The new Doom is out, and as you may have already learned today, Motherboard editor Emanuel Maiberg and I rather like it. This is a good opportunity to talk about the legacy of the original game, which has long been heralded as one of the key pioneers in 3D gaming. But the truth, at least from a technical standpoint, is a little more complicated. As Ronnie Oni Edwards relates on his YouTube show “Digressing and Sidequesting,” the original Doom from 1993 was actually little more than a cleverly disguised 2D top-down shooter.
DoomVideos by VICE
Videos by VICE
“The processor [in Doom] is just thinking of everything as being in a 2D plane, but drawing it in such a way that it looks like it’s calculating three-dimensional space,” Edwards says. “If it were actually calculating three-dimensional space, you would be able to stack rooms on top of one another, but you can’t in Doom.”
It wasn’t until 1996, with the release of Quake, that Carmack would deliver the “proper” 3D technology that led to the foundations of many if not most games today. But considering that he and Romero showed us what dreams may come a few years before with technically incompatible technology only serves to enhance the games’ legendary status.
