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| Doomworld: Was Doom originally going to have "player lives", similar to shoot-em-up games with 3 player lives? If so, why was this changed? |
| John: Removing the concept of lives ensured that the player would get through the game without becoming too frustrated. |
| What did the marines who were playing cards in the alpha version do? Do they follow you? |
| They don't follow you. I don't think they ever were supposed to do that. I think they were just supposed to die as soon as a horde of demons swarmed into the room at the start of the game. We took them out because it would have been Special Case code to get that to happen the right way and we also had no time. |
| Why was the BFG changed? The "eight billion fireballs" one in the press pre-beta looks cool :) |
| The 8,000,000,000 fireballs (1) looked like Christmas and (2) slowed the engine down on a 386/33 because there were too many sprites on the screen. Additionally, it was cooler the way it turned out because it didn't look like we just modified the Plasma gun to make a more powerful weapon. |
| Who came up with the idea of Ultimate Doom? |
| At one of our company meetings, we decided when we were going to release the full version of DOOM into the stores and in this meeting we decided to rename it Ultimate DOOM and to give the buyer more incentive to purchase the game by adding another episode. For our customers who bought the full version of DOOM through our 800 number, we made a patch for them that would upgrade them to the Ultimate DOOM product. |
| Why are there no level par times in the DOOM II intermission screen? On that note, where did the ridiculous par times for Doom 1 come from? |
| I didn't have time to set all the par times for DOOM2 because there were so many levels and we only took 8 months to make DOOM2. I set all the par times for DOOM 1 by starting the level, running to the exit as fast as possible, rounding off the resulting time, then adding 30 seconds for padding. I actually got those levels done faster than the par times. |
| Some of the Episode 4 levels are great, but why no new boss at E4M8? |
| We didn't plan on
adding anything major for the fourth episode, just new maps. We didn't
want to modify any more of the code than was needed to support that new
episode. The names of the levels were assigned by me, but all the
names came from a list that Kevin Cloud compiled that all came from the
Bible. I picked "Thy Flesh Consumed" as the name of the extra episode.
In fact, I finished E4M2 in a record time for me. There was never a DOOM/DOOM2 map that I ever made from concept to finish faster than E4M2. It took me 6 hours and I started at midnight and worked until 6 AM and it was done. |
| Doom's Episode 1 was one of the first (and one of the last) widely distributed shareware programs. Why was there no Doom2 demo/shareware of any sort? |
| GT Interactive never asked us for a demo and we didn't think about putting one out. |
| Who's idea was it for the "The End" bunny scroller at the E3M8 ending, and why was it kept around in Ultimate Doom? |
| I believe Kevin Cloud may have come up with the idea of panning left and showing a ruined, burning city while the music turned "wrong". The bunny head on a stake was Adrian's idea. :) |
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