4 ms·

A nice 25-year retrospective from one of the original FPS title DOOM's team. > The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything about

A nice 25-year retrospective from one of the original FPS title DOOM's team. > The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything about games. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM would signal a new era. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D’s chaingun audio. It wasn't as if multi player games did not exist before; however, they fairly exclusively were single screen affairs. Being first person and having your own screen on your own machine was truly revolutionary. I fondly remember fragging my family members and learning about IPX (it wasn't always TCP everywhere).

wvenable 8y ago
I remember playing Doom with two computers connected with a serial cable.
- EvanAnderson 8y ago
  A friend and I were so desperate to play over serial that, lacking the proper serial cable, we "shimmed" the PCs with books to get the serial ports at the same height, put them back-to-back, and made a "cable" out of gender changers and null modems that we had sitting around.
  - eggsome 8y ago
    I can do you one better. We emulated IPX over serial so that we could have have 3 players. I can't seem to find any information on the net regarding this, but I know that we managed to get it working somehow. There was some dirty TSR hack that intercepted IPX calls and sent them via serial. One of the PCs (with 2 serial ports) had to act as the "gateway" and run the game first, then the "edge" PCs could connect. Fortunately my best friend had 2 serial ports and a seperate PS2 port for his mouse (although whenever he rage quit both of our PCs hardlocked for some reason). If I recall correctly it only worked with a particular version of the DOOM exe - so we could only play the shareware version (despite having access to the full game). 6 months later we pooled some cash and got NE2000 cards so that we could play properly without dicking around with crazy hacks - I do recall my friend being disappointed that he could no longer crash our PCs and end the game when he lost anymore :)
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    Oh my god, I love this. Of all the rigged-up gaming solutions I've heard over the years, this might take the cake.
- elsonrodriguez 8y ago
  I feel that I lucked out. My area code had a dialup BBS with 40 lines, on which they ran software to tunnel IPX. On the client side you ran SIRDOOM, which then shelled out to Doom once the connection was setup. Best part: it was all free. I never got the background on why they did it, and why they never charged a dime. Maybe they had aspirations to be the next DWANGO? Who knows... but I spent many a night fragging till I dropped.
  - treebeard901 8y ago
    I try to tell people this exact same story whenever the opportunity presents itself. It might be the first thing I've noticed similar to a "When I was your age story", except movie theaters were not 25 cents... We had multiplayer online shooters in the mid-90s.
  - shinymark 8y ago
    Wow, that sounds great! I used to play on DWANGO a lot as an early teen (13 or 14, back in 1994-95). Somehow I convinced the DWANGO staff to make me a moderator on the San Francisco servers... it came with responsibility to keep chat relatively civil but it also meant free Doom 2 on their service which was incredible at the time. I ended up talking to Romero directly back then because he would make random (?) visits to various DWANGO servers. I remember him specifically being generous with his time chatting with me and others. So if you ever see this Romero, thank you!
    - rzzzt 8y ago
      John used to talk to me on the game's last level as well, but he was hidden behind a wall and I could not understand perfectly what he said.
dkonofalski 8y ago
I was pretty young when DooM came out and getting IPX to work was (and still is to this day) one of the most frustrating experiences that I can remember. That being said, when it did work, it was an absolutely marvelous experience. This was really the first game that I can remember having the realization that I was playing against another person and that they were probably going through the same mental gymnastics that I was while we were playing. It was really a life-changing experience for my perception.
berbec 8y ago
I remember blowing my allowance on Django (iirc), a doom multiplayer modem client. Tunneled ipxspx over 9600bps
- oops 8y ago
  > Django (iirc) Dwango! :-) There are still modern doom servers online using the Dwango wads. I spent so many hours deathmatching on those maps. Good times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO
  - berbec 8y ago
    Yes! Oh the memories. If blow through my monthly allotment of hours in a weekend
msla 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze There was one earlier example of deathmatch as we know it, and I played it... after a fashion. > MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze introduced the concept of deathmatch combat.[1] [snip] > Up to 16 computers can be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port. Hence the name. What a weird and wonderful hack. On a personal note, I played a port of this... to the original Game Boy: > A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software (now Blue Planet Software), under the title Faceball 2000.[5] James Yee, owner of Xanth, had a vision to port the 520ST application to the Game Boy. George Miller was hired to re-write the AI-based drone logic, giving each drone a unique personality trait.[citation needed] It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It did so by connecting multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - seven such adapters were needed for a full 16 player experience.[citation needed] Game Boy deathmatch. Never got to experience it myself, as my family only had the one Game Boy and we didn't know anyone else who had the game.
- merlincorey 8y ago
  I really like the idea of a network of computers daisy chained via MIDI. That's amazing! Thanks for sharing.
- emptybits 8y ago
  Hi, Xanth programmer from the 8/16-bit era here. Can confirm the MIDI Maze FPS ancestry and MIDI-based deathmatch "LAN parties" (that predated LANs). Can also confirm that we were (and are) in awe and big fans of ID, Romero, Carmack, etc. (We prototyped but never released a PC FPS.) Playing an FPS deathmatch head-to-head on Game Boys was as giddy and intense as you'd expect in 1992-3. Literally, it was head-to-head ... those cables weren't very long. Before anyone runs off to buy an old cart or run an image on an emulator, set your expectations of FPS framerates realistically for a Z80 (or 65816) console in the early 1990s. CPUs were slow for matrix (or any) math, memory access was slow, buses were narrow, "graphics hardware" was optimal for side scrollers and tile-mapped character graphics with a few sprites. All of this worked against quickly rendering frames of 3D. We certainly couldn't use any textbook 3D graphics algorithms. It was all trickery and shortcuts but it worked. (The SNES was a bit better though we predated the FX chip which I think would have helped more.) The Game Boy version was amazing for its portability. I personally enjoyed our SNES version the most but it was back to single-screen two-player. Both were written single-handedly by a genius engineer named Robert Champagne who later went on to be Chief of Technology at Nintendo Software.
cromwellian 8y ago
The first real-time multiplayer game I played 'online' was Modem Wars for the Commodore 64 by the now deceased Danielle Bunten Berry, who also made lots of other incredible ground breaking games like M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold. I wish Modem Wars was rebooted, in many ways, it was the first "Starcraft 2" game for modem play, and was incredibly fun.
- ido 8y ago
  Why was it the "Starcraft 2 of modem play" rather than the "Starcraft of modem play"? Especially since the two games are so similar & the first Starcraft was already renown for its network play (asking genuinely not sarcastically)?
Jaruzel 8y ago
Something most people don't mention is that if you were lucky enough to have three DOS machines side by side, and also have them networked (IPX or TCP/IP) you could run DOOM in 'ultrawide' mode by bringing up the game across all three monitors, with the -left and -right command line options on the respective machines. I'm not sure if any of the engine ports (zDoom etc.) still support this though.
- wink 8y ago
  Wow, I can't believe I never heard of this or even tried it back then.

wvenable 8y ago

I remember playing Doom with two computers connected with a serial cable.

EvanAnderson 8y ago
A friend and I were so desperate to play over serial that, lacking the proper serial cable, we "shimmed" the PCs with books to get the serial ports at the same height, put them back-to-back, and made a "cable" out of gender changers and null modems that we had sitting around.
- eggsome 8y ago
  I can do you one better. We emulated IPX over serial so that we could have have 3 players. I can't seem to find any information on the net regarding this, but I know that we managed to get it working somehow. There was some dirty TSR hack that intercepted IPX calls and sent them via serial. One of the PCs (with 2 serial ports) had to act as the "gateway" and run the game first, then the "edge" PCs could connect. Fortunately my best friend had 2 serial ports and a seperate PS2 port for his mouse (although whenever he rage quit both of our PCs hardlocked for some reason). If I recall correctly it only worked with a particular version of the DOOM exe - so we could only play the shareware version (despite having access to the full game). 6 months later we pooled some cash and got NE2000 cards so that we could play properly without dicking around with crazy hacks - I do recall my friend being disappointed that he could no longer crash our PCs and end the game when he lost anymore :)
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  Oh my god, I love this. Of all the rigged-up gaming solutions I've heard over the years, this might take the cake.
elsonrodriguez 8y ago
I feel that I lucked out. My area code had a dialup BBS with 40 lines, on which they ran software to tunnel IPX. On the client side you ran SIRDOOM, which then shelled out to Doom once the connection was setup. Best part: it was all free. I never got the background on why they did it, and why they never charged a dime. Maybe they had aspirations to be the next DWANGO? Who knows... but I spent many a night fragging till I dropped.
- treebeard901 8y ago
  I try to tell people this exact same story whenever the opportunity presents itself. It might be the first thing I've noticed similar to a "When I was your age story", except movie theaters were not 25 cents... We had multiplayer online shooters in the mid-90s.
- shinymark 8y ago
  Wow, that sounds great! I used to play on DWANGO a lot as an early teen (13 or 14, back in 1994-95). Somehow I convinced the DWANGO staff to make me a moderator on the San Francisco servers... it came with responsibility to keep chat relatively civil but it also meant free Doom 2 on their service which was incredible at the time. I ended up talking to Romero directly back then because he would make random (?) visits to various DWANGO servers. I remember him specifically being generous with his time chatting with me and others. So if you ever see this Romero, thank you!
  - rzzzt 8y ago
    John used to talk to me on the game's last level as well, but he was hidden behind a wall and I could not understand perfectly what he said.

dkonofalski 8y ago

I was pretty young when DooM came out and getting IPX to work was (and still is to this day) one of the most frustrating experiences that I can remember. That being said, when it did work, it was an absolutely marvelous experience. This was really the first game that I can remember having the realization that I was playing against another person and that they were probably going through the same mental gymnastics that I was while we were playing. It was really a life-changing experience for my perception.

berbec 8y ago

I remember blowing my allowance on Django (iirc), a doom multiplayer modem client. Tunneled ipxspx over 9600bps

oops 8y ago
> Django (iirc) Dwango! :-) There are still modern doom servers online using the Dwango wads. I spent so many hours deathmatching on those maps. Good times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO
- berbec 8y ago
  Yes! Oh the memories. If blow through my monthly allotment of hours in a weekend

msla 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze There was one earlier example of deathmatch as we know it, and I played it... after a fashion. > MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze introduced the concept of deathmatch combat.[1] [snip] > Up to 16 computers can be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port. Hence the name. What a weird and wonderful hack. On a personal note, I played a port of this... to the original Game Boy: > A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software (now Blue Planet Software), under the title Faceball 2000.[5] James Yee, owner of Xanth, had a vision to port the 520ST application to the Game Boy. George Miller was hired to re-write the AI-based drone logic, giving each drone a unique personality trait.[citation needed] It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It did so by connecting multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - seven such adapters were needed for a full 16 player experience.[citation needed] Game Boy deathmatch. Never got to experience it myself, as my family only had the one Game Boy and we didn't know anyone else who had the game.

merlincorey 8y ago
I really like the idea of a network of computers daisy chained via MIDI. That's amazing! Thanks for sharing.
emptybits 8y ago
Hi, Xanth programmer from the 8/16-bit era here. Can confirm the MIDI Maze FPS ancestry and MIDI-based deathmatch "LAN parties" (that predated LANs). Can also confirm that we were (and are) in awe and big fans of ID, Romero, Carmack, etc. (We prototyped but never released a PC FPS.) Playing an FPS deathmatch head-to-head on Game Boys was as giddy and intense as you'd expect in 1992-3. Literally, it was head-to-head ... those cables weren't very long. Before anyone runs off to buy an old cart or run an image on an emulator, set your expectations of FPS framerates realistically for a Z80 (or 65816) console in the early 1990s. CPUs were slow for matrix (or any) math, memory access was slow, buses were narrow, "graphics hardware" was optimal for side scrollers and tile-mapped character graphics with a few sprites. All of this worked against quickly rendering frames of 3D. We certainly couldn't use any textbook 3D graphics algorithms. It was all trickery and shortcuts but it worked. (The SNES was a bit better though we predated the FX chip which I think would have helped more.) The Game Boy version was amazing for its portability. I personally enjoyed our SNES version the most but it was back to single-screen two-player. Both were written single-handedly by a genius engineer named Robert Champagne who later went on to be Chief of Technology at Nintendo Software.

cromwellian 8y ago

The first real-time multiplayer game I played 'online' was Modem Wars for the Commodore 64 by the now deceased Danielle Bunten Berry, who also made lots of other incredible ground breaking games like M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold. I wish Modem Wars was rebooted, in many ways, it was the first "Starcraft 2" game for modem play, and was incredibly fun.

ido 8y ago
Why was it the "Starcraft 2 of modem play" rather than the "Starcraft of modem play"? Especially since the two games are so similar & the first Starcraft was already renown for its network play (asking genuinely not sarcastically)?

Jaruzel 8y ago

Something most people don't mention is that if you were lucky enough to have three DOS machines side by side, and also have them networked (IPX or TCP/IP) you could run DOOM in 'ultrawide' mode by bringing up the game across all three monitors, with the -left and -right command line options on the respective machines. I'm not sure if any of the engine ports (zDoom etc.) still support this though.

wink 8y ago
Wow, I can't believe I never heard of this or even tried it back then.