DOOM Port Corner, Entry 5: 3DO

A brief programming note: Because I am extremely well-organized, I decided the best time to get a new PC up and running would be in the middle of writing this article/just before the Community Endurance Run. If you saw me Endurance Running, thanks for stopping by! If you made a donation, thanks for your generosity! If you didn't make a donation and are thinking "ah man I missed my chance" I have good news! You can still do that if you want!

So while we were hitting these things at a rate of once a week, this one is coming a little later than usual. We apologize for the service interruption. It will probably happen again at some point.

There are legends from the mists of time which the people speak of in hushed whispers. Stories told of brave men and women who thought that the way forward for video games was putting real people into the damn things. What if you got movie-quality visuals in your video game? What would that be like?

What indeed

This was more or less the value proposition for the 3DO, that doomed... is calling it a console accurate? I mean the pitch was multiple hardware manufacturers could make their own version of the 3DO, even if I don't remember anyone but Panasonic and Samsung actually taking a serious crack at it. It was a format rather than a console, I guess, which is what the point was. It was also Fucking Expensive and kind of a flop. Imagine paying $699 for a video game console in 1994! Adjusted for inflation that's over $1300, or the probable cost of the PS6. People weren't as depressed and desperate for Grand Theft Auto 6 back then, so it didn't sell and had a pretty short lifespan.

There was still time for a DOOM port though! There's always time for a DOOM port, is what I'm beginning to understand.

Setting Expectations

The 3DO port of DOOM was the work of a single programmer, something of a legend: Rebecca Ann Heiniman, aka Burger Becky (a nickname earned, I shit you not, for her habit of stashing hamburgers in her desk), aka one of the founders of Interplay, yes, that Interplay. She's fucking cool as shit, and not only released the source code of the port for all to see but also did a series of pretty fuckin' comprehensive videos detailing what a shitshow the whole porting process was.

At this point, she was not the founder of Interplay or anything like that, she was in fact working for Art Data Interactive, who was going to handle the DOOM port. Now stop me if you've heard this one before, but the CEO (Randy Scott) did not in fact understand how video games were made. Scott thought porting DOOM would be as simple as taking the Jaguar source code and recompiling it to the 3DO format - oh, and they could add in new sprites and weapons by just dropping the assets in and it would Just Work.

Shit did not work like that, but it didn't stop ol' Randy from producing a teaser trailer for the game which featured a glimpse of a New Weapon in breathtaking CGI that for obvious reasons never made it into the game. It's uh, it's really something. It also didn't stop ol' Randy from giving Heiniman ten weeks to pull the port together. That's not a lot of weeks! I would probably want more than that number of weeks, if I were her.

It's an immense credit to her talents as a programmer that the damn thing happened at all, and that it's... I mean...

Well, it works! More importantly, while Randy may have been a little naive in terms of how long stuff actually takes to do, he refused to stop having cool ideas. The coolest idea he had was to put FMV cutscenes into the game which would give the plot of DOOM a little more heft.

Was there a romance angle planned? Baby, you know there was. This is Hollywood, baby!

That didn't happen, unfortunately, for a number of reasons. For starters, EA stopped providing support to the 3DO, even though it was kind of their whole idea in the first place (again, Trip Hawkens, the guy who ran EA, was also the guy who pushed for the 3DO). That meant Art Data Interactive, who was sort of counting on EA for some financial support, had to put something together to pitch to other potential investors. That's where these photos came from.

Just some Dudes being Guys

They only ended up doing a few polished up photos, which I was unfortunately unable to find good copies of. I was able to find a Reddit post that has two of them mashed together, which doesn't quite capture the magic but it gets the idea across:

I would've played the shit out of the game just to see more of these cutscenes. Then again it is very easy to convince me to play DOOM for like, any reason at all, ever

There were rumors I chased for a little while which suggested there was actual footage of some sample cutscenes, but in spite of my best efforts I couldn't find proof of that (Heiniman herself, I think, said no actual FMV was actually produced, and she seems like a pretty trustworthy source). I did find, as a side effect of this hunt, this video from I think CES 1997 which is... pretty fucking good and features the dude who played Jax in Mortal Kombat II. I should note that according to the doomworld forum thread I found this in, this was part of Sony's promotion of the PS1 version of DOOM and so not really relevant here, but it's too good to pass up.

Anyway, that's the DOOM we could've had. What about the DOOM we got?

The 3DO Had Decent Tech

This is maybe the most important thing to keep in mind with the 3DO: its Cel Engine hardware was able to pull of some visual tricks that the Jaguar could not. Heiniman's porting process basically re-built the Jaguar's rendering engine using Cel Engine tech, which means that visually, the 3DO's version of DOOM is slightly more faithful to the original. Here's your E1M1 comparison shot:

It's a little more dark, and it still uses the simplified textures of the Jaguar version, but its lighting is slightly better than the Jaguar's and more importantly, Specters look like Specters again:

Toe to tip, that's a Specter

It also means partial invisibility is back on the menu

You'll notice, however, that the gameplay doesn't take up the whole screen. This is due to the fact that it ran like hammered shit at full resolution. As a compromise with id, and as a bet on the idea of more powerful 3DO hardware in the future (this failed to happen, of course), Heiniman included a cheat code which unlocked a slider which would allow the player to expand the screen size if they so desired. When I played the game, I messed around with a number of different screen sizes, which is reflected in some of these screenshots.

This is the smallest size allowed by law

Getting the game ported and running acceptably from a visuals standpoint was a work-intensive task - and as I previously said, there were only ten weeks in which to do it! It's not really a surprise, then, that when it came time to take care of the music end of things, Heiniman thought about what it would take to build a midi driver for the 3DO and say "nah, fuck it, we'll use digitized audio instead."

This would end up being an extremely consequential decision.

(Un)holy Music

Apart from the (unfulfilled) promise of a DOOM with FMV, the 3DO's version of DOOM would have something no port of the game had thus far: a soundtrack featuring real instruments. With basically no time to do the work of the port, Heiniman didn't want to have to rush to build a midi driver. The 32X is a great example of what happens when you rush it - it sounds fucking terrible - and digitized audio was much easier to implement.

Heineman was too busy getting the lighting in this thing to actually look decent to do things like make a damn midi driver, and you know what she was right to do so because this looks pretty good

But who would play these rockin' tunes? Randy Scott and his church garage band, of course! Is there a little bit of irony in the idea of a church band playing the soundtrack for the big devil video game? Yeah I mean there is a little of that in there for sure. Is the tempo of their version of At Doom's Gate slightly slower than the original version which is kind of weird to me, specifically? Absolutely! Does it still whip ass? Yeah!

Hulshult's take might actually be my preferred version these days, mostly because it keeps the fast tempo and also has real rockin' geetars. I'm getting sidetracked - the point is, the 3DO soundtrack is easily the thing people actually like about this game. It's certainly the thing I most like about this game, and I - as I'll get into - kind of like most things about this one.

Getting the Damn Thing to Work

Much like my experience with getting the Jaguar port up and running, the 3DO version took a considerable amount of work, this time due to the fact that Heiniman released her source code for the 3DO version. This made finding an actual version of the game that wasn't a cleaned up port (much like the way Psydoom is a cleaned up port of the PS1 DOOM) kind of a pain in the ass! I might even call it fuckin' impossible!

I do not know why Doomguy's eyes are closed here. I just know that is not a very good looking screenshot on account of how damn tiny the screen is.

Also the nature of the 3DO's hardware being less of an actual console and more of just a set of blueprints (I am being super-broad here, you don't have to come correct me) given to various manufacturers means that like... who can truly say how the thing actually ran? Retroarch, which is my go-to for most of this project, was not able to help. It has a 3DO core, but the DOOM disc image I managed to find doesn't run in it for reasons I haven't been able to figure out. In the end, I did in fact end up using a source port of the game which I then, for reasons of accuracy, lowered the screen size in and played with a controller (well, for a bit. I ended up using a mouse and keyboard eventually). Keep that in mind as we move forward.

How's it Play?

Bear in mind here that I was using a source port (Phoenix Doom, which also has a helpful list of improvements it made to the port which are important), so when it comes to framerate I can only base my conclusions on my own experience and also some footage I watched. It runs about as well as the 32X version, which is to say it runs Okay. Speaking of the 32X, that's also more or less how the controls work too - it's a three button game, but holding buttons and pushing directions on the D-pad will do stuff like cycle through your weapons and pull up the map or whatever else.

It's a good map, as it always is

Some of the nice things the 3DO allows is that it remembers your control configuration if you change it, and it also remembers what levels you've completed. What that means is that you can warp to any level you've finished when you start the game up. You have to pistol start, of course, because the game does not remember what equipment you had on you. This meant Heiniman didn't have to implement a password system, but it also makes the way that people like me play DOOM (hoarding rockets and cell ammo to make the final bosses easy) impossible.

Unlike the PS1 version, there's no DOOM II maps here - a little odd, given that DOOM II had been out for nearly two years by the time of its release, but hey, Becky Burger had ten weeks so you got as straightforward a port of the Jaguar version as was possible. The game is, in the end, still DOOM so you can't really complain that much. Although honestly, you can complain a little. Three buttons isn't really sufficient for DOOM, and not being able to strafe without having to hold down other buttons fucking blows! That's just how it goes for most of these ports, but it doesn't make me think more fondly of the game, I'll tell you that for free.

You do get some fun text when you beat the game though.

This kinda feels more like the end text for Quake than DOOM, but you know, whatever.

A Worthy Port, or Doomed to Ignominy?

This is kind of a tough one. The story of its development (and the person who developed it) is kind of fascinating! Also that soundtrack is easily best version of the soundtrack you'll find in any port pre-Hulshult remix (and that one is technically just a new version on PC so it doesn't count). It's a fascinating view into video games during the mid to late 90s, especially the weird FMV gold rush that was on at the time. I think that's really cool! All that and the 3DO itself is just an fascinating console with an interesting story behind it, so obviously a port of DOOM had a lot of potential to be... well, if not good then at least intriguing.

Unfortunately, the only FMV stuff we have is those promo/behind the scenes photos, and the only really cool thing we got is the soundtrack. Add to that the reduced screen size, the dodgy framerate, and my common hatred of playing DOOM on a controller and, well, this port is Doomed. Phoenix Doom is a nice port of it, and makes it look slightly nicer than it actually would've on real hardware, but that's not enough. I wish we'd gotten some corny-ass FMV romance bullshit (as was rumored), but alas! That just wasn't in the cards, I guess.

Just imagine

RIP to Rebecca Heiniman, who really did do some good work here (and then went on to do a bunch of other really cool shit that you can find out about all on your own). Cool lady!

NEXT UP: We're running out of old console ports! There's only really one left - and like the story of the 3DO's port, this story is an interesting one! That's right, it's time to take the Super Nintendo Entertainment System's version of DOOM out for a spin! Look forward to it!