Surprisingly enough, this was the first version of DOOM I ever played. All the way back in the early 2000's at a friend's house down the street. I had lots of fun, it was my first FPS after all. It was an awesome experience;
Thing is, it's an awesome experience if that's how you got to experience DOOM for the first time...
Many many years later, I decided I wanted to play some DOOM, so I downloaded the DOS version and played it through DOSBOX... It worked, it was nice. Then I found out about sourceports like gzdoom, zandronum and others. Nowadays I play it through the official sourceport on Steam/Switch/Xbox/Playstation.
But I never forgot how cool it was seeing this game for the first time, and I must say, those were some damn rose tinted glasses.
Why? Because this version is outright terrible.
From the get-go, the first thing you see after the publisher's logo is a lower quality version of the classic Doom splash screen. Of course, the SNES can't handle as many colours as a PC, so this is fine, I guess.
But then...
No ceilings, no floor, lower resolution than usual for a SNES, terrible artifacted HUD and the FPS... MY GOD, it's low.
It's less than 14 FPS, that's for sure.
And DOOM players might say: Just lower the screen size!
Well, that's something you can do other ports to get more performance...
But this is the entire pause menu. And yes, I say pause menu, there is no start menu here. There's nothing, it just boots you straight into the game and the pause menu only gives you these settings.
There is no save feature, there is no graphics adjustment, and turning the sound on or off does nothing for performance (which is to be expected to be fair).
(There is a map screen pressing select though)
I'm not one to give up so easy though! I kept playing...
and I beat the first level!
This was starting to give me a god damned headache. It was that bad, for real.
So why am I covering this? Well, welcome to my new series of posts! Impossible ports are ports that while not exactly impossible, are hard to to do. And porting a 1993 semi-3D shooter to the SNES is no easy feat!
This game is one of a few that uses the SuperFX2 'helper' chip inside the cartridge to give it an extra boost of power. Of course, the SFX2 can't do miracles, so that's why a lot is removed here. Like the textures for the floor and ceilings to save up bandwidth, outdoor areas, 5 levels, and more.
This port was done by Randy Linden alone, he initially started it because he just wanted to see what could be done and because he was a fan of DOOM.
Back then the sourcecode for DOOM wasn't yet available, so he used the "Unofficial Doom Specs" which is a document by Matt Fell which outlines how the game works and its technical details.
The resources were extracted from an IWAD (the file that contains the game itself in the DOOM engine).
An Amiga computer was used for development and a hacked cartridge of Star Fox was used for testing, his friend John Coffey who was also a fan of DOOM helped shrink levels down and reduce useless details to improve performance.
These are other differences from the SNES version to the PC version, info taken from the DOOM wiki.
Surprisingly this game supports the XBAND modem which allows for ONLINE MULTIPLAYER!
Yes, a shoddy port of DOOM for the SNES from the 90's somehow allows from online multiplayer. It's crazy!
This is a good port considering the hardware constraints, but it ends up being a bad games because of, well, the hardware constraints.
It's really impressive what Linden managed to do, and DOOM was also ported to some other systems that couldn't quite cut it, but this is in my opinion the most insanely cool version.
Give it a shot, just don't play for too long or else you'll definitely get some light nausea.
If you actually want to play DOOM on a retro console, go for the PS1. It doesn't have the same soundtrack, but its alternative soundtrack and how well everything works makes it a great port, and it's one I've been playing recently on my Gamestick GD10 late at night with the lights off. The ambiance on that version is really something else!
Thanks for reading y'all!
