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There is a youtube curator called AHOY, whom tends to make documentary level content about older games and real life weapon history. I came across AHOYs documentary on the original DOOM games a little while ago, and since then I have been slightly obsessed with OG doom. The history of games and computing in general is a facinating subject which I enjoy learning about. The Documentary a great watch if you want to understand more about the context of original doom, or just get hyped to play it again.
'Whatever Happened To Everyone Who Worked On Original Doom?' By UtterSpartan
I also like speedrunning in games, and doom is a big speedrunning community. If you want to understand the history of passionate players pushing the bounds of the doom games, I recommend watching some videos by Karl Jobst on various doom speedruns and community achievements to really appreciate the rich history of doom.
Karl Jobst Doom Videos Playlist
Finally if you enjoy learning about the coding/programming side of games and the many internal quirks of dooms mechanics, decino is a great curator who dives deep into all that. They also upload gameplay sessions of various doom WADs.
Decino's Doom Analysis Playlist
So, I was sold on the carnage. I wanted to play OG doom in all its old-school glory. I desired, no, needed to rip and tear the way God intended.
Conventionally, to play doom you have to, well, buy one of the original games first. This is how most people start off with doom. Buut, there are some legitimate workarounds for those who don't want to or can't afford to spend 5$ on a 30 year old game.
The source code for the doom engine was released a LONG time ago, so that part is notoriously free. What *isn't* free is all the assets like sprites, textures, music, sounds, and other proprietary goodies that go into the visuals. Everything that makes a game besides its mechanical code.
What this means is that we are left with the barebones skeleton of a game, with all its hard coded mechanics and physics engine, but no visual assets or map data that makes up a game. Plenty of commercial games from the late 90s run off some variant of the doom engine for this reason. But all these spin-off doomengine games are also, not free.
This is where freedoom comes in. Freedoom is an ongoing collaborative effort by many individual sprite artist, game developers, and map makers to re-make *every* asset from doom and doom2 and use those free assets with the free doom engine to build a completely free and open game with everything published under GPL. This project started in 2001, over 20 years ago, and particularly in recent years has made vast sprite overhauls and visual inprovements. A lot of creative love and labor has gone into this project from many talented individuals all sharing one vision: A doom game Acessable to everyone.
Believe it or not, there are people with computers who can't afford to waste money games, or those who live in such poor and impoverished nations whoms local currency is so irrelivant online stores don't accept it. The existance of free and open source software is the only alternative these people have short of straight up piracy. Its these people who need escapism the most. The existance of freedoom means that everyone and anyone who wants a classic doomlike experience can legitimately have it.
But freedoom is just one game made by a couple of hobbiest right? Sure some of the maps might be servicable and the sprites acceptable, but surely there isn't much else content wise. What else can freedoom do for me? What more can an inferior FOSS doom clone acomplish?
The original doom games levels were good and all, but we would'nt still be talking about these games 30 years later if not for the insane community of doomers who continue to contribute content long after development stopped. Doom was one of the first PC games to truly embrace the modding scene, and still is a bastion of the people all these years later. Some mods were actually released officially by ID as an expansion known by 'Final Doom' containing the Pluntonium Experement and Evilution custom episodes.
Many community made wads produced by hardcore fans come extremely close to rivaling IDs own masterful level designs. Some of them re-haul the game in completely new ways known as total-conversion mods. And all of those community made wads are ours for the playing thanks to freedoom. Yes thats right, any mod or wad made for vanilla doom 1 and 2 will work flawlessly with freedoom. Including total conversion mods which are like new games in themselves.
When you go to the doomworld fourms, particularly the freedoom section, people will sometimes ask if theres a way to get freedoom closer to the original doom experience. I think its a fair question to ask how close freedoom can get to og doom in terms of aesthetics and maps without straight up infringement or piracy. 'How close can a free clone get to the original while still being free'.
Heres the best way I found as of 2022 to get *very* close to emulating the original doom experiences without crossing that line of infringement using freedoom and a couple of very special WADs that very luckily just came into existance like very recently.
'Doom The Way We Remember it' and its sequel/counterpart 'Doom 2 The Way We Remember It' Are a duo of wads published last year in 2021 which act as full re-creations of all the original doom levels (and sounds) from memory. Many different members of the map making community came together for this project.
In practicality, these are free community remake maps of *every* map from vanilla doom 1 and 2 which largely stay true to the feel and design of the originals, while adding slight altercations in order to spice things up. The slight altercations are really fun to discover if you are already familiar with the og maps. It feels just like doom, but somethings off. I love the levels I played so far, and is just different enough from the officials to not infringe.
Critisisms? Well the levels are simpler in geometry, and not nearly as playtested as the official doom maps which means there are times you might get stuck or fusturated at an uninetnional design quirk. I think any critisisms are mostly voided by the fact that these are average people making the maps as a passion project and not paid devs. Common people dedicating their free time and efforts with no compensation, so expecting ID level of map design refinement is absurd.
Showcase Trailer for DTWWRI by Engired
DTWWRI fourm post on doomworld
Showcase Trailer for D2TWWRI by Engired
D2TWWRI fourm post on doomworld
Its not at all obvious how to get custom WADs loaded into your game if you have not done it before. The following is a step by step guide, as well as some explainations on technical defenitions.
WAD files, which stand for 'wheres all the data?' are a very clever way which games that run on the doom engine are packaged for distribution. Instead of 10,000 different files all seperated out on your file system like most unity based games do, all the data for the game is bundled in one file. Like a early kind of .ZIP, all art assets, midi sound bytes, map data, and all the other things that make a game, a game. All bundled into one easy to distribute file.
This makes modding the core doom games absurdly easy. Really the first time the average player had such convienence compared to almost every other game. Want a new community curated expansion full of expertly curated maps on par with the official product? Want to make a complete graphical overhaul to the base texures? Want to change the way everything looks to be kid friendly and ship kid-friendly doom inside cerial boxes? Want to throw out the shooty bang bang gamelplay completely and make a whole new RPG game with the visual aesthetics of super mario?
Just download the appropriate WAD file then plug and chug. Its as easy as that.
One more thing about WADs, there are two kinds, as far as I can tell. IWADs and custom WADs. IWADS are the base asset files that the doom engine requires for anything else. IWADS are the bedrock for everything else to be built off of. All the skin and flesh that goes on top of the metaphorical skeleton that is the source engine.
Regular custom wads are not standalone and require an IWAD to build off of. The vast majority of all WADs are this type. Things like custom maps, retextured sprites, even total conversions. This makes sense after all, just the custom map data means can do nothing without the rest of the other asset data to work with.
doom.wad, doom2.wad, freedoom1.wad, and freedoom2.wad are all IWADs, or standalone games that contain complete asset data.
DTWWRI.wad, D2TWWRI.wad, plutonium.wad and tnt.wad all count as standard custom WADs that contain partial custom data that overrides some of the IWAD data.
Source Engine Ports like prboom+, GZdoom, chocolate doom, are all different community maintained ports of the original doom engine that was open sourced after release. The Doom Engine is responsible for all the nitty gritty mechanics of game physics, spawning mechanics, map building algorithms, and all other forms of mechanical and mathematical logic that complex games must simulate and continuously re-calculate during gameplay.
Source ports exist because the original doom engine is *veery* old. Its so old that engine was designed to run on MS-DOS computer systems. Theres no need to get into what MS-DOS is/was, its dead and completely irrelevant in 2022 outside of the retrocomputing community. The short of it is that Windows killed native support for MS-DOS after windows 2001, thus making the original DOS doom engine un-runnable in modern computers outside of very inefficent virtual software emulation with a program like DOSBox.
Many attempts have been succesfully made by different parts of the doom community in the mission to port the DOS doom engine to more modern hardware/software archetecture so that OG doom can be played natively with hardware acceletation. Some of these projects remain as true as possible to vanilla doom and its intentional limitations. Some of these ports completely overhaul the source to impliment many modern gaming convinences.
If you would like more knowledge on the many kinds of source ports and what their differences are, I found this video helpful.
'A Subjective Look at Dooms Source Ports' by Dwars
Source ports are still just the engine though, the mechanical foundation of the game that has no data to work with on its own. You must provide it with atleast an IWAD.
I hope that helps anyone who may be confused by all the talk of WAD and engines and such. Its really not that complicated but people don't like to explain things in appropriate detail on the internet because were all lazy.
I use a unix based system, specifically ubuntu drived, and prboom+ is the default source port engine installed with it through the package manager. You might be on windows or bsd variant so installation process and location of internal files will be different. Good luck!
Installation is most easily done from the package manager for most linux systems. prboom+ (the engine) *should* be installed automatically along side freedoom as a dependency. Don't forget that the choice is yours if you want to use a different engine like chocolate doom or GZDoom instead if its easier to install those on your native system.
freedoom IWAD official download
Doom The Way We Remember It (v2)
Doom 2 The Way We Remember It (v8)
After downloading the zips, extract the .wad files to the appropriate location where doom wads should go on your computer. For me using an ubuntu based distro, this location is
/usr/share/games/doom
The freedom1 and freedoom2 wads should already be here too. These are the core IWAD files for freedoom phase 1 & 2. The DTWWRI wads we just added to this folder will serve as the custom files loaded on top of the IWADs.
In the terminal, use these commands respectively
For Doom 1:
prboom-plus -iwad freedoom1.wad -file DTWWRI.wad
For Doom 2:
prboom-plus -iwad freedoom2.wad -file D2TWWRI.wad
If all went well, the game should boot up with the custom maps using freedooms assets. Congratulations, you are winnar!
The command is fairly self-explainitory. prboom-plus is the engine, -iwad freedoomX.wad is an argument telling prboom that freedoom is the main IWAD to be used as a base for graphical assets and resources.
-file DTWWRI.wad is the custom file loaded on top of the base assets, usually things like maps but some mods also add their own textures and assets which over-ride the base ones provided by the IWAD.
If command line terminals scare or confuse you, which is perfectly fine if your just an average person who knows nothing about how computer software actually works under the hood, then your best bet is to download a program which acts as a simple, easy to interact with Graphical User Interface (GUI) that lets you load different doom wad profiles with the easy click of a button.
The example that comes to my mind for prboom+ is Prboom-launcher. Im sure every popular source port has its own little GUI launcher on github, happy hunting for one that works for your needs.
The replies to some of these topics about how close freedoom can get to doom can often boil down to this statement
If you want to play doom, buy it. The Devs worked really hard on it and deserve the money. Stop being poor and spend the 5$ or wait till a sale.
'The Devs' aka ID software crew of 1996, are the ones who 'deserve the money'. Guess what? they're gone. All of them. With the exception of 3 of the original credited names, everyone who worked on OG doom games have moved on from ID in the 30 years since. How much do you want to bet that not a single person who worked on original doom save maybe Carmak or Romero, sees a dime of that sweet sweet GOG or steam sale revenue?
You know who does absolutely see that revenue, though? Bethesda, the company that bought ID out a LONG time ago. The ID software of today is just a hollow token name championed by yet another souless conglomertate game publisher. ID is Bethesda by any other name, and has been for a long time now.
Any money you spend today on a legit digital copy of doom goes largely to Todd Howards pocket. I don't know about you but Todd Howard got enough of my hard earned money already from the many different versions of buggy skyrim and botched Fallout releases bought over the decade. Oh also I already bought legal copies of doom 1 and 2 for the nintendo switch a few years ago.
We can argue till were blue in the face about the morality vs legality of pirating old video games. In my opinion, if you bought a legit copy of old game sometime, I wouldn't loose too much sleep over using 'alternative means' to get the files you already paid to have.
In short:
"Oh but wont somebody think of the poor megacorporations and multi-millionares? How will Our Lord And Savior Toddy ever finance his 5th mansion and custom yahct if we don't buy another half baked re-release or slightly improved remaster?" - some doomworld users probably
Me: *Sings sea shantee while sailing the high seas*
Many full conversion mods for doom basically have the full original IWAD data packaged inside just slightly altered shades. While on first glance this seems legally dubious, in practicality just slightly editing the textures is enough to avoid laywer troubles. If WAD makers have gotten away with it this long, they probably will keep getting away with it. I guess its a smarter move on IDs part to turn a blind eye to this very obscure and grey form of slightly-altered data distribution than go the nuclear legal option on a large part of its own dedicated fans.
So freedoom IWAD + some full texture conversion mods = looks just like regular doom in most aspects. If direct piracy isn't up your ally, this is the way to go if you really want that official doom aesthetic.
There are many overhaul WADs that exist for the express use in multiplayer matches. Freedoom offers a variant called FreeDM for multiplayer death matches. So far I haven't done any multiplayer so can't say much besides its a thing. If you happen to be a fellow doomer and would like to play some casual matches with me, shoot an email :)
I hope this has been educational, or at least mildly entertaining. I didn't know any of this stuff three days ago myself and am glad to condense the information I gathered for others to benefit from. See you next time.