Hello there! So, with the recent release of The Ancient Gods Part 1 for Doom Eternal, Doom fever has started anew. So, what better opportunity to talk about an old port of Doom than right about now?
Our tale starts in 1995 with a company called Art Data Interactive, lead by an individual called Randy Scott. This man had a pretty neat plan: snagging the license and source code for Doom and porting it to the 3DO, with added FMV cutscenes, new levels, new weapons and new enemies. Sounds pretty good so far, right? Well, this guy thought that you could add stuff to the game simply by drawing it and putting it in the game. Investors and distributors started making deals with mister Scott, who, in turn, was obligated to provide the finished game by Christmas, the same year.
Numerous studios were called upon to make the game and all of them were turned away by the tight deadline and the incompetence of Art Data as a company. Now, into the fray comes Rebecca Heinemam, the heroine of our story. She already worked on id Software properties in the past, porting over Wolfenstein 3D to the 3DO, so Randy Scott lied to her, saying the game is 90% complete, in order to convince her to sign the contract with Art Data Interactive.
Of course, miss Heineman quickly found out that the company only had the original source code and no work was ever done, so she wanted to quit, but eventually was convinced to put up with the bullshit as a favour for The 3DO Company. Rebecca quickly started work, opting to port over the Atari Jaguar version of the game to the 3DO, due to how similar the two consoles were on the inside. She disregarded all of Randy Scott's new features.
During development, a pretty big problem popped up: the music of the original game was in MIDI format, so it would need to be converted, a process which would take a long time and expensive equipment, both of which were out of the question. By some form of divine intervention, Randy was in a rock band and he finally did something in the favour of the project: he and his band recorded cd quality renditions of the original music. Sure, it all sounded a bit off, but it was still pretty good.
In the end, the game could technically run, so Randy Scott did another stupid thing, screwing up everything. He requested the printing of 50 thousand copies of the game, costing a total of 150 thousand dollars, which had to be paid back to The 3DO Company. Why did he do this? To pay back the money he borrowed to get the license and pay for development and printing, of course! Thing is, he hoped all 50.000 copies would sell at full price, which clearly did not happen, as the reviews came in and the game hit the bargain bins.
After all this ordeal, Randy Scott tried to pin the blame on Rebecca for the shoddy port. Miss Heineman anticipated this crappy behaviour, of course, and waited to cash in the final check for development before giving Randy the...finished?...game. Of course, bad business leads to bad things, and Art Data closed down its door soon after all this unfolded.
All in all, the game itself is a dumpster fire, for the reasons mentioned above, but, to be honest, it really is a miracle it even got to this state in the 2-3 short months it had in the oven. The thing we should take back from this is Rebecca Heineman's prowess and determination. Also, as a final note, miss Heineman is actually active on YouTube and Twitter and is open to questions about her past projects, so if you want to know any more details, you can look her up and ask her yourselves.
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