field was a lot more open in mac development at the time.
after the moderate success of minotaur, they set about working on a first person shooter, inspired by wolfenstein 3D. minotaur and bungie's earlier game operation: desert storm were quirky in an intellectual kind of way; operation: desert storm came with a glossary of military terms and trivia, and authentic maps of the kuwaiti theater of operations during the gulf war. pathways into darkness was no different, which set it apart from the mindless fun of wolfenstein 3D. initially intended to be a first person version of minotaur, they chose to write an original story instead, a lengthy tale of a secret special forces mission to stop the awakening of a dreaming cosmic monster deep beneath a pyramid in the yucatan peninsula. along the way one can speak to the dead that litter the pyramid's corridors, ranging from the player character's special forces comrades to a lost nazi expedition that had entered the pyramid in the late 1930s looking for a potential superweapon.
in terms of technical stuff, the engine isn't a purely orthogonal game like wolfenstein 3D is. instead, walls are quite narrow, with beveled ends; while the underlying map design does seem to be grid-based, the grid squares appear to be much smaller than the massive blocks of wolfenstein 3D, which allows for narrow columns built out of in-game architecture rather than having to use sprites. lighting is not universal, either, and visibility fades into black off in the distance, though a flashlight pushes the darkness back a little. the initial version of the game used gradients for the walls and floors; the powerPC version finally texture maps these.
at times, the game comes off feeling more like a cross between a survival horror and an adventure game with dungeon crawler elements; a text parser requires some specific keywords for talking to the dead, and some of the puzzles are obtuse as hell, and it's entirely possible to play yourself into a corner without realizing it for hours. meanwhile, time actually passes as you play, and you only have five in-game days to complete your task. a weight limit determines how much you can carry, and healing options are limited to rare blue potions and sleeping, the latter of which uses up time. ammo is scarce until you find a certain magical item that lets you create duplicates of anything you put into it, and enemies respawn, furthering the constant threat. saving the game can only be done at save points, which are far and few between.
in spite of its difficulty (or perhaps because of it) pathways into darkness was a smash hit; it was the first native first person shooter for the mac (not counting the colony) and launched bungie into stardom, enabling them to expand their operations.
unfortunately, accessibility to this fantastic game is quite limited. mac owners will be pleased to know that it's available for free on the app store; for everyone else, there's basilisk II (or sheepshaver for the powerPC version) but setting up can be quite the chore.
in addition, art game genius brendon chung has devised his own spin on the early hours of the game in the form of doom 3 mod pathways redux.
ultima and its major competitor wizardry are probably the two greatest influences on RPGs, east and west. a lot of the things we take for granted in RPGs now were invented and codified by these two series. for most of the early 80s they dominated sales, but by the early 90s they'd lost their grip on the market as their successors began to take over, especially final fantasy and other japanese series. ultima VI had shown the franchise still had the chops, but wizardry was fading fast, and by the 1990s only a cult following in japan really still cared about it. as the cRPG scene began to go dormant in the face of the rising wave of jRPGs, the bigger names began to experiment, tossing out a few spinoffs in an attempt to remain relevant. most of them weren’t successful -- the worlds of ultima series seem to have gone forgotten -- but there was at least one runaway hit.
ultima underworld: the stygian abyss began as the brainchild of paul neurath, who worked at origin systems, the company richard garriot founded to aid in publishing his ultima series, and which had grown into a huge company by the 1990s. neurath was dissatisfied with the simplistic graphics of earlier dungeon crawler games like wizardry, and wanted to create something that built on suspension of disbelief. he founded blue sky productions (not to be confused with bluesky software, creators of vectorman) with the intent of developing this game. the famous demo shown at CES 1990 came out of the early work; origin was so impressed that they offered a publishing agreement and suggested the game be rewritten as an ultima spinoff.
i've written a lot in this space about immersive sims; one of the more invisible aspects of immersive sims, particularly the "traditional" ones like thief and deus ex, is a development process that is perhaps more organic than that of other studios. ultima underworld was developed in such an environment, and is often described as the first immersive sim -- and indeed, it would seem to fit by most any standards, including mine. stepping away from the grid-based movement of classic dungeon crawlers like dungeon master or, yes, wizardry, realtime movement combined with more tactile world interaction pushed ultima underworld out of the hoary old dungeon crawler genre and into something a little more interesting. there's actually a surprising amount of things to see and do, and the entirety of the dungeon is open to you. in a very real sense, ultima underworld laid the groundwork for everything from deus ex to skyrim to dark souls, on top of being leagues ahead of the competition in terms of technology, with fully-textured everything, curved walls, sloped ceilings and floors, and some early 3D models. it's also singlehandedly responsible for launching the career of warren spector, whose previous production work had been wing commander II and one of the worlds of ultima spinoff games. spector would go on to produce system shock, which was in a very real sense the sci-fi counterpart to ultima underworld, and the rest is history.
of course, a game with ultima underworld’s cult popularity can’t go without a sequel. by september 1992 origin was forced by money issues to sell to electronic arts (a shocking move given garriot's long-running hatred of EA founder trip hawkins.) blue sky ended up merging with lerner research, a small outfit that mostly did flight sims, to form looking glass technologies, and it was under these auspices that ultima underworld II: labyrinth of worlds was created in 1993, with much stronger ties to the ultima franchise than its predecessor. years later, arkane studios (they of dishonored fame) would create a spiritual sequel called arx fatalis. and just as the ultima series lives on in garriot's upcoming shroud of the avatar, so too will ultima underworld, in underworld ascendant.
i'm on record as saying i strongly dislike ultima as a series, finding them to be mostly unplayable and difficult to take seriously, and i think garriot is a hack resistant to change, even positive change that would make his games more accessible to people other than crazy assholes who speak in faux-old english in their daily life. i find ultima underworld's controls to be clunky and its historical slowness on DOSbox has long precluded me from being able to get into it. but even i must admit that ultima underworld, and ultima as a whole, are among the most influential games ever made, which is why whenever some gaming site talks about gaming history and ignores the franchise and its influence on everything from final fantasy to bioshock, i have to wonder just how lazy they really are.
this article is a complete rewrite of an earlier entry.