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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

I remember when, in 1993, my boss bought a $6000 Windows machine at work - to play Doom.

Edit: He had already mentally checked out of this job and was transitioning (already working at) a different company. As a comp-sci computer graphics specialist, he dug Doom at multiple levels. Me - I was not impressed by Doom - probably because I didn't have his background to understand what a feat of engineering it was to get such performance out of a 1992-era CPU.

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If you played other games at the time, there wasn’t really anything else like it. Wolfenstein and similar existed, but Doom was a significant advancement. Us lowly console players were many years from anything similar.

Playing the limited shareware release of Doom the very first time in single player mode was already incredible, but it was the multi-player mode that was mind blowing.

It would be fun to see a graph with sales stats of NE2000 clones around that time. They were the cheapest Ethernet expansions boards at the time, and one of the few that Doom supported.

Yeah, I can vividly remember when my friends and I booted up a copy of shareware Doom the first time. We'd played the heck out of Wolf3D and so on.

Nothing was like Doom when it came out. It was shockingly, impossibly smooth.

Most of the Id games were significant advancements (up to Quake at least); in addition to Doom, the other major revolutions were:

- Commander Keen (smooth scrolling)

- Catacomb 3D/Wolfenstein 3d (pioneered ray casting on PC)

- Quake (introduced full 3d worlds)

As a side note, Terminator: Future Shock ([1]) had 3D enemies in '95 - but still 2D-sprite explosions and weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator:_Future_Shock

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II still used 2D sprite explosions and weapons in 1997. Was Terminator: Future Shock true 3D? I seem remember it used the Daggerfall engine which was 2.5D.

First generation 3D games were kind of a mess IMO. They usually hadn't figured out the controls yet and polygon counts were so low I always thought they looked worse than sprite based games. It isn't a surprise to me 2D-sprites hung around for awhile. Billboard sprites are still a pretty good/cheap choice for symmetrical things like explosions.

XnGine (the engine behind Daggerfall, Terminator: Future Shock, SkyNET, etc - i think the last game to use it was Redguard) was full 3D however Daggerfall relied a lot on sprites for NPCs and such (most likely because it had a ton of NPCs in towns) but the maps were fully 3D and there were 3D objects in them (the screenshots in this tool[0] that show daggerfall maps make it clear). Terminator used sprites for small objects (weapons, pick up items, etc) but enemies were 3D models as was the world. In Redguard almost everything was 3D.

[0] https://www.dfworkshop.net/introducing-daggerfall-scout/

I still feel Marathon was at equal level, even surpassed it in several areas. And released maybe a couple of months after Doom.

But it was only known by Macintosh gamers at the time.

In which ways I feel Marathon was better:

- better light effects

- ability to look up and down

- secondary effects on various weapons

- deep story (done through interactions with computer terminals)

- variety in physics based on levels and weapons (e.g. grenade launcher) is affected by physics

- having to deal with oxygen depletion in some levels

- some AI that aids you (defense drones that support your fight against the aliens)

- more variety in level objectives (e.g. prevent humans from being killed by aliens)

- more comprehensive multiplayer (I believe Doom supported 4 players; Marathon supported 8 - Marathon has more types of multiplayer games than just Deathmatch).

I think Jason Jones [0] was probably at an equal level as John Carmack at this point in his career.

A deeper comparison between the 2 game engines can be found here: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/78805-marathon-vs-doom...

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Jones_(programmer)

Sounds like an example of releasing a good product on a relatively unpopular machine.

Marathon was better on paper, but as far as visceral gameplay experiences go it lagged behind Doom quite a bit

Yeah, I had heard of Marathon but never watched any gameplay. Watched some stuff on YouTube and it's not nearly as entertaining as Doom, imo.

Despite it having more or less the same graphics tech it's a very different game. It's slower paced, more atmospheric, and with more story. The story in doom was a single page of text after beating each episode. Marathon had in-game computer terminals where they drip fed the story of the Marathon and its AI that was going "rampant" (interestingly Microsoft borrowed that idea for Halo 4, the first one that Bungie didn't create).

It wasn't just the engineering. The immersion was unprecedented in videogames, which was supported, besides the obvious rendering improvements, by lighting and sound.

Experiencing for example, lights suddenly turning off and monsters appearing and making noises behind the player, was very intense and novel.

(There were also other revolutionary aspects in Doom, notably, multiplayer)

I was at E.A. working on the ill fated 3D0 OS video subsystem when Doom was released. The game was immediately installed on everyone's PCs, "for research", and for the next week or two absolutely zero work occurred at Electronic Arts.

While 3DO may not have been a success, at least you could play the legendary HoMM3 and Star Control II on it.

Being an OS developer for the 3D0 was enlightening, primarily because very little of the highly publicized 3D0 technology actually worked. The OS team was expected to fix the hardware bugs, while maintaining all the marketing hype. Plus the executives were early spending the money they expected to earn and were half checked out during the critical "nothing works this cannot be delivered" meetings. It was the cascading cluster fuck of all cluster fucks, as E.A. had no capacity to realize this "ambition", just executives capable of selling the idea.

Interesting! My vague recollection (as a kid at the time) was that the 3DO really did deliver some impressive stuff but just at a very high price. Of course by the time the Playstation was released it was game over for 3do (and Atari, and Sega).

I worked on the PlayStation OS too. Very different everything. I was Sony Computer Entertainment's first software engineer hire, promptly sent to Tokyo to help finish the system.

What were the main things that stood out to you as different?

Professionalism; EA was basically modeled after rock bands as programmer teams back then. Sony was creating a series of international divisions and appointing star people from other divisions with their own new division, dubbed Sony Computer Entertainment of [Country Name], and an entire campus to run. Their attitude was game developers were tough and critical and needed to be won over, while EA's attitude was game developers were gamers who code and can be satisfied by a pizza party.

I remember playng Doom at a common PC (no graphic card). Was there something special about running Doom on some expensive machine? (FPS wise?)

3d cards did not exit at the time, everything was done on the CPU.

And yes your pc had a graphic card, or you wouldn't have had anything to hook your screen onto ;)

Yes, sure, I wanted to say "advanced graphic card with GPU".

Anyway, the USD 6k price tag was very high since I remember running Doom on a sub USD 2k PC. Most probably closer to USD 1k.

I think in 1993 you could easily still spend $6k by buying the top end 486/pentium CPU from intel, 8mb ram, CD-ROM, large (for the time) HDD, 17" monitor, etc. It wouldn't have a GPU but the latest tech always cost a big premium (it might be just 50% faster than a good but non-top-end system but cost 2-3x as much).

EDIT - looking at some ads in the December '93 issue of Computerworld [0] there's a Compaq ad saying "the Deskpro with Pentium starts at just $3,199" (both the "starts at" and the "just" make me think you could make it cost a lot more than $3,199, altho you could surely also play Doom on a cheaper computer).

[0] https://books.google.de/books?id=WESBpiNtNTEC&pg=PA19&hl=en&...

At that time I bought a generic PC with a 486 DX4 below USD 2k.

This doesn’t contradict anything I wrote above. It was possible to get much better bang for buck than the absolute most expensive option but I can believe the above story that you could spend someone else’s $6k to splurge on the most expensive PC you could find.

I don't tried to bring a lengthy discussion, it was a play with memories: remembering assembling your own PC and travelling the city choosing the specific components carefully based on price.

I didn't mean to take it in a negative direction either! And I agree with you anyway, my computer at around that time was also much cheaper than the example given (I think an IBM Aptiva on sale from a shop that was trying to get rid of inventory) and played games just fine (at least for the first couple years of its life)!

It was very high - but this was a business purchase. It was EASY to spend $6k for a high-end PC in 1993. Also consider that $6000 is $12000 in 2023 dollars.

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