Doom

The scads of material written about the creation and release of Doom in December of 1993 are enough to retroactively make this tiny website's attempt to explain the phenom redundant by several factors. Even so, I feel that there is something I can say that relates to the wider discussion of games as art in general.

The company of id software would base out of Mesquite, Texas. This is important to note because Mesquite had been a primarily agricultural community before the end of World War II brought suburbs and modernity to the area. For context, Mesquite had an official census count of 101,484 people in the year 1990, totaling roughly %0.0408 of the American census as a whole, and equal to %0.34 percent of the total population of California at the time. As such, the economy of this area that isn't local mercentiles are tied heavily to the city of Dallas - owing both to Dallas being part of the Texas Triangle Megaregion and for the simple reality of being located next to Dallas.

Of course, the difficulty of discering what part of Texas DOOM was made in - a company that started in Louisiana, and then to Wisconsin, and then to Texas - begs the question of what the hell any of this has to do with DOOM at all. Shreveport, Louisiana is an area mere miles out from the Gulf Coast Megaregion, and Madison is the capital of Wisconsin just a scant dozen miles out from Milwaukee and the Great Lakes megalopolis. All of these areas have a relation to each other being a hub of culture and finance without the stressors related to working in a megaregion. My thesis is that, until very recently with the advent of freeware game tools and modding capabilities, any games that could be made had to come from within or around these 11 megaregions. But, this would not always be the case.

The Alpha Builds

The project began officially on September 18th, 1992, and the earliest known build of the game would release as a tech demo five months later. Doom v0.2 is a mostly unremarkable single room, with enemy behaviors not set into stone, but with a clear level of work put into modular lighting. Doom v0.4 is slowly coalesing towards the form it would take, with the ambitious goal of making AI follower marines still on the table. It is also noteworthy for having a map that is recognizable as an alpha version of Computer Station (E1M7).

The WADs

The fan material that would arrive from the supernova stardom of Doom may well be impossible to quantify, but the research of said material has been made a great deal easier from the service of wikis and fans eager to archive this material, without whose work this page would not exist.

The first WAD ever made - or considered the first of its kind based on current evidence - is a file called ORIGWAD.PWD made by Jeffrey Bird. Coming out a mere 4 months after Doom itself, it was potentially the first ever WAD of its kind made entirely from scratch ie: not made by altering pre-existing maps but a standalone file. There are arguments about if this was truly the first PWAD ever made, but considering how remarkable it is that we can put a timestamp on these early materials at all, for the purposes of this page, it will be assumed ORIGWAD.PWD was the first.

Galaxia

The Czech Republic has a long and surprising history with computer games, going to the trouble of playing card games via printer on Czech produced mini-computers called PMD 85. The abundance of these computers in Czech schooling is almost certainly the reason for this history. Either way, it comes as no surprise, then, that at least one Doom WAD would release in 1994. What IS surprising is both the timing of the release in its importance to Czech gaming in general and the level of care in its design. The first commercial game to release out of Czechia is a game called The Secret of Donkey Island (Tajemství Oslího ostrova), released just a month before Galaxia was finished, on June 20th, 1994.