This Week In Retro: Doom 64 (Patreon)

April 4, 1997: Nintendo invites N64 owners to go to Hell

by Diamond Feit

Doom.

Doom doom doom doom doom doom. Doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom! Doom doom doom doom? Doom, doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom. Doom doom doom doom doom: Doom doom doom.

Don't worry, I'm not having a stroke. I just needed to convey the magnitude of Doom when it launched in 1993 and this was the most succinct way that I thought would work.

While I have a hunch most retro-game aficionados are at least familiar with Doom by reputation, there's an aspect to the game that's easy to forget: id Software's ground-breaking first-person shooter is surprisingly flat. Booting up the game, it may look like the player is trapped inside a Martian moon base with zombified human soldiers and imps from hell, but these are illusions. Every level in Doom, every enemy in Doom, and every object in Doom is two-dimensional. It's not pretty, but the game is completely playable from the map screen where everything is reduced to a basic wireframe and simple shapes.

Aiming is purely a horizontal matter, for no matter how it may appear on-screen, nothing in Doom exists above or below anything else. The game contains elevators and slopes and pits, but any weapon fire will automatically slope upward or downward to hit its target. This also means that no matter how labyrinthine Doom's levels appear, at no point will the player pass over or underneath any occupiable space. It's a testament to the skilled designers at id Software how hard it is to notice these restrictions, however; I only became aware of Doom's limitations years later when true 3D first-person shooters became commonplace.

Likewise, no one in 1993 who played Doom would have felt the controls were unusual or lacking in features, even though they hardly resemble modern PC commands. The default movement keys are the arrow keys, with left and right turning Doomguy. Players looking to strafe around monsters—an essential crowd-control strategy—must hold the Alt key of all things (Shift is for running, and Ctrl is the default fire button). Nothing about this read as strange to me as a teenager; when I played Wolfenstein 3D for the first time on a monochrome laptop in high school, it controlled much the same way.

What I'm getting at here is Doom may have laid the foundation for decades of first-person shooters that followed, but given how massive the genre is today, Doom is a remarkably small, narrow game in comparison. A "longplay" of the original three episodes takes two hours and change, while an expert-level speedrun can end in less than 15 minutes. These are not arguments against the well-respected legacy of Doom, just clarifications: Whether you love or hate the modern FPS, the game that kicked off the genre is a very different beast.

Honestly, this column isn't even about Doom, it is about one very particular version of Doom that just turned 25 years old. After Doom had already made its way from the PC to the Atari Jaguar, the Sega 32X, the 3DO, the Super Nintendo, the Sony PlayStation (twice), and the Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 owners got a Doom to call their very own. Unlike all those other ports, however, Doom 64 is an original work with all-new art and true 3D level design, plus a new demonic weapon and a brand-new final boss. It's practically a sequel in every aspect beyond the title; no, they didn't skip over Dooms 3 to 63, that's just the numerical suffix that was appended to most games on the Nintendo 64.

From minute one, Doom 64 is a more somber take on the first-person shooter. The bright colors and scenic views of "The Hangar" (E1M1 in the PC original) are gone, replaced with dark hallways and the night sky of "The Staging Area." Doom was a significant upgrade from Wolfenstein 3D in terms of lighting, allowing for dim or even flickering illumination in any given chamber. Doom 64 kicks that up a notch with multiple or even no light sources in select areas, forcing players to navigate pitch-black corridors with nothing but dim shapes on the floor to guide their movement.

More than the graphics, though, it is the soundtrack that reflects the biggest difference between Doom and Doom 64. In 1993, composer Bobby Prince created MIDI tunes for Doom which closely resemble heavy metal, giving the entire game a kinetic energy that never lets up. His songs are short and all but guaranteed to loop multiple times per level, becoming earworms that players (such as myself) can still remember three decades later.

Doom 64 uses an all-new score written by Aubrey Hodges and it couldn't be more grounded. Tracks are much longer, with some running over 15 minutes, and are full of ambient sounds and unsettling industrial hums. In an interview with Laced Records, Hodges said "I was experimenting with sounds to find what emotionally bothered me, what made me feel anxious. [I was looking for] atonal and dissonant sounds to pick at that fear and vulnerability we all have." The Doom 64 soundtrack thus blends into the background and infuses the game with dread, making for a tense experience rather than the raucous "kill 'em all" mood of the original Doom.

Speaking of "mood," there's not much story in Doom, but there is an established reason one man has to fight the forces of Hell all by himself. The series' unnamed protagonist is a literal Space Marine sent to investigate chaotic reports from a base on Martian moon Phobos, then teleporting to its sister moon Deimos, discovering that the only exit leads to the shores of Hell. He makes his escape back to Earth but the ending reveals he did not make the journey alone, setting the stage for Doom II: Hell on Earth. That sequel ends with Hell in ruins and the implication that Doomguy went home to rebuild human civilization.

In Doom 64, trouble is again detected on Phobos and Doomguy is ordered to get his ass back to Mars to finish the job once and for all. The culprit turns out to be "the mother of all demons" who stands as the final enemy in the game (in the 90s, everything was "the mother of all" somethings). Should the player prevail, a text crawl states that Doomguy remains behind in Hell by choice to prevent any further demonic uprisings, making his victory less-than triumphant—another reversal from the earlier games.

From a pure gameplay standpoint, Doom 64 is just more Doom. The cast of monsters is mostly the same, all the usual weapons are present, and the moment to moment action remains "find demon, shoot demon, repeat." The new levels do exist in proper 3D, but there's still no reason to aim up or down because that's just not how Doom works. Aside from the presence of an analog stick, playing Doom 64 with the traditional Nintendo 64 controller is just like playing Doom on a PC keyboard; players can run and turn and strafe but there is no "look" command.

Two factors kept Doom 64 from becoming a classic. First, even for an all-new game, it still arrived in a world where Doom was already widely available on every PC and home console, and newer first-person shooters had significant graphical and gameplay innovations compared to the four-year-old original game. Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and id Software's own Quake were all more advanced versions of what Doom had started.

The other handicap was Doom 64 lacks any multiplayer modes. This wasn't uncommon in Doom ports at the time, but with four controller inputs, the Nintendo 64 was built to be the life of the party in living rooms and dorm rooms alike. Mario Kart 64 was already on store shelves when Doom 64 launched, and another first-person shooter with multiplayer support would arrive by the end of the summer. Only people who couldn't play Doom in any other format or dedicated fans hell-bent on playing every version had any reason to pick up Doom 64.

I suspect it was that latter group that ended up latching onto Doom 64 as a hidden gem, as the game managed to develop a cult following. For many years it remained exclusive to the Nintendo 64, but modders worked their magic to unofficially translate Doom 64's unique levels and features to the PC. In 2020, current Doom-owners Bethesda announced a surprise: Doom 64 would officially become multi-platform thanks to an HD remaster, meaning it is now available for PC and all current home consoles. The controls have been modernized to a degree, mapping movement to the WASD keys/left analog stick and aiming to the mouse/right analog stick, but there's still no looking up or down, because that's just not how Doom works.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.