The World of Doom, Tailored to Fit Yours

By L.R. Shannon from The New York Times, June 27, 1995

Nobody knows how many millions of people have played the gory adventure game Doom since it was introduced more than a year ago. The first episode was free, in the sense that one could download it from an on-line service, although subsequent episodes cost money. Its sequel, Doom II, is strictly cash and carry.

A few hours with Doom II can be almost as exhausting as actually severing the heads and limbs of well-armed enemies with pistol and rocket, chainsaw and plasma rifle before they do the same to you. The player moves through the mysterious corridors of a world populated by growling, groaning — whats? — accompanied by the sound of threatening music. Whatever they are, when you kill them, they bleed. Luckily VGA and Super VGA monitors are not of photographic quality.

But Doom, moral objections aside, is also educational. Early in its shelf life, the developers, Id Software of Mesquite, Tex., made available the resources for patient and skillful young men (and they are almost all young men) to write add-ons, variations, spookier and bloodier scenes and settings.

Hank Leukart has brought these resources together in the “Doom Hacker’s Guide” (MIS:Press; $21.95), a book of ideas and instruction packaged with a CD-ROM bearing tools like DEU v5.21, for creating maps; NewWADTool v1.3, a sound, graphics and music editor, and others. With patience and skill, you too can wield these programs to make background music out of a snippet of the school song, turn the C.E.O. into one of the enemies to be blown to smithereens or transform one of the scenes into your classroom or office.

Hacking Doom is not for the faint of heart, but then, neither is Doom itself. If you are comfortable with SideDefs, creating a vertex and dealing with MUS files, plunge ahead. Otherwise, stick with Write, Basic and Solitaire.

You can use Write, the simple word processor that comes with Windows 3.1, to read the FAQ (frequently asked questions) files on the CD-ROM or, presumably, any other program that can read or convert a TXT file. Mr. Leukart has operated a Doom FAQ (ap641@cleveland.freenet.edu) since before the beginning. A high school sophomore when he wrote the book, a senior this fall, he attends Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio.

“The Doom Hacker’s Guide” is for owners of the DOS/Windows version of the game. The good news for players, if not programmers, of Macintosh games, is that a Mac Doom II distributed by GT Interactive Software of New York City is coming out in the next month or so at about $50. It is a beta (not quite finished) version of Doom II that has been occupying my back-porch Powerbook; I hope the neighbors aren’t looking.