DOOM (3DO)

“As You Take Damage You’ll Begin to Look Like Raw Hamburger.”

“Welcome to DOOM, a lightning-fast virtual reality adventure.”
North American 3DO cover.

There’s no way to open an article on the subject of DOOM that doesn’t retread ground that’s already been well-worn over the course of the last twenty-eight years. Like, what am I supposed to say here that hasn’t already been said a million times by now? Could I possibly be the first one to break the news to you that DOOM‘s original 1993 DOS release represents one of the single-most important game launches of all time? Do you really need me to tell you that it’s an absolute masterpiece of first-person shooter design? Should I even make the effort to invoke the names of Romero, the two Carmacks, Hall, Taylor, Prince, Cloud and Peterson? In the face of this self-doubt, I suppose there’s really only one thing that I can say: For as much has been said and written about DOOM, its excellence and significance still has yet to be overstated. It really is just that good — that truly revolutionary a piece of interactive software. And if it takes another million more glowing homages to sufficiently honor it, I will be more than happy to submit my contribution to that running tally.

With all that being said, there is still a bit of dilemma left for me to face: With every aspect of DOOM’s history and impact so thoroughly documented and explored, what’s left for the likes of little ol’ me to bring to the table? Even as I narrow my scope on what is well-established as the game’s worst console conversion – its 1995 showing on the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer – I’ll still wind up just largely rehashing what is an already thoroughly chronicled niche in DOOM‘s history. The story of its production is the stuff of legend as it stands; between its publisher’s false promises, the shocking organizational missteps, and the one woman who had to clean up the whole mess in order to turn out a functional product in precious little time. But where the original release of DOOM on DOS set quickly-incorporated standards for an entire industry, some of the lessons that should’ve been learned from its 3DO incarnation still haven’t been taken to heart — not completely. And so, I find that it’s a tale worth covering at least one more time, in the hopes that someday this mixed-up business of ours eventually takes proper heed. And even if the moral still just winds up falling on deaf ears, and I’m effectively just re-telling this story for the umpteenth time? To that complaint, all I can say is: “Wait ‘til you hear me do it!”

In recounting the story of 3DO DOOM‘s development, we’ll first explore in brief the development of DOOM for Atari’s Jaguar hardware, which served as the spawning vat for most console conversions to follow. Art Data Interactive will enter unto the cruel, and bring with them boisterous boasts they had no means of backing up. The blood-soaked hero Rebecca Heineman will emerge, and we’ll do our best to pay homage to one of gaming’s bona fide legends. Then, I’ll be doing the unthinkable: Diving headfirst into Hell to play through all of 3DO DOOM for myself, and providing my own personal determination of its quality. After wading through a pile of dead roughly knee-deep, we’ll do our best to measure the game’s impact on both the market and on the greater franchise’s legacy, before attempting to answer one of my own questions — something I’ve honestly pondered on for a long while now: Would the worst possible version of DOOM still have managed to impress a first-time player in 1995? I reckon that’s a question more loaded than a shotgun with a hundred shells chambered, but it’s still one I need to discover the answer to for myself. So join me here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame – my own personal “House of Pain,” if you will – as we plumb the depths of this most unruly evil given CD-ROM form.

… Were those enough references to DOOM level names to establish to the hardcore Doomers out there that I know what I’m talking about? This article is gonna be “Barrels o’ Fun,” guys! Don’t get lost in the “Halls of the Damned” on your way here! “The Gantlet!” Alright, that’ll do.

“The Toughest Space Trooper Ever to Suck Vacuum.”

“Oh @#%!! Out of ammo! Better high-tail
it outta here!”
DOOM Jaguar promotional poster.

DOOM’s runaway success on DOS-compatibles presented the games industry with something of a conundrum: While console manufacturers clearly wanted a piece of the action, it was less clear if their systems would actually be up to the task of running the game. Where PC developers had spent the better part of the past several years chasing after console-quality presentation and performance (id Software itself was borne from no less than an attempt to convert Super Mario Bros. 3 to DOS, and from John Carmack’s figuring out how to implement smooth screen-scrolling within computer games),^[1] the proverbial shoe was now firmly on the other foot, as console developers were desperate to reproduce DOOM’s “3D” graphics on their own respective hardware. As it would turn out, the one to crack the code on getting ‘id Tech 1’** to run on consoles would be id Software themselves, who worked to develop a version of DOOM fit for the “64-bit” Atari Jaguar. What’s of particular interest in the process of id picking the Jaguar as their console of choice is the fact that their other option would’ve been the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, until John Carmack came to a grim prediction on the system’s long-term prospects:

“We have a few reasons for not developing on the 3DO, but development machine bigotry isn’t one of them. […] The biggest reason is that I doubt that 3DO is going to become a huge success. $750 is way out of line for a pure entertainment machine. Was the NEO-GEO a success two years ago? We bought one, but we don’t know anoyone [sic] else that did. I doubt there will be all that many units sold. To make matters worse, there are over one hundred third party licensees suposedly [sic] developing on 3DO. If there were only a couple companies developing for it, they might make money. I predict there is going to be some serious lossage going on in the 3DO developer community.” ~ John Carmack, id Software^[2]

That snippet comes as part of a larger post written by Carmack describing the decision to port DOOM to the Jaguar, in which he goes on to further deride the 3DO and the very concept of “CD games” in and of itself. (“I would rather cut down to the essentials and fit on a cartridge than uselessly bulk up on a CD. I have a minimallist [sic] sense of aesthetics in game design”)^[2b] In determining that the Jaguar was fit to play host to DOOM before other consoles, Carmack recalls that “[id’s] initial appraisal of the Jaguar was ‘nice system, but Atari probably can’t make it a success’. But when I got the technical documentation, I was VERY impressed. This is the system I want to see become a standard platform.” While the company’s initial appraisal in that case would eventually prove to be the correct one, John was still absolutely correct in identifying the inevitable failure of the 3DO: At its original price point, and given that it still lacked somewhat technically in comparison to the Jaguar (“The 3DO has a capable main processor [a couple times better than the weak 68k in the jag], but most of its power is in custom hardware that has narrow functionality for affine transformations”); it was pretty much doomed from the word go, pun intended. That being said, John didn’t outright reject the prospect of DOOM eventually making its way to the 3DO. Just so long as he didn’t have to be the one to develop it:

“There will probably be a version of DOOM for 3DO. We are talking with a few companies about licensing out the port. It would be kind of fun to do it here, but I am eager to get to work on the next generation game engine that will make DOOM look puny…” ~ John Carmack, id Software^[2c]

Ultimately, the conversion of DOOM that Carmack and company created for the Atari Jaguar would become the foundation for most other console ports to follow. Between modifications made to map geometry in order to eke out better performance, scrapping the ‘Episode’ structure in favor of straightforward numbered levels, and the removal of several maps / items / enemies that evidently proved too troublesome to translate; Jaguar DOOM would demonstrate that there was still catching up to do on the part of console manufacturers in keeping pace with the burgeoning PC ecosystem, but that they could at least deliver a version of the game that remained mostly intact. At the end of the day, it’s still clearly recognizable as DOOM, and its handful of compromises aren’t enough to ruin the magic of blasting demons away in glorious 2.5D. As mentioned, this console-specific version of the game would serve as the foundation (provided by id to interested companies) for further ports to other systems of the era; including Sega’s 32X and Saturn,*** the Sony PlayStation, and even Nintendo’s GBA later down the line And of course, when the time came for DOOM to come to the 3DO, it would be the Jaguar codebase that it came to leverage. But the story of how that came to pass is a bit more convoluted than a simple matter of licensing.

3DO DOOM’s creation begins with a publisher by the name of Art Data Interactive, and a man by the name of Randal “Randy” Letcher Scott. Now, I should warn y’all that we’re going to be saying some unkind things about Randy in the process of detailing this bit of games history, so allow me to issue this disclaimer nice and early: Randy Scott is not only a complete idiot when it comes to game design, and a certifiable scam artist when it comes to matters of money; but he is also an accused pedophile (still pending conviction) who ran a music school as an excuse to molest pre-teen girls (allegedly),^[3] and as such is likely undeserving of your sympathies. In cases where his versions of events on Art Data’s operations and 3DO DOOM’s development contradict other available information / testimony, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’s the one spinning bullshit — that it’s best for you and us to err on the side of not believing a single word that comes out of his notoriously big mouth. With all that said, let us flash back to more “innocent” times, and to the foundation of his game-publishing venture.

“You don’t need the reflexes of a hyperactive eight-year-old to win, either.”
Photo of Randy Scott, courtesy 3DO Magazine (Issue #3, 1995)

It all starts with Randy’s time at a prior company by the name of ‘ABC International,’ where he served as Vice President of Sales driving global distribution.^[4] The way Randy tells it: “I’d just got so tired of seeing so many crap games coming down the pipe — so one day I thought wouldn’t it be great if I could persuade a couple of people to give me a couple million dollars.” This runs somewhat contrary to the way Rebecca Heineman tells the story; where her version of events begins with Randy as an industry outsider catching onto the initial hype surrounding the 3DO, and managing to accrue roughly $100K in startup capital from peers in his church’s congregation, thereby allowing him to establish himself in the games industry despite not having any previous experience or connections in the business.^[5] In either case, Scott’s first move (after founding the company in September 1993) was to help fund the production of future Hall of Fame inductee Rise of the Robots — a title which was then being heralded as a major advancement in video game graphics and artificial intelligence. By investing in the highly-anticipated title, Art Data would earn itself distribution and promotional rights to the 3DO release (despite not being the credited publisher), and hope to turn some amount of profit in the process of doing so — unaware of the eventual outcome that Rise of the Robots would ultimately wind up being reviled as a critical flop and sales dud. But boy howdy if it didn’t seem like a surefire investment at the time, given the massive hype surrounding the title.

With their foot wedged in the door for the time being, Art Data would move to purchase the rights to publish DOOM for the 3DO, which would be sold to them by id Software for the princely sum of $250,000 US dollars.^[5b] As Randy paints the picture: “I had some help from a real good friend of mine, Nick Earl, who’s in charge of business development at 3DO, and I had several conversations with Jay Wilbur at iD Software, who’s a good friend, which probably helped out a lot, and I called Nick and said, ‘I think it’d be great if we could get Doom on the 3DO — we’re the guy’s [sic] who can do it, I want you to help me out.’”^[4b] For a more realistic perspective on the matter: By this point in time, id were practically printing money from licensing out DOOM, and were plenty happy to do business with anyone willing and able to match their deliberately hefty asking prices. At the same time, they would only have to provide a seemingly bare minimum of technical support to their licensees, as their focus was by this point on either finishing up DOOM II: Hell on Earth or getting started on what would become Quake (depending on when exactly the deal took place). But this arrangement suited Randy just fine: The way he apparently “understood” it, porting a game was a trivial matter — as simple as dragging and dropping the files from one format to another, and changing out a handful of copyright text here and there. And hey, while they were at it, they might as well try and improve on the original game too — toss in a few new weapons and levels as long as they had the opportunity! So began the process of assembling a team to handle this seemingly menial task.

The marketing machine for DOOM’s 3DO release spun up in late 1994 (in or around December), with ‘The 3DO Company’ itself fully onboard and eager to promote their console’s potentially profitable acquisition. Magazines dedicated to coverage on the console were treated to exclusive screenshots of the port in action (either aware or not that they were just being fed screenshots of the DOS version), as well as opportunities to interview Randy for details on its development. Scott, for his part, seemed to cherish the attention and the opportunities to present himself as an up-and-coming celebrity in the gaming sphere. The narrative he took to threading centered on his [supposedly] brilliant business acumen: His ability to secure lucrative titles (3DO Magazine UK celebrates him as having “magicked” the DOOM and Rise of the Robot licenses^[4c]), his eye for budding talent in the industry (highlighting project coordinator Tristan Anderson in particular), and – perhaps most importantly in his mind – his connections to already established figures in the business. For just a handful of the names he liked to drop; there’s the aforementioned Nick Earl and Jay Wilbur, a claimed connection to 3DO Company founder Trip Hawkins, references to one “Carmick” [sic] as “the lead programmer at iD,” and an unnamed “good friend” at Mirage Technologies. All these self-congratulatory talking points and excited visions for the future emerging before the company had even published their first game should speak to what it all truly amounted to: Much ado about absolutely nothing.

Perhaps the first clue that nothing in the way of actual work was being done by this point should’ve come from the ways Randall attempted to describe the process of game development. By his measure, a typical “work day” at Art Data amounted to the following: “We all come in, play Doom for six to seven hours, the non-creative people go home, and the creative people stay up all night and the eye-candy elf does his work – you come back in the morning and there are a lot of strange, magical things on everyone’s screen.”^[4d] When asked about the then-upcoming ‘3DO M2,’ and posed the pertinent question of “What does a million polygons per second actually mean,” Randy could only respond with vague jargon he had picked up along the way: “It means real time rendering! It means that you can have a lot more movement on the screen. I always say motion is life, and up ‘til now games have had a fairly static background. Now with real-time rendering this big old buzzword, ‘Virtual Reality,’ can actually come to fruition.” And when interrogated as to whether or not DOOM on 3DO was actually at a playable stage yet, his answer avoided anything technically-specific in favor of more of his pre-written marketing lines: “We’re now starting to see the first playable stages of 3DO Doom and there is, simply, no comparison between the PC and 3DO versions. Oh yeah. The stuff that we’re putting together is just going to be phenomenal. I tell everybody load up your rocket launchers and break out the sun tan oil because this is the hottest version of Doom that you’re ever going to see.”

To have the confidence and mindset of Randy Scott (disregarding the supposed pedophilic tendencies, of course) is to harbor both a gift and a curse. On the one hand, it has to feel like being on top of the world — like every minor achievement is a major windfall, and to know in your heart of hearts that absolutely nothing or no one can stop your ascent to glory. On the other hand, it’d render you completely blind to the very real troubles and challenges in your way — leaving you so deluded as to believe that your sheer strength of will is enough to overcome the legitimately impossible. In actuality, all Art Data had actually developed thus far for 3DO DOOM was… well, just the concept of putting DOOM on a 3DO, really. That’s seriously as far as they had been able to get on their own. Where the UK’s 3DO Magazine in 1994 had been instructed to claim that the game’s “graphics are being entirely overhauled,” that “the audio is also likely to be redone,” and that “there’s even plans for new monsters, weapons and levels”;^[6] in reality, the team at Art Data was incapable of altering so much as a single aspect of the original game, as there wasn’t a single person on staff with the capabilities of doing so. Still, Randy had been coached to point out the differences in capabilities between competing consoles, and did so with aplomb: “The Sega 32X version [of DOOM] had to leave out a few levels, the WAD files had to be smaller because of the RAM requirement; the Jaguar version lost a lot of detail… Neither machine really had what it takes. 3DO has. […] We’re gonna pump up the screen resolution, and we’re not going to sacrifice the gameplay for one second doing so.”^[4e] This effectively amounted to completely baseless posturing, as he and his company didn’t seem to have the slightest clue as to how the 3DO hardware even worked.

The most substantive work that had been done on 3DO DOOM thus far had been an attempt to produce some live-action vignettes for the game; featuring one actor in a ‘Baron of Hell’ costume, another dressed as a vague soldier type ostensibly meant to stand in for the Doomguy (despite not matching the established look for him at all), and even a “damsel in distress” who I shudder to theorize how they would’ve shoehorned into the game’s story. Accounts of how far production on these ultimately scrapped FMV scenes managed to get has been historically inconsistent: By Randy’s testimony, they had already “went out and filmed at one of our film locations and it was so bloody and so gory that we couldn’t use it,” before claiming that the footage would instead be incorporated into their eventual conversion of DOOM II: Hell on Earth.^[4f] Rebecca’s recall of this aspect in particular has changed at a few points over the course of the years: Where her statement in 2015 was recorded plainly as “No FMV was made”; in recent years, the claim has changed to acknowledge that footage was – in fact – committed to film, but unused due to Randy’s attempts to finagle it from the production crew without having to actually pay them for their time.^[7] What can be confirmed is that the production stills that have circulated in the years since are legitimate, which I’d take to mean that there was at least some amount of shooting done which they would’ve been taken during.**** Of course, it’s not as if Art Data would’ve even had a means of inserting them into the game anyway, if they had just been left to their own devices.

How Randy and company were able to get away with doing so little for so long is a truly impressive feat. So long as they kept telling representatives at The 3DO Company that progress was being made, the manufacturer was apparently willing to buy it without question — failing to imagine the concept of a studio with so much riding on their own game’s success feeling so compelled as to blatantly lie to them. What Art Data Interactive actually had planned was to contract out development to some outside developer for as cheaply as possible, with the expectation that it could be done as quickly and easily as copying the original source code onto a 3DO CD-ROM and instructing it to “run better” on what was believed [by Randy] to be more powerful hardware than PCs of the era. When it finally came time to reach out to developers for hire, however, the responses Randy got were less promising than what he had envisioned: The first company he had contacted had reportedly told him that “What you want is gonna take two years and a budget of, like, $3 million,” to which Randy responded with something along the lines of “Oh no, no, no. You’re lying to me.”^[5c] He then sought out another unspecified studio, who were convinced to begin work on the project before receiving any initial sum of money. By the time they had reached their first development milestone, and the time had come to ask for payment before continuing, Randy evidently stalled so long as to scare the contractors off, putting the game back at square one.

It’s in or around July 1995 that Art Data’s reality distortion field would finally fail, and at which point The 3DO Company would begin to more seriously inquire as to the progress made thus far on DOOM‘s port. And again, we’re presented with two conflicting reports / recollections as to how The 3DO Company evaluated the situation — both ultimately leading to more or less the same conclusion. The company either got duped once more by Art Data about the amount of work that had been done, by their claims that the port was “90 percent complete”^[5d] and simply needed an extra hand to get it finished; or they finally realized at long last that Art Data had been stringing them along this whole time, and would thusly be forced to delegate the game’s development themselves. What ultimately pressed the matter was the due date for 3DO DOOM‘s production run, where the game was contracted and committed to a December release window, which would’ve required it to go gold by November [at the latest] in order to guarantee that the disc pressing could be completed and shipped to retailers in time. Where any other title could’ve just as easily been left to languish in development hell by its console’s manufacturer, and the associated publishers would’ve been left without hope or recourse; we’re talking about DOOM here, with the very reputation of the 3DO itself on the line. Too much promotion had already been prepared for it, and its being positioned as a tentpole release for the system meant that the parties involved would have to deliver something by the end of that year in order to avoid being left in the dust of their competition. And so, The 3DO Company was left with only one option: It was time to call in “The Fixer.”

“This is not a cumbersome adventure game, but an action-oriented slugathon.”
Photo of Rebecca Heineman.

Rebecca Ann Heineman’s entry into the games industry is a truly unique one. In 1980, she competed as part of a tournament held by Atari featuring the 2600’s version of Space Invaders — one of the first video game competitions of its kind held in North America. Despite a lack of confidence in herself to even place within the tourney, she participated and earned a score of 88,000 points at the Los Angeles qualifier. When the officials read her score back to her, her only response was “Is that good?”^[8] As it turned out, she had only gone and quadrupled the score of that current round’s second place contender, and would ultimately double the eventual runner-up. She’d go on to compete at the tournament finals held in New York City, where Atari would pay for her plane ticket as well as her room and board — the company only realizing at this stage that she was an unaccompanied minor (aged sixteen), and treating her as lavishly as possible in order to mitigate the potential for a lawsuit. As Rebecca would recall: “[Atari] were really trying to take good care of me […] I didn’t really know what ‘suing’ was at the time… I thought they probably figured out I was trans and they were treating me differently.” She’d go on to win said tournament with a final score of 165,200 points, be touted as “the first video game champion,” and quickly get hired as a writer for Electronic Games magazine on the basis of this title.

Rebecca was able to parlay her writing gig into a career in games development, after revealing to one of her editors that she had taught herself how to write code by reverse-engineering Atari 2600 cartridges — a talent she had developed due to being unable to afford purchasing them outright, thereby motivating her to pirate them instead. Say what you will about her “unique” learning process, but it taught her a valuable skill set — a prowess for programming which quickly led to her getting hired by Avalon Hill, where she just as quickly established herself as the studio’s most gifted code guru / a go-to instructor to others in the company learning the craft. It’s here where she scored her first industry credit, as a programmer for the ambitious pseudo-3D bomb disposal romp London Blitz. With Avalon’s closure in 1983; she eventually returned to her home state of California, filled another programming position at Boone Corporation, and stayed with the company until its own dissolution that same year. During her time there, though, she had met three other employees – Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell – who shared in an aspiration to form their own company in Boone Corp’s wake. This would lead to the foundation of Interplay Productions, and to a number of her most notable industry credits being produced within this period. While Becky would ultimately go on to work on too many titles over the course of her career to even begin chronicling here, we’re gonna highlight two development tales in particular; as both will speak to Rebecca’s talent, tenacity, and trusty knack for making the impossible possible — even when she’s made to work under particularly dismissive and delusional executives.

Tales of the Unknown: Volume I – The Bard’s Tale may well have been the creative brainchild of one Michael Cranford, but it was Rebecca’s code which brought it to functional fruition in 1985. Building upon an RPG foundation established by the likes of Wizardry, it nestled comfortably into the genre pantheon, and proved a sales success for Interplay and company. There was only one problem: Michael Cranford was, by all accounts, an asshole; who had held up the game’s release at the last minute in a move to demand higher royalties and secure rights to the sequel for himself — to where he could develop it from his own home without “interference” from the rest of Interplay.^[9] Interplay being made to cave in gave way to a very iterative sequel; wherein Cranford would simply recycle Rebecca’s existing code from the first game, be left unchecked to shoehorn in as many biblical references as he well pleased (in accordance with apparently re-discovering his faith), and to completely overwhelm players with outrageous difficulty. What all this ultimately led to was The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight releasing to commercial underperformance, the rights reverting back to Interplay to develop The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, and a prolonged feud that would center around Cranford, Fargo, and Heineman. It was Rebecca who first revealed the story of Cranford “taking the game hostage” (later confirmed by Brian^[10]), which was soon to be vehemently disputed by Michael; who in turn claimed that Rebecca had lied about the extent of her contributions to that original game, and attempted to further disparage her character in the years to follow.^[11] But Becky always has her receipts in hand: Hidden within Volume I were allusions to / easter eggs centering around her industry nickname of “Burger” (earned by her habit of always having a ready supply hamburgers in her desk drawer), which Michael could not even recall / account for the inclusion of when questioned at speaking engagements^[12] — indicating that Rebecca had, in fact, had a significant hand in the programming and underlying design of the game.

This feud would continue over the course of years, with Fargo eventually taking to Cranford’s side in order to denigrate Heineman — stemming from his own personal issues with her, as she had since refused to back an attempt by Fargo at revisionist history on the subject of Interplay’s founding (where according to Becky, he had at one point privately asked her to support his claim that he was the “sole founder” of the company).^[7b] With Rebecca’s publicly transitioning in 2003, this only seemed to add more fuel to Cranford’s fiery rage, owing to his apparent “values” as a devout Christian. As late as 2018, Michael has continued to deliberately misgender Becky and refer to her by her deadname — between salty asides at speaking engagements, and taking to online forums to perpetuate his claims that she was “an outsider on the process of development” and “a storyteller with an agenda.”^[13] Where the game’s code should speak for itself, and Michael’s own inability to account for specific details of his own game’s development should prove fairly damning, this somehow remains a matter of contention between fans of the games to this day. In spite of all this bad blood, Rebecca still expressed her interest in remastering the original Bard’s Tale trilogy in time for the series’ late 2018 crowdfunded sequel, The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep. This would mean having to work again with Brian once again (as well as Michael, to a lesser extent), but hopefully help to resolve the differences between them — not to mention providing a great bit of service to the fans, and giving Rebecca the opportunity to re-cement her involvement with the franchise.

Instead of mending fences, this development would only seem to drive a further schism between Heineman and Fargo; the latter of whom only begrudgingly agreed to the collaboration in light of Kickstarter supporter demand, and who [according to Rebecca] found himself privately frustrated by the fact that Becky’s then-upcoming remasters were soon gaining more traction and excitement than the upcoming sequel itself.^[7c] This in turn motivated Brian’s attempted undermining of Rebecca by offering her a pittance of a $25,000 contract for her work, his eventually managing to push her away from the project entirely, and his further attempting to convince newly-contracted developer Krome Studios to omit her name (as well as her studio Olde Sküül’s) from the credits of the remaster entirely. Luckily, the folk at Krome would deny this request, citing Becky’s providing them the game’s original source code as absolutely instrumental in making The Bard’s Tale Trilogy possible. After all: It was Heineman who had written much of that original code in 1985, who had backed it up and held onto it, and who had first pushed for the remakes to be developed in the first place. It’s clear that the historical record should highlight Rebecca’s contributions to this series over the course of thirty-five years, and that Cranford and Fargo’s collective pettiness is matched only by their stubborn refusal to share credit for their collaborative creations. Where Becky has had to bite and claw for her due recognition on The Bard’s Tale in the decades since – dismissed by some as proof of her own pettiness and unprofessionalism – there’s perhaps a silver lining to the hardships she faced here: It may well have toughened her up to hostile work environments, and prepared her to stand up for herself against unpleasant coworkers.

The second game I’d like to highlight is Rebecca’s conversion of Delphine Software’s Out of This World (’Another World’ outside of North America) to the Apple IIGS, as released in 1992. By all accounts, it was a conversion that was never supposed to happen; between the presumed limitations of the hardware at hand, the dwindling market for said system, and the belief by Interplay staff that it simply couldn’t be done in anything resembling a fluid or functional fashion. When the offices first caught a glimpse of the game running on its native Amiga – their having just secured publishing rights to it in North America – they were collectively wowed by its presentation, much as the rest of the gaming world was in 1991. It was Rebecca who broke the astonished silence in the room when she casually proclaimed “Hey! I could do that on the [Apple] IIGS.”^[14] This assumed boast apparently resulted in immediate laughs and jeers from the peanut gallery, and the immediate dismissal by her coworkers of her claim. It’s at this point where Becky determined to single-handedly convert the game out of pure spite — to prove her coworkers wrong, and demonstrate that she wasn’t one to be underestimated. And so her work on the project began, occupying her spare time between other projects in concurrent development. By her measure, it served as a welcome distraction from the likes of designing Track Meet on the Game Boy — a “project from Hell” that she’s since gone on to detail the torturous development of. Maybe we’ll have to check in on that one at a later date…

In any case, it didn’t take long (roughly two weeks time) for Becky to get a proof-of-concept up and running for what Out of the World could look like on the IIGS. Not too much longer after that, she was able to show her work in progress to her higher-ups at Interplay, who promptly accused her of somehow “cheating” in getting the game to perform as well as it was — either using hardware acceleration, or secretly hiding an Amiga behind her Apple workstation. After proving that the game was, in fact, running on the hardware that she had claimed it was; Becky was asked if she could potentially port the game to the Super Nintendo, based on the premise of it sharing a similar architecture to the IIGS. Sure enough, she said that she could, and promptly delivered a version of the game for Nintendo’s console offering — without the added benefit of a Super FX chip, even, since Interplay was too cheap to spring for it.^[15] This in turn also led to her helming a 3DO conversion of the game, with all-new visuals courtesy of graphics shop Lil’ Gangster Entertainment. This iteration of Out of This World would also feature a hidden minigame titled ‘Stalactites,’ as well as an easter egg graphic of Rebecca getting her head chopped off by a “Management Type.” But between these two conversions, Becky still remained committed to her IIGS pet project, and took it upon herself to personally contact a distributor by the name of Big Red Computer Club — a company who were similarly dedicated to supporting the out-of-favor platform.^[14b]

Having established this connection, Becky further prompted negotiations between Interplay and Big Red Computer in order to reach a manufacturing and distribution deal. Interplay offered to print a small run of a thousand units if Big Red were willing to pay wholesale price for the lot (roughly $35 per copy),^[14c] fully expecting the company to decline the offer. To everyone’s surprise [except Becky’s], Big Red actually wrote them the check, and the game was made to enter into a proper quality assurance phase of development. With the game eventually completed and shipped, Rebecca had proven her point, and Interplay were made to eat a plate of crow… while counting the money made off the back of their highly profitable SNES conversion. But wait, that’s not all! Two months later, Big Red would reach out to Interplay again to order another thousand copies of the IIGS version of the game, having already quickly sold through their initial lot. Flabbergasted by the fact that this IIGS version was also turning out to be a decently profitable venture, they happily printed and shipped off another order, which Big Red in turn happily paid for. In this way, Rebecca had managed the feat of not only proving her programming prowess / her co-workers wrong, but had also single-handedly secured an otherwise neglected source of profit for Interplay thanks to her ingenuity. The lesson to be learned here? Rebecca was a lady capable of making the impossible possible — of turning around projects deemed undoable by other parties, and making surprise successes of them through her sheer force of will. She had the ability to recognize how games functioned from a mere glance, the know-how to make them run on seemingly underpowered platforms, and the market acumen to create business opportunities for her employers which they would otherwise have written off. For those “in the know,” these services would prove an invaluable commodity.

What came next for Becky was the opportunity to develop a version of id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D for Macintosh computers, which would wind up serving as something like the definitive version of the shooter: Incorporating the new automap feature and two new weapons (a flamethrower and rocket launcher) id had added to their own SNES conversion of the game – now with the added benefits of improved graphics and performance, as well as a range of new levels and campaigns – Wolfenstein 3D on Mac is by far the most accessible and feature-packed version of the game you can potentially get hands on. From here, Rebecca would develop a further 3DO port of the game (“I took the Mac code, which I did […] ported it over to the 3DO, enhanced everything, and the game was running 60 frames a second. It was a phenomenal version of the game.”),^[5e] which would unfortunately hit shelves with a game-breaking bug that had been inadvertently introduced during 3DO’s own mastering process.^[16] Despite this initial setback – which necessitated a product recall and the subsequent re-release of a fixed revision – Rebecca’s solid work on the port had put her on the console manufacturer’s radar. It’s at this point that we resume the 3DO DOOM story, as Rebecca would be sent the direct request by way of The 3DO Company to help Art Data Interactive get their game past the finish line. By Rebecca’s estimation, this call would’ve come through somewhere in July 1995 (she’s been quoted as incorrectly claiming the year as 1996 before, contributing to confusion with regard to the game’s recognized release date), with the hopes that the game could be finished by November / in time for retail in December that year. In addition to her outstanding qualifications, it was likely also presumed that her connections to id would help to accelerate the process, and that her experience with Wolfenstein 3D might presumably provide her some insight into how Carmack’s code operated.

Becky accepted the manufacturer’s request, spent two weeks negotiating a $40,000 contract with Art Data for her commitment (which would additionally see her newly-formed independent studio Logicware credited as the conversion’s developer), and upon her hiring was fed the same line as 3DO were about the game being 90% complete — told that all she needed to do was “finish up some bugs and get the game ready for shipping and get it out in about a month or two.”^[5f] It’s at this point that Rebecca asked to be sent the game’s current source code and assets as soon as possible, so that she could get to work on her end just as quickly. Of course, Art Data didn’t actually have anything to deliver anything to her, other than an apparent litany of excuses. This utterly pointless back and forth reportedly went on for two whole weeks, during which Randy had apparently kept asking Becky to start working with “what she had already” — in spite of having provided her with absolutely nothing, as you’ll recall. If I had to guess as to what might’ve been going through Randy’s head here: He probably assumed that Becky somehow already had access to all the necessary code and assets; either thanks to her id connection, or based on the erroneous assumption that all you need to port a game from one system to another is just a retail copy of the original game itself. Knowing how truly little Randy understood about how software development works, that latter option is a very real possibility here. If only it were so easy.

Eventually, Becky had to contact id herself in order to get DOOM‘s source code and assets direct from them, receiving both the Jaguar and PC versions of each. She quickly established that the Jaguar iteration would be the easiest to build her 3DO version on top of, and determined that she could begin working from there / familiarizing herself with the code until she received Art Data’s own in-progress build. It’s at this point that she got taken aside by “a friend of [hers] working at Art Data” (most likely Tristan Anderson), and had the truth finally revealed to her: “We don’t have anything. The developer that was working on it? They only got to it, like, the code to compile and nothing — everything Randy was saying was lies.”^[5g] Her response – by her recollection – effectively amounted to her saying “Oh,” before declaring that she would be promptly pulling out of the project and leaving Art Data to reap what they had sown. But her contact at 3DO caught wind of this development, and proceeded to beg her to stay the course: “Please. We really need this game out by Christmas. People are expecting it.” Feeling indebted to The 3DO Company for helping her build and sustain Logicware – and given the promise that further (hopefully less troublesome) development contracts would be sent her way if she could get DOOM to pass – Becky begrudgingly agreed to get the job done, even as it meant effectively doing the entirety of the work herself. The time at this point is now August, with the due date for completion slated for November. All told, she’d have just about ten weeks to manage the whole feat.

Lacking the time to do much other than a straight port of the Jaguar version of DOOM to the 3DO meant a number of immediate concessions and compromises. Immediately nixed were Randy’s aspirations to include new levels in the game: Rebecca would be struggling as it was to get the game’s originally included three episodes up and running — scratching the fourth episode (‘Thy Flesh Consumed’) completely, as it didn’t come as part of the original Jaguar package. Rebecca claims that Randy had gone as far as to instruct her to “download [user-made] levels off the Internet” as a means of attempting to make good on his publicly-issued boasts — even offering to pay her an additional $40,000 if she could include just one more level.^[17] Rebecca immediately and rightfully refused this request, which would’ve effectively amounted to theft if Randy had his way. Furthermore, Becky would not be adding the “new weapons” Randy had promised either, for a multitude of reasons — the primary of which being time, of course. But there was also the matter of another particularly baffling misunderstanding on the part of Mr. Scott, who believed that all that had to be done to implement a new weapon into a game was to provide a programmer a picture of what it was supposed to look like, along with a description of its functionality. Needless to say, it’s a bit more complicated than that to add a new gun willy-nilly to something like DOOM‘s established arsenal — never mind finding places to put them within the game’s existing levels, fundamentally altering the ammo economy, and rebalancing combat around their inclusion. This hadn’t previously stopped the company’s marketing department from supposedly submitting doctored screenshots of DOS DOOM with crudely drawn-over weapons to the press — another claim made against Art Data by Becky, which I could not personally track down the purported examples of.*****

There was one aspect of porting Jaguar DOOM that was proving to be particularly problematic: Producing purpose-built MIDI drivers on the 3DO in order to play back the music written for the Jaguar version of the game, which had been “custom-written [in] 68000 assembly” for the machine.^[17b] The Jaguar version of DOOM may not have actually been able to play music during gameplay due to the system’s own technical idiosyncrasies (the console’s DSP chip responsible for music playback had to be dedicated to processing other elements of the game code instead), but it still contained the soundtrack within it nonetheless — featuring during the between-level intermission screens. This left Rebecca with two choices: Either write a new audio driver for the game capable of playing back the previously programmed arrangements, or take full advantage of the console’s disc-based format in order to play back CD audio during the game. Naturally, she would opt for the latter, and additionally leverage Art Data’s own resident musician in order to perform and record a newly-arranged studio soundtrack: None other than company president Randy Scott, who dabbled in music production and performance before his eventual turn as a music teacher. This process evidently entailed Becky recording samples of the original game’s music to cassette, sending them off to Randy to re-record and put his own personal spin on, before receiving them back in a format which she could incorporate into the game. In this way, 3DO DOOM could at least boast having a unique soundtrack to its name — a gimmick which would only go on to be completely upstaged by Aubrey Hodges’ highly acclaimed / darkly ambient soundtrack for DOOM‘s release on PlayStation.

But perhaps the biggest challenge faced in bringing the game to 3DO was the matter of its framerate — getting the game to run at an acceptable degree of fluidity and smoothness. Where one of Becky’s many skills as a programmer was her ability to optimize games – streamlining code and reducing system processing in order to improve performance – she simply didn’t have the luxury of time on her side. We’ll be getting into more detail about this in the review portion of the article, but what’s important to know for right now is that Rebecca had to shrink down the size of the game’s default viewport — the portion of the screen dedicated to your first-person perspective of the action. That said, she did include a cheat code within 3DO DOOM which enabled players to expand the viewport to as large as was possible, as an optimistic bit of future-proofing: The 3DO Company had an improved model of 3DO console in the works, dubbed the ‘3DO M2.’ Part of their plans for it were to incorporate a higher-powered processor, capable of driving expanded / improved performance. In addition, it was meant to be a backward-compatible console, which could theoretically play older titles with the benefit of those gains. And so, Rebecca’s hope was that folk who owned an M2 would be able to use the cheat to unlock that fuller-screen mode, and be able to play the game with something closer to its original intended framerate and resolution. Of course, there was nothing in place to stop an owner of an original model of 3DO from activating the cheat for themselves, and playing DOOM with the fully-scaled viewport at the cost of a severe performance hit.

Against all odds, Rebecca had a functional version of the game up and running come November. It was quickly sent off to The 3DO Company for mastering (the company had a process in place where only they held the means to write and manufacture the final versions of the discs for consumer models of 3DO console), who were pleasantly surprised that Becky had managed the feat after all. Not too long after, Randy would reach out to Rebecca for what seemed to be the final time; asking where the new weapons and levels were, threatening to withhold payment, and attempting to trick her into “incriminating” herself over a recorded phone call.^[16b] Becky held her ground, reminding Randy that she had only committed to get the game to a functional state, and that it was his own fault for promising a version of DOOM to the public that he had no means of personally fulfilling. Wisely, she had also preemptively made a deal with The 3DO Company early in the game’s development, which guaranteed that they would make good on her contract pay in the event that Art Data Interactive either failed or refused to — though the issue ultimately wasn’t forced, as Becky held back the completed game from Randy until he wrote Logicware a check for their remaining $20,000 in due payment.^[17c] In any case: Rebecca’s work was done, the game was completed, and it would make its way to store shelves just in time for December… the 29th, that is. Yeah, by the time all was said and done, Art Data apparently still wound up largely missing out on retailing during the holiday season. But would “late” still prove better than “never” in the case of 3DO DOOM?

** ‘id Tech 1’ is a retroactive designation for what was originally colloquially referred to as “The DOOM Engine.” The new naming scheme was first established in 2007, with the announcement of ‘id Tech 5’ as the latest iteration of the company’s engine development (first publicly demoed at that year’s Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference), and folk being made to figure out from there what games the previous four iterations of the engine would’ve been associated with. Going backward: ‘id Tech 4’ was the foundation for DOOM³, ‘id Tech 3’ would’ve been made to power Quake III Arena, ‘id Tech 2’ drove both Quake and Quake II, and id Tech 1 would correspond to the DOOM engine respectively. Of course, this means that Wolfenstein 3D gets stuck with the unofficial ‘id Tech 0’ moniker, and the codebase driving Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D is effectively left without so much as an informal designation. All told, it makes for a fairly confused / inconsistent naming scheme, and none of it even matters because the idea of “engines” as most folk know it is largely misunderstood to begin with.

*** I suppose that including the Sega Saturn version in this list is something of a “technicality,” if not a potential misnomer? To be more specific: The Sega Saturn conversion of DOOM is directly derived from the Sony PlayStation release, with a Frankenstein’s amalgamation of additional 32X code for good measure. But seeing as both of those conversions are themselves derived from that original Jaguar codebase, I’m still fine with claiming that Saturn DOOM is still a member of that same lineage — albeit, belonging to a splinter of that already-splintered lineage. This shit is tough to keep track of, y’all.

**** There’s also the matter of Usenet testimony from a visitor to Art Data Interactive’s booth at CES 1994; where one ‘Scott Le Grand’ claims that tentative FMV cutscenes from the game were on display, and that they weren’t very good cutscenes at that. By his estimation of the calibre of production: “Imagine FMV with the acting quality of Baywatch and the special FX of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Yes, it was that bad, and no Pamela Anderson to distract you from its failings, just a wimpy Darrien Lambert look and feelalike as ‘Our Hero’…”

***** After checking Rebecca’s entire Twitter timeline for the reportedly posted scans of these doctored screenshots, and failing to track down whichever issue of a “German 3DO magazine” they would’ve supposedly appeared in, I unfortunately could not track down the evidence of these screenshots having made it to print. This being said: 3DO-centric magazines are not an entirely preserved commodity, and it’s very possible I simply didn’t have access to any of the offending issues. At the very least, I can confirm the fact that magazines were provided DOS screenshots of DOOM by Art Data in place of proper 3DO images, based on elements of the UI and the fact that development had not truly begun in earnest on 3DO DOOM until well into July 1995 — later than print date for many of these spoofed screenshots.

“A Smaller Viewing Area Increases the Smoothness of the Animation.”

“Even for a tough hombre like you, DOOM
can be a deadly place.”
North American 3DO back cover.

It’s a tale as old as time: Man’s meddling in God’s domain lets loose the hordes of Hell, until a space marine with a shotgun single-handedly fights them all back. Just the way they teach it in Bible school. But seriously, folks: DOOM‘s pretense for demon-slaying action shouldn’t need any re-introduction or synopsis, but I do feel somewhat obligated to provide one here anyway. Figure this shouldn’t take too long.

You are Doomguy — alternatively pluralized as “Doom Guy.”^[18] Accept no substitutes, forget what you’ve heard about ‘Flynn Taggart’ and ‘Buddy Dacote,’ and miss me with that ‘Doom Slayer’ shit. All you need to know is that he’s a Marine transferred to an unfavorable post on Mars due to his striking a superior officer – who would have ordered him to fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians – and effectively made to serve as security for the interplanetary megacorporation UAC (Union Aerospace Corporation). Unfortunately for him [and fortunately for the rest of mankind], your change in station coincides with the company’s teleportation experiments yielding a rather unsavory fruit: A full-scale invasion by demons straight out of Hell itself, who make quick work of the UAC staff at facilities on Mars’ moons of Phobos and Deimos. He and the rest of his combat troop are promptly beamed up to Phobos, where the demons seem to tear down the rest of your squad just as speedily. It falls on him (you) – initially armed only with a pistol – to face down the entire demonic horde himself. Luckily for humanity, he’s the goddamn Doomguy: Capable of carrying nearly 460 lbs on his back, running 50 miles per hour without so much as stopping for breath, and fueled by a righteous fury fit to make Satan himself quake in his cloven boots. From Phobos to Deimos, and eventually into the Inferno itself; he and you will square off against the armies of the damned as represented by several varieties of enemies, numbering ten flavors in total… or just eight, here on the console front.

What we’ll have to remember moving forward here is that 3DO DOOM is nearly identical in terms of content to the Atari Jaguar’s version of DOOM (save for a few differences we’ll be addressing later). As such, when it comes to matters of “missing content,” we’re working with what John Carmack himself saw fit to deliver to console owners of the era — what he determined the hardware was reasonably capable of handling, with all the changes and content removal that come with that. What remains intact is the core of gameplay; between blasting demons away in first-person with a selection of eight weapons (your fists included), self-contained and heavily-themed maps filled to the brim with items and secrets, and collecting colored keys in order to open associated color-coded doors. As said earlier in this article: It’s all still clearly recognizable as DOOM, but distinct enough to warrant highlighting the differences. So, let us count the ways, beginning with what is arguably the most substantial change-up: The deconstruction of the ‘Episode’ format that originally governed the sequence of maps, in favor of a more straightforward series of ‘Levels’ ranging one to twenty-three (plus a secret twenty-fourth). In the process of this alteration, there are maps from the original set of twenty-eight that don’t make the cut, significant changes made to what remains, as well as a small handful of new replacements made. And as most have historically agreed, these compromises made are generally for the worse in terms of playability — necessary as they may have well been in order to get the game running in the first place.

Generally speaking, most map changes amount to geometry: Removing particular pillars, steps, and other elements which would’ve induced a heavier rendering load with their presence. Some of these changes are certainly less noticeable than others, where even the most obsessive player is unlikely to notice some of the minor tweaks made to decorative flourishes and smaller details. On the other hand, omissions that move to change or remove the locations of various points of cover and switches may prove more appreciable — seen as early as the removal of a pair of columns within the game’s iconic first level (E1M1 / ‘Hangar’), and where the switch to activate the map’s first secret (a passage to the outdoor sector of the map) is now entirely missing. Eventually, these alterations begin to become increasingly more substantive: Entire rooms missing from some of the later maps, simplified lighting effects across sectors, the removal entirely of “crushers” (tiles designed to descend and crush characters into the floor, damaging them in the process),** and a reduction to the number of wall and floor textures utilized in order to free up some of the system’s video memory. That last change does at least have the surprise benefit of fixing some missing / unmapped textures from the original games, thereby eliminating a handful of unintended “hall of mirrors” effects. Furthermore, a pair of items from the original game were omitted in the Jaguar conversion (the ‘partial invisibility’ orb and ‘light-amplification visor’), and thus stripped from the maps in which they appeared.

Interestingly, the 3DO port actually brings back the invisibility power-up, and consequently returns them to where they once belonged in the levels — a fact which I don’t often see reported on. My best guess is that they were still present in that original Jaguar source code – able to be disabled on a per-console basis for those with difficulty rendering transparency effects – and that Rebecca decided to leave them on for the 3DO? This further extends to an enemy that had gone missing on Jaguar, which similarly returns to the fray on 3DO: The infamous ‘Spectres,’ serving as blackened and semi-transparent versions of the existing ‘Demon’ enemies. On the Jaguar, instances where spectres would be made to appear within levels see them replaced by their fully-visible pink counterparts, making for a largely seamless swap. But again, this must’ve amounted to a toggle option within the Jaguar codebase, as Becky simply deigned to display them in all their transparent glory. Owe all this to the fact that the 3DO hardware was capable of addressing / rendering alpha channels, whereas the likes of the Jaguar [as well as the 32X and Sega Saturn] would’ve had to rely on dithering effects (alternating empty and active pixels) in order to create the illusion of sprites and textures blending into the space. As such, if you’re looking for which console conversion of DOOM is more faithful to the DOS original, the 3DO surprisingly manages to edge out those other versions — for as dubiously significant as these re-inclusions may be.

Ultimately, competing for the title of “most complete conversion” is rendered moot by the shared omission entirely of several levels — maps which Carmack just couldn’t figure out a way to make feasible on what he deemed to be inferior hardware. Disregarding DOOM’s late-releasing fourth episode ‘Thy Flesh Consumed’ (released as part of The Ultimate DOOM on April 30, 1995 — well after the original Jaguar version had already been completed); consumers would lose out on the likes of episode three’s original introductory map ‘Hell Keep’ (E3M1), the curiously hand-inspired ‘Slough of Despair’ (E3M2), as well as Inferno’s secret map / re-interpretation of Hell Keep as ‘Warrens’ (E3M9). But the two most significant cuts by far are the removal of ‘Tower of Babel’ (E2M8) and ‘Dis’ (E3M8), originally designed to serve as boss encounters at the ends of their respective episodes. As a matter of fact, those associated boss enemies – the dreaded Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind – are completely absent from these console versions of DOOM, accounting for the reduction of enemy varieties down from ten to eight on 3DO. In exchange for several of these missing maps, players would receive some confusingly identically-named replacements: A lesser take on Tower of Babel now serving as a survival gauntlet for your level sixteen, a pared-down reimagining of Hell Keep for level seventeen, and the absolutely confounding decision to replace the final level Dis with what was originally episode two’s secret map; ‘Fortress of Mystery’ (E2M9). We will have a lot more to say about that last level in particular later on.

That just about sums up the key content differences between the console and DOS versions, barring a handful of tweaks made to presentation and functionality: Changes made to the status bar’s appearance, the omission of on-screen messages indicating item pick-ups, a lack of ‘Intermission’ screens between episodes / glimpses at the ‘You Are Here’ screen between maps, the inability to save during levels now replaced by a straightforward level select from the main menu, and so on. Oh, there’s also a somewhat significant change made to the ‘Nightmare!’ difficulty, wherein enemies no longer respawn after being killed — a concession likely made in the interest of balancing difficulty against less responsive console controls, or to cut down on system processing in some way. But all told, these changes are all comparatively inconsequential when contrasted against the broader changes made to the actual map designs. So, with all that out of the way, I think we can finally begin to address the 3DO version specifically — to determine what makes it “unique,” and how it rates against the likes of Jaguar DOOM and similarly-derived contemporaries. As such, the first thing I’m gonna highlight here is the standard model of 3DO controller itself: A relatively inoffensive design, bringing with it five face buttons (A, B, and C; as well as a ‘Stop’ serving as select, and a ‘Play / Pause’ for start) and an acceptable directional pad. But what puts it above the likes of the Jaguar and 32X when it comes to DOOM are its L and R shoulder buttons, allowing for dedicated control over strafing — a functionality which would’ve otherwise required you to hold a “strafe modifier” button while pressing left or right on the D-pad. In this way, 3DO DOOM immediately gains an edge over several of its peers, as you regain the vital abilities to speed-strafe and circle-strafe in-game.

The second leg up 3DO DOOM has over its competition (subjectively, I suppose) is its newly-arranged CD soundtrack, courtesy of none other than Randy Scott himself [as well as his bandmate Bryan Celand]. While Bobby Prince’s original MIDI compositions were already the stuff of video game music legend, their depth and fidelity could vary between different sound card options for PCs of the era. Where it arguably sounded best on something like a Roland SC-55 – the sound card it was originally written and intended for – the average computer consumer of the 90s was more likely to have something along the lines of a Creative Sound Blaster, which I’d argue sounded like complete ass. I should know: It’s what I was personally rocking back in the day when I first played DOOM. And if you didn’t happen to be packing a sound card in your machine, you wouldn’t have gotten a taste of the music at all — only getting to experience the shrill tones of your system’s internal speaker playing back decidedly unfittingly chirpy arcade-esque sound effects. All this is to say that the musical experience of DOS DOOM was an inconsistent and highly variable thing, and that the opportunity presented during 3DO DOOM‘s development to record the music to CD with live instruments would be a fortuitous one. And to give credit where it’s due: Randy’s soundtrack ain’t half bad! Certainly beats the hell out of the 32X’s cacophony of farts or Jaguar’s awkward silence — though I’ve always been more partial to the gloomy Aubrey Hodges soundtrack, personally.

3DO DOOM brings with it thirteen background music tracks (plus an unused fourteenth, “Sweet Little Dead Bunny”), based largely on Bobby Prince’s original score. In addition to maintaining much of the original arrangement, they also match the game fairly well with regards to tone: The electric guitars are appropriately distorted, the slap bass is nice and punchy, and the synths avoid becoming a distraction or brightening the dreary mood. Other layers of instrumentation and noise are utilized as appropriately as they are sparingly — adding to the soundscape while letting the leads drive the dirges. I can almost imagine Prince himself landing on some of the same musical choices made by Scott if he too had been given the benefit of full CD audio to work with: Very much an idealized version of what DOS DOOM‘s soundtrack could’ve sounded like had it been released on a compact disc rather than a floppy diskette. Just don’t come into the game expecting the standard thrash metal style of cover that most remixers seem to opt for, and you may find yourself pleasantly surprised by what you get to listen to while decimating the demon hordes. It’s got some bona fide bangers, but not much in the way of headbangers, if you catch my drift. If you want the experience of playing along to the arrange soundtrack yourself, but understandably don’t want to have to play the 3DO version of the game just to hear it; there’s a mod in the form of a PK3 file that you can use to replace PC DOOM‘s soundtrack with the 3DO set, within your source port of choice.

Alright, I reckon that’s just about all of the good things there are to say about Art Data Interactive’s DOOM. That means it’s time to start addressing the bad and the downright ugly, in which 3DO DOOM dutifully delivers. But to cover the finer points effectively, we first have to explain [in brief] how graphics rendering and screen resolution work. So, here’s the layman’s explanation (Skip ahead two paragraphs if you wanna be spared): The more individual pixels a machine has to account for drawing on a frame-by-frame basis, the more stress it puts on whatever internal bits of hardware are in charge of rendering graphics. As such, filling out an entire screen with constantly-changing images can represent a pretty tall order — all the more so if the graphics processor additionally has to run the behind-the-scenes calculations required to produce 3D graphics. If that load becomes too much for the system to bear, it loses its ability to update the screen at its intended speed — most typically aiming for a rate of thirty or sixty times per second, in accordance with the 60Hz refresh rates of standard monitors. As a game drops below that threshold, it either begins to run in slow motion (taking the additional time to render every single frame), or starts to drop frames outright (maintaining the game’s timing and pacing, but skipping intermediate frames as needed). Neither of these solutions are particularly ideal, but I’d argue that skipping frames is the worse route to take of the two — depriving you of your ability to effectively react, occasionally dropping your inputs entirely, and generally making the action more difficult to parse.

Bearing all this in mind, it behooves a game developer to find ways to cut down on that processing load as much as possible, in order to maximize potential performance. Perhaps the quickest and dirtiest way of accomplishing this is to cut down on how much of the screen actually has to change between frames — employing “static” elements that mostly remain in place / intact over the course of gameplay. For example: Putting a big ol’ status bar across the bottom of the screen, with unchanging background tiles and less frequently-updating bits of informational text. If that’s not enough, you could start shrinking the game window itself — adding empty or static space between the edges of the screen and your player’s viewport. Of course, employing this method invariably means shrinking the portion of the screen that the player is most interested in looking at — crushing and squeezing down the images to the potential point of being absolutely indecipherable. When you consider that the typical CRT television display you’d be playing on at this point in time spanned maybe 17″ inches in diameter [on average], you only had so much space to work with in the first place; to where I’d argue that a game window shrunk down any further than 160 by 144 pixels is going to be nearly impossible for a player discern — if they aren’t having to squint their eyes just to see it on their screen. But when a higher framerate is vital to a player’s gameplay experience, it’s a compromise they may find themselves needing to make.

Now, why did I go ahead and explain all that? Well, in addition to wanting to inform those who aren’t intimately familiar with the technicalities of how video games work, it’s also necessary for understanding why 3DO DOOM is presented in the way that it is. Rebecca may have been a bona fide master when it came to matters of porting and optimization, but ten weeks time simply wasn’t enough for her to get DOOM up to scratch on the given console. Perhaps with the benefit of an extra month or two, she could’ve found some novel ways to put the system’s processor to work, and gotten the game to run in full screen at a consistent thirty FPS. But as it stood – aside from a handful of optimizations made to the game’s assembly functions – she could only fall back on that simplest option: Shrinking down the default screen size, and providing the option to players to shrink it down even further as desired for better performance. As such, 3DO DOOM‘s default viewport only manages to span 224 by 128 pixels, versus the DOS original’s 320 by 168 pixels (bear in mind that we’re subtracting the 32 pixel tall status bar from this measuring). For those able to tolerate it, this could be further scaled down to an absolutely miniscule 128 by 80 pixels — to occupy just one-third of your total screen space. At this stage, you are entirely trading in your ability to discern what’s happening within the game, all in the hope of gaining a handful more stamp-sized frames per second. But even with the game window shrunk down as small as the 3DO allows, you’re unfortunately still unlikely to hit that thirty FPS sweet spot.

It’s time for a bit of number crunching, as I’ve gone and counted average framerates within a range of different screen sizes and in-game situations. My results – imperfect as they may be given emulation (even in an HLE-capable emulator) – are as follows: At the game’s default provided screen size, you’re liable to average roughly eight frames per second during a typical round of combat, with highs of around twelve frames per second while left to peacefully navigate less busy spaces. This is, by all accounts, pretty lousy — what many a modern game player might decry as “unplayable.” At the lowest possible setting, you can expect an upgrade to a paltry ten frames per second during action, contrasted against a comparatively smooth twenty frames per second on average outside of combat. If you’re particularly masochistic, you could always use that cheat code to unlock the game’s maximum resolution (280 by 160 pixels), and net yourself a nifty three to four frames per second mid-battle — upped to just five or six when safely outside of it. Some of these gains and drops may seem pretty far from significant from one another, but believe you me: When you’re batting below that thirty FPS mark, every last digit you can muster counts. The difference between eight and ten frames per second can very well mean the difference between life and death in-game — whether or not you see a fireball headed your way, let alone have a chance at dodging it to fight another day.

So, now that we’ve gone and addressed the issues of screen space and framerate, it’s time to hit y’all with one more sobering statistic (the last one, I promise): In 1995, a new model of contemporary computer would’ve likely cost you between $750 and $3,500 dollars. Understandably, most folk were reluctant to drop that kind of cash, especially if they already had an older desktop sitting around already that could facilitate the bulk of their daily computing needs. Maybe it was something ubiquitous to several years prior, like an IBM compatible model boasting a 386 processor — providing them a blazing fast 33Mhz clock speed, a whopping 4MBs of RAM, and the power to run the then-latest version of WordPerfect 6.1. As far as gaming performance would get you though, you’d be running pretty hot when it came to the likes of DOOM — lucky to average anything higher than single-digit framerates at anything higher than a medium screen size with your graphics quality set to ‘Low.’ You can imagine all that might look something like this (🔊). In other words, you could expect performance and presentation pretty similar to the likes of 3DO DOOM, and you’d be downright chuffed to manage the feat! The point I’m trying to make is similar to the one I made earlier with regards to DOOM‘s music: Your gameplay experience on a personal computer was a wildly variable thing, depending on what kind of hardware was available to you — assuming you could even afford the luxury of a PC in the first place. As such, the experience of getting to play DOOM at its intended 35 FPS (the standard refresh rate for many computer monitors of the era being 70Hz) with a full frame and high-quality graphics was not one available to everyone. If anything, it was a downright rarity, well until the era of Windows 95 machines becoming a consumer standard.

Does knowing all that absolve 3DO DOOM of its presentational sins? Not really. It’s still just about the roughest way imaginable to play DOOM — the equivalent of a “worst case scenario” on the computer front. But here’s the thing: It’s still DOOM (more or less), and it’s still technically playable all the way from beginning to end. Which warrants asking the question: Would a casual consumer who had never experienced / lacked the means to play DOOM on PC / DOS still be able to derive enjoyment from playing the 3DO version? It’s a theoretical that requires putting yourself in the shoes of a player in 1995 (or 1996, more likely), and remembering what the expectations and standards of the time were like on the console front — a mental exercise that means putting aside whatever experience you might’ve had playing DOOM within a modern-day source port (as they typically represent impossibly smooth and high-definition visuals compared to what was possible back in the day), as well as temporarily erasing the past twenty-five years of computer and console hardware advancements from your memory. Perhaps the 3DO in this scenario is only your second or third console — definitely the first you’ve owned capable of rendering 3D graphics, albeit at a snail’s pace. Let’s also assume for the purposes of this exercise that you’d be playing the game at its default screen space, prioritizing visibility over performance. Bearing all this in mind, would DOOM‘s uniquely hellish charms still have an impact on you, or would the framerate woes prove too bitter a pill to swallow?

Starting with just a pistol in hand [and your hand itself], you approach the game’s first enemies: Zombiemen bearing their hitscan rifles, capable of zapping you from afar. (Reckon we’re also assuming that your first time playing, you’re picking either the ‘Hurt Me Plenty’ difficulty level or below, and as such are spared shotgun-toting Sergeants for the first two levels.) You’ll quickly find – much as in the DOS original – that your trusty sidearm isn’t really all too worthy of your trust. Only here on 3DO, the issue is compounded by the fact that your inputs are so delayed, and that even the basic ability to line up shots is compromised. This means that the pistol makes for an especially ineffective starting weapon in this version of the game, as its value hinges entirely on the idea of you being able to center an enemy in the middle of the screen and precisely time your trigger squeezes (as simply holding down the fire button makes it fire less accurately). You’ll no doubt want to upgrade your arsenal as soon as possible, and lucky for you there’s a shotgun hidden in a secret as early as the first level! Only one problem: You – as a first time player, mind you – probably aren’t fully aware of secrets and how they function in DOOM. What’s to tell you that before you flip the switch at the level’s exit, you should backtrack to find where a platform in one of the previous rooms automatically lowers after passing it, and grab hold of the handy twelve-gauge?

Not only that, but there’s another new obstacle in the way of you discovering potential secret areas and stashes: You’re unlikely to notice even the most clearly-indicated / color-coded pushwalls within the environment, as the decrease in visible resolution mixed with the game’s tendency to drop frames will probably lead to your running right past most of them. All this means that you’re probably not picking up any new weapons until the third level, where you’ll finally start to see enemies dropping shotguns and the chaingun presented to you outside of secret areas. Hell, maybe you’ll get lucky and find the rocket launcher in level four after unintentionally falling into and wading through some nukage, and you’ll more or less have the extent of your arsenal for the remainder of the episode… unless, of course, you wind up dying and being forced to restart a given level with just your pistol in hand again. And without the benefit of mid-level saves afforded to you in the original DOS release, that means there’s no possible reprieve or fallback in the event of your death — not to mention, if you should need to turn your console off and pick up the game at a later time. All this serves to undermine the experimentation and exploration that are arguably essential to the DOOM experience; between the added difficulties in secret-hunting, the inability to set your own checkpoints, and the severe penalties for death.

I imagine that a first-time player will be doing a lot of dying, and not necessarily by the hands of monsters. All told – and even on ‘Ultra-Violence’ difficulty – there does seem to be a reduction placed on enemy difficulty. This might have something to do with how framerate could potentially affect the underlying “tic” system that dictates AI behavior, or more simply be a matter of deliberate scaling for console players? In either case, the baddies do seem to approach and attack less frequently, providing some much-needed additional wiggle room (given the effects on your movement). Pinky demons are still liable to swarm and surround you though, making them the potentially most dangerous monsters in the game given the extra challenge on top of attempting to weave through them. But their lethality is still trumped by one hazard in particular: Navigating your way out of nukage pits and other damaging floors (such as lava). Given how slow you are to turn and how difficult your escape routes are to discern, falling into various pools and vats may prove a death sentence more often than not — especially when the ways out are hidden behind indistinguishable secret walls. And given a tile’s scripted imperative to harm you roughly every second, every moment spent stuck in the muck is another step closer to death. Even if you find your exit, there’s a very good chance you’ll overshoot it on your first mad dash toward it, given how poorly movement momentum mixes with your missing frames and input latency. And it is perhaps this bit of traversal frustration which compounds every other difficulty and hurdle in 3DO DOOM.

It’s here where I have to disagree with an assertion made by Becky, that changes she made to the game’s acceleration and movement “made the controls actually quite fluid and quite nice.”^[16c] To this, all I can say is “Nah,” and point to any instance in the game where you have to attempt to walk through open doors or across a suspended bridge. The movement in 3DO DOOM is – by all objective means of measurement – terrible: A half-functional mess of delayed inputs stretched across interminably long frames, resulting in the inability to so much as navigate to the end of a hallway without bumping into the walls on both sides — never mind shoving your way through the demon hordes, or surviving the most slightly precarious of surrounding environmental hazards. To get a handle on your direction requires doing something that you should never have to do in DOOM: Stopping your running, and engaging with the ability to turn slower while at walking speed. But even this isn’t a cure-all when it comes to positioning yourself in front of narrower openings and pathways, where so much as tapping the strafe buttons to try and align yourself is liable to send you rocketing across the room — potentially over an edge and into toxic sludge. Needless to say, this becomes all the more perilous when it comes to combat, where your abilities to dodge projectiles and avoid being cornered are compromised to the point of near-impossibility. I honestly don’t know what else to say about it, other than the fact that it throws a wrench into what should be one of the most intuitive and responsive movement systems in all of gaming.

To add yet another wrinkle to this sorry fold, I’ve gotta talk about the rocket launcher. Arguably one of the most effective weapons in Doomguy’s toolkit in most versions of the game, it’s rendered as completely useless here on the 3DO, if not more hazardous to your own health than to your enemies. It comes down to that inability to accurately gauge angles and distance, as the auto-aim / homing ability of rockets seems more razor-thin than ever here on the console. Combine this again with newfound difficulties in turning and stepping, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster at hand: It feels like every other rocket you fire will either miss its mark or blow up directly in your face — causing significant damage to your precious health. I swear, I unintentionally ate more rockets over the course of playing through this version of DOOM than I have in decades spent deliberately rocket jumping in Quake. Maybe this is just a problem with how I expect DOOM‘s rockets to behave versus their implementation on the 3DO? It might come down to incorrectly calculating distances due to the shrunken-down viewport, or having my timing thrown off by the dropped frames and stuttering. That, or the rocket launcher really is just that awful to use in this version of the game, due to all the concomitant factors at hand. One thing I encountered that seems like it’d be a universal issue is the chance for the game to stutter and freeze for full seconds when switching to the launcher and firing its first shot, as if pulling the sprites for the rocket from the system’s memory routinely causes some sort of temporary hiccup? In any case, I found myself favoring the chaingun above all else, for its ability to make enemies perform “the chaingun cha-cha” as the instruction manual so eloquently puts it. That, and the fact that you can simply hold down the fire button and reasonably expect it to hit something in close-quarters combat — unlike the shotgun, which somehow seems to miss more often than not at point-blank range?

Bearing all the above in mind, challenging 3DO DOOM really does make for an unusually cautious and deliberate take on the game — even (if not especially) for the veteran DOOM player. Levels one through eight – the equivalent of original first episode ‘Knee-Deep in the Dead’ – are relatively simple in terms of enemy difficulty and variety, but may prove some of the trickiest maps to safely and efficiently navigate. You can always bring up the map screen in-game by holding B and pressing Play / Pause, but it might only solve so many of your woes when it comes to key-hunting and figuring out where you’ve been / need to go. The original eight maps might be masterpieces of FPS design, but some of the simplified architecture and texture choices can slightly hamper their effectiveness, made all the more problematic by the compromised controls and smaller screen. For example, I found myself spending way too much time getting lost on level seven (‘Computer Station’), between my repeatedly missing passageways and retreading the same ground. 3DO DOOM arguably gets easier as you get further into The Shores of Hell and Inferno, as the environments open up somewhat and navigation becomes more straightforward. Barring a few especially egregious levels (I’m looking at you, ‘Unholy Cathedral’), the back half of DOOM generally goes by pretty quickly, and feeds you some pretty intense firefights to keep you on your toes.

Word of warning: There are a few map changes in particular that might throw an experienced player for a loop. In example: If you forget that level thirteen’s ‘Command Center’ no longer has a secret exit (as its associated secret level is now the game’s final stage), you might wind up like me and wander around the map in circles for thirty minutes trying to find it — though I reckon a first-time player wouldn’t have the same issue in that scenario. Then there’s the matter of the missing Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind battles, which see replacement levels anti-climatically substituted in their place: Level sixteen, for example, is a completely different arena from the one you’d face the Cyberdemon in, and instead serves as an underwhelming series of standard monster waves. But no change is more disappointing than the game’s final level ‘Dis’ – wherein you would face off against the Spider Mastermind serving as your final boss – being replaced by episode two’s aforementioned secret level, ‘Fortress of Mystery.’ Quite frankly, Fortress of Mystery is just about the worst map in all of DOOM: A total joke which entails two rooms full of enemies, before a final room that contains all three of the map’s keys within arm’s reach of one another. To end your time playing DOOM with its goofiest puzzle instead of a proper boss fight just makes the whole endeavor feel wasted — ending with an absolute whimper instead of a deservedly satisfying bang. This isn’t to say that the original Spider Mastermind fight was a stand-out in the pantheon of video game boss battles (they feel like a holdover of the interchangeable hitscanning bosses from Wolfenstein 3D, and somehow wind up being easier to tackle than the Cyberdemon), but it at least provided a player with a sense of having clawed their way through Hell in order to best the “big bad” at the end.

There is one more change made to the game’s ending which warrants distinction: On finishing the inferior Dis, and exiting through the final portal, you may expect to be whisked away to the game’s text epilogue — the screen explaining the significance of your mission and the aftermath of defeating the Spider Mastermind. From there, you’d await the transition to the graphic showing the state of Earth, where the stage is set for the game’s sequel as you bear witness to a burning city and a bunny’s head on a pike. Only, a further concession had to be made here, for reasons completely unknown: As in the Atari Jaguar version of the game, the epilogue text describing your victory over the Spider Mastermind and return to Earth (“It’s good that no hellspawn could have come through that door with you…”) is replaced with a far more generic congratulatory crawl, in which “id Software salutes you!” and you are told that “You have proven yourself the best of all!” Again, just an utterly unsatisfying conclusion by comparison to the original, and one which seems to imply that Doomguy’s ordeal has come to a complete and final end. Perhaps sensing how underwhelming this screen was, Rebecca determined to tack on at least one more bit of celebration for players who had endured DOOM’s demonic gauntlet: A hybridized version of DOOM II: Hell on Earth’s ending, where you’re treated to an impromptu “Cast of Characters” gallery featuring all the enemies you’ve faced over the course of the adventure. As you cycle through the monster roster – watching the baddies disintegrate into gibs every time you press a button on your controller – you’re intended to end on a page dedicated to “Our Hero,” featuring the Doomguy himself ultimately being reduced to a bloodied corpse. Only one small problem: The gallery just continues to loop indefinitely, providing you no way to return to the game’s main menu. You’ll have to power your 3DO off and on again if you’re so compelled to replay the game, and to discover that the full range of levels is now selectable to start from.

And so, that’s DOOM, more or less! Quite possibly the worst version of it, but DOOM nonetheless. At the very least, plowing through swarms of demons can still be fun, and admiring the variety of scenery and level design can be a treat. Once a player figures out the tricks for discovering secrets, thoroughly re-exploring the provided stages can prove a solid bit of replay value (though missing two of the three secret levels does hurt this somewhat). And when it comes time to challenge the game at its higher difficulties, you’d hope that a player would find a way to get used to / compensate for the controls and framerate, in order to stand a chance against the additional monsters which await. But I guess all that is contingent on wanting to replay 3DO DOOM in the first place, rather than just tossing the game into the “one and done” pile. One factor which certainly detracts from the replay value is the total lack of multiplayer — contrary to the console’s own branding as the ‘3DO Interactive Multiplayer.’ While the lack of online functionality is understandable (given how the system itself didn’t support it), the lack of any local multiplayer options is certainly a disappointing exclusion. That said, imagining how low the framerates would go given a split screen configuration makes for a fairly terrifying thought, and it’s probably for the best that the attempt wasn’t made. Spare a thought for the theoretical friend invited over to play 3DO DOOM cooperatively, and being made to endure single-digit framerates in the company of their apologetic bestie. Makes me think back to the times I subjected my own friends to Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, running at lows of 0.5 frames per second… which, doesn’t that just make 3DO DOOM seem blazing fast by comparison?

What’s my final verdict, then? Y’all might be surprised to hear it after how harsh I’ve been, but I’m gonna rate 3DO DOOM as a resounding “barely acceptable!” Layer on as many technical issues as you might and do your damndest to hobble the controls, but DOOM is still DOOM after all is said and done, and there’d still be plenty for a first-time player to appreciate about it in its day. Movement in particular takes a painfully long while to get used to, but you can eventually learn to largely compensate for the acceleration and the lag — certainly more so than many of its console contemporaries, which would strip it of its immediately accessible strafing. And unlike the SNES conversion of the game, you’re not getting a compromised version of the core gameplay, where monsters are made to face you at all times and where causing infighting becomes impossible. That said, that SNES version does at least retain the original boss battles; which does give it an advantage in terms of pacing and pay-off, and might make it a more fully-realized version of DOOM? But all told, I’m still sticking with my immediate impression after finishing the 3DO version: For a first-time player, coming in hot off the heels of comparatively simpler 3DO FPS fare like Wolfenstein 3D and maybe Escape from Monster Manor? You could certainly do a whole lot worse than even a severely-compromised version of DOOM. After all, you could’ve somehow wound up with a copy of Iron Angel of the Apocalypse under your Christmas tree instead. How’s that for a fried slice of “Hell on Earth?”***

Of course, none of that necessarily means that DOOM on 3DO is what I’d call a solid conversion. It is – as has been said before – just about the worst possible version of DOOM imaginable, and something like a sacrilege to those who hold the original DOS release dear. The shame of it all is that it didn’t have to be this way: If Rebecca had been given more time, or if someone other than Art Data Interactive had picked up the publishing rights in the first place; we could’ve gotten a far less compromised take on the title, or even something like a potentially improved version given the CD format at hand. That’s not to say that Randy’s ideas for adding new weapons and enemies should have ever been paid heed (god only knows how many awful user WADs exist as a disappointing precedent for that), but rather that something along the lines of what PlayStation DOOM accomplished could’ve been possible: Creating a new tone and atmosphere for the game, utilizing both the CD audio and the potential to pack the rest of the disc to the brim with improved graphical assets. You’ll hate me for suggesting it, but the idea of a completely redrawn DOOM certainly would’ve made for a unique selling point — something to ostensibly demonstrate the 3DO’s capabilities, as well as potentially entice already veteran Doomers to try out this variation on one of their favorite games. A new episode’s worth of original levels could’ve also served something like that purpose: Providing a set of especially challenging or aesthetically interesting stages, as a means of proclaiming “3DO does what computers DOS-n’t.” Y’all like that slogan? I’m telling you, I definitely could’ve gotten a gig at a 90’s game marketing department.

I suppose though that DOOM 64 would’ve pretty quickly overshadowed whatever a 3DO developer may have been able to muster: Midway Games’ wholly original take on the classic formula – with an entirely new set of levels, technical improvements to the engine, completely redrawn graphics, and Aubrey Hodges’ masterful sound design – represents just about the best case scenario possible for a developer attempting to “improve” on DOOM‘s design. And frankly speaking, the 3DO simply wasn’t capable of performing like the N64 could — lacking the processing power and system memory to effectively compete past a certain point. Honestly, the best that a 3DO conversion of DOOM could’ve hoped to achieve was probably to just reproduce the DOS original as closely as possible, and provide a decently-performing version of it at that. Ultimately, that’d be a feat most closely approximated by the Jaguar in its time — where the PlayStation version managed the feat of improving the aesthetics to the point of serving as its own distinctive iteration. But even in a scenario where 3DO DOOM could’ve stacked up as an acceptable alternative to the DOS release proper, there’s still one major flaw in the business model here: Folk who knew about / could afford a 3DO probably already had personal computers. And at that point, why not just stick with the original version of the game? Where it might make sense for someone to settle for the likes of SNES DOOM in lieu of having a desktop to play it on instead, I’m just not sure how many folk able to casually drop $750 on a niche multimedia machine wouldn’t already have the latest in home computing available / accessible to them as well.

Ultimately, 3DO DOOM‘s biggest issue – more so than any matter of framerate or screen size – comes down to a question of purpose. The essential question that Art Data and Randy Scott forgot to ask themselves was “Who exactly is our product for?” All they could see was the money being made by id Software on the back of the game’s original release, and an envisioned path toward getting a piece of that pie for themselves — disregarding the logistics and potential reach completely, under the blind assumption that anything with “DOOM” written on the tin was guaranteed to sell. Of course, this lack of market awareness would come back to bite them in time. And again, that’s all in talking about a theoretical best case scenario for the game: The fact that they absolutely botched its development by delaying for so long and attempting to contract it out for as cheaply as they could meant producing the weakest, most technically-challenged version of the game seemingly possible. Rebecca did what she could given the time allotted, and at least managed to deliver a playable product; but man is it still rough, and “rough” was unfortunately not good enough when nothing short of “perfection” was gonna do. Clearly, she’s not the one at fault though — not where Randy Scott’s hubris and incompetence was responsible for her being given such precious little time in the first place, and his public bragging set the final product up for such a disastrously disappointing reception. Still, for those who may have owned 3DO DOOM, there was perhaps a feeling of something being better than nothing. It at least gave them a taste of what had quickly become the hottest game on the PC market, and possibly helped clue them in to the fact that their console of choice wasn’t quite the powerhouse they had been promised. A harsh lesson to be sure, but nothing compared to the heavy dose of reality that Randy was about to be prescribed.

** In a confusing bit of oversight, 3DO DOOM‘s manual still goes out of its way to make an explicit reference to crushers, despite their not appearing in the final product: “Some of the ceilings in DOOM can smash you, making you cry blood.”

*** Yeah, I’m being a bit mean here to an admittedly very novel and atmospheric game in Iron Angel of the Apocalypse. It certainly has its defenders, and I can’t deny there’s some merit to it! But on the other hand: I don’t know if I’ve ever played a more plodding and tedious first-person shooter in my entire life, and I’m willing to wager the casual teenaged consumer in the mid-90s would probably not have fully appreciated Santa leaving this particular present under their tree.

“This Is a Hint to Get Out of the Radioactive Ooze Now!”

“Sorta like a shaved gorilla, except with horns, a big head, lots of teeth, and harder to kill.
Don’t get too close or they’ll rip your
fraggin’ head off.”
Promotional flyer / magazine insert for
Art Data Interactive.

3DO DOOM’s late December release had evidently flown so low under the radar, most gaming magazines would not even register it until well into the new year. And when it finally came time for them to pen reviews of it, not many would be particularly kind to it. Ed Lomas for the UK’s Computer and Video Games Magazine would score it as a 60 out of 100, noting that “the game plays in a tiny window — a problem which could be overlooked if it helped the game run smoothly, but it doesn’t.”^[19] In throwing the game a single bone, they do go on to credit the game as featuring “its own little rock gig,” and praise the soundtrack for incorporating real instrumentation. In Gamefan Magazine’s review of the 3DO version, a panel of three reviewers settled on an average score of 50 out of 100, with contributor ‘E. Storm’ (a pseudonym for editor Dave Halverson) declaring that “You can’t fault the hardware here, this is just a wickedly bad translation.”^[20] They further go on to “beg Id for a Virtual Boy version… Pleeease…”, which — you know what? That would, in fact, have whipped ass — as utterly impractical and likely unprofitable as it may have been. It’s honestly surprising that in all these years spent asking the eternal question of “Can it run DOOM?”, that nobody has attempted to put out so much as a proof-of-concept of E1M1 running on the ol’ red-and-black visor. We’ll also highlight GamePro’s brief review of the game, which scored it at a [contemporary] record-low of 1.5 out of 5.0: “This version is awful, it just for the fact you can only get fluid gameplay by shrinking the window to the size of a stamp – any bigger and the picture gets so choppy, it’s unplayable. The sound and controls are average, but this is the worst console version of Doom so far.”^[21]

This brings us to the contentious saga of the UK’s 3DO Magazine review of DOOM, published after the publication’s having spent the better part of a year promoting the game as a killer app and propping up Art Data Interactive. Ultimately, they’d rate the game as a 60 out of 100, proclaiming it as “A classic of run-and-shoot action […] marred by slowdown and a poor save system.” They would further speculate that “Veterans of the PC version won’t find much to enjoy, but newcomers will find the addictive gameplay still survives despite the problems.”^[22] A fair assessment, all told; but one which would still result in some small controversy, as readers would pen letters to the editors to take issue with some of their “misleading” descriptions of the product. Rod Luke from Wales would write in to decry 3DO DOOM as nothing short of an unmitigated disaster: “What the hell do they think they are doing? Can they honestly believe that the 3DO has a strong future if they can’t pull off a half decent version of Doom. […] Doom on the 3DO needed to be good, hell more than good. It needed to be the best!”^[23] Darren Child from Chesterfield would point out discrepancies in the magazine’s screenshots of the game: “The screen can’t be expanded to the size that you had in the review. It is about ⅔ that size on maximum setting […] What is going on? Did you get your copy from Mars or something?” In response, 3DO Magazine’s editor would claim that the version of the game they reviewed was a “preproduction Doom [delivered] prior to Xmas,” and that “the screenshots were taken from the pre-production version which, apart from the minor differences you spotted and we didn’t, is identical. That the graphics are slightly blockier on the page than on TV is due the grabbing system we – and other magazines – use.” Furthermore, they’d defend DOOM by admitting that while they “weren’t overly impressed either,” that “it’s still a great game and many people got a great deal of enjoyment from the 3DO version.”

The sum of low-scoring reviews probably would’ve been enough to sober up Scott and company pretty quickly on their own. But the true day of reckoning came when the sales numbers came back to the Art Data offices — figures totaling in the higher thousands, as opposed to the predicted tens of thousands. Now, to be clear about one thing right upfront: The 3DO was not a particularly popular console. It only ever moved something like a couple million units of hardware, and none of its top-selling software ever got much further than the 500,000 copies sold milestone.^[24] As a matter of fact, its all-time highest-selling title was 1995’s GEX, which just barely made it across the platinum sales milestone. The console’s top-selling first-person shooter – for point of comparison – would be Studio 3DO’s own Killing Time; released August 1996, and moving a respectable 100,000 ~ 125,000 units. The fact that an original IP could run laps around something as well-established as DOOM (at least in terms of 3DO sales) really goes to show what the console’s audience was looking for: System exclusives, which leveraged the 3DO’s unique hardware in novel ways. But of course, this wasn’t a concept that Randy was capable of understanding — where his belief was that all you needed to sell a successful game was brand recognition, and the ability to cram marketing down consumers’ throats. In fact, Randy was so sure that 3DO DOOM was gonna be a guaranteed unit mover, that he went ahead and did something very, very stupid in preparation for its launch.

Art Data Interactive’s order for DOOM‘s initial production run is reported as ranging anywhere between 50,000^[17d] and 250,000 copies.^[5h] Big as the potential for discrepancy there may be, even the lower end of the estimate still represents an absurd projection given the 3DO’s reach at that time — where there were only estimated to even be around half a million console owners at that moment in time. And to their credit, The 3DO Company itself had attempted to dissuade Randy from this course of action — to convince him to order a smaller run at first, see if they sold through them all, and worry about ordering more after establishing a viable demand for it. But Randy couldn’t be talked down from it: So sure was he that DOOM was gonna rock the 3DO’s world and become a bona fide system-seller in its own right, that The 3DO Company could only respond by saying “Well, if you want to write us a check for that amount of money, we’re not gonna stop you.” Or perhaps he simply didn’t have a choice in the matter? Maybe his ordered production run represented the game’s break-even point — the minimum number of copies he’d have to sell in order to offset the costs of licensing and producing the game? In any event, Art Data would wind up falling well short of even the most conservative of projections – landing somewhere roughly around 10,000 copies sold – and as such their fate was effectively sealed: The toxic reputation that would be attached to 3DO DOOM by magazines and word of mouth would help sink its long-term sales, while Randy’s own conduct had ensured that his relationships with The 3DO Company and id Software were up in flames.

Art Data Interactive’s remaining months were spent largely in a state of free fall. Randy attempted to promote 3DO DOOM‘s Japanese release (on April 26th, 1996) with an appearance on a media disc for Japan’s own 3DO Magazine, where he appeared on video [dubbed over by an interpreter] to hold up a copy of the game and run down its finalized features: “It features twenty four raging levels, CD quality audio, six screen sizes, and six levels of speed. So it’s time to load up the rocket launcher, go down to your retailer, and purchase your ticket straight to hell.” At the risk of reading too much into a grainy 240p video, Randy already looked like a man defeated by this point; beaten down by DOOM‘s North American failure, frustrated to have just twenty four levels within it, and lacking the air of confidence that he had once projected in print media. By how, he surely realized that his company was in irreparable shambles — his only hope now being to recoup some portion of the massive debt he had accrued. DOOM‘s sales prospects in Japan were unlikely to make much of a dent in that number, though. His best move would be to finish up the studio’s last two games in development as quickly as possible, and hope that at least one of them could make its money back. As a matter of fact, these two titles were both advertised within 3DO DOOM‘s manual: Promoted as “Availabe” [sic] across a range of platforms — misspelled in the same way three times in a row. Not only that, but one of the titles mentioned – Nick Faldo’s Champion Golf Challenge – doesn’t appear to have ever actually made it to production?** Which leaves us with just one game left to cover in their catalogue.

Chess Wars: A Medieval Fantasy was intended to release across 3DO, PlayStation, Mac and PC. Ultimately, it would only release for the latter-most machine — designed specifically with MS-DOS in mind. Evidently, the game had been in the works since nearly the beginning of Art Data’s operations, but had been stalled for a variety of reasons. When additionally considering the fact that Art Data lacked the ability to do their own programming (development would eventually be contracted out to one Alex Wells of Digital Arena Software), you can begin to infer what the extent of the company’s own contributions to it were, and around what point they likely stalled out. Which is to say, Art Data had gotten as far as filming some lavishly-produced live action footage, and were made to sit on it until they could find someone to develop the actual game around them. The finished product is your standard chess simulator, with the expected range of options for scaling AI difficulty and so forth; but with the novelty of full-motion video sequences made to play any time a piece is captured — cuts to filmed scenes with actors in appropriately medieval costuming, with unique scenes for every permutation of chessman knocking another off the board. It’s the sort of gimmick that’s fun for precisely one match, before becoming something you routinely skip in all your subsequent games to follow. It’s also a concept derivative of the likes of 1988’s Battle Chess, 1993’s Star Wars Chess, and countless others in between and since. In other words: It was hardly the sort of game worth putting your company into debt to develop, which is precisely what Art Data Interactive did by sinking so much money into the live-action production. Leave it to Randy to yet again misunderstand the video game market, and to burn through his company’s dwindling cash reserves in the most wasteful way possible.

Eventually, Art Data’s debt would’ve had to have proven too substantial to escape from, and their inability to demonstrate any semblance of a viable profit model would catch up to them. Between the financial [and critical] failures of DOOM, Rise of the Robots, and Chess Wars; none of Art Data’s bets had paid off, and there was nothing left in the coffers for them to wager with. The company would fold in either late 1996 or early 1997, having failed to make any sort of impact on the industry save for the controversy surrounding 3DO DOOM‘s release. A disgraced Randy – having burned all his bridges and destroyed his professional reputation – would promptly exit the industry; returning only briefly for a credit as a beta tester for Valusoft’s 2001 release of CIA Operative: Solo Missions, before disappearing from the business once again. Randy began to re-focus on his musical career — establishing his own company Music Town at some point in the early 2000s, and offering music lessons and instrument repair services to clientele across two California locations. Unfortunately for him, this business too came crashing down come 2017, with the allegations of his sexually abusing two students (aged five and six) over the course of a two year period.^[3b] While he’s yet to be found guilty (as of the time of this writing), and his defense would argue that “these are the first allegations against him [in his thirteen-year career]”;^[25] it’s safe to say that his reputation will be forever tarnished by the incident, and that he’ll have to find yet another new industry to develop a trade within — assuming he doesn’t spend the rest of his life in prison under a potential maximum sentence of 30 years to life. Unfair as it may be to Randy, it’s just that much harder to believe in his innocence given his propensity for shady business and compulsive lying twenty years prior.

Art Data and Randy Scott’s reputation were not the only two casualties in DOOM‘s wake: The 3DO itself would not survive the year 1996, either. With emerging competition in the forms of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, hardware sales slowing to an unsustainable crawl (as well as publishers abandoning ship in the face of industry-low royalties on software sales), and the selling of the rights to the M2 console technology to Matsushita; The 3DO Company made the pivot from manufacturing to development and publishing, and began to support other consoles ahead of their own. Ultimately, it was the wisest move they could’ve made at the time: To have gone ahead with producing the 3DO M2 as a competitor to Sony and Nintendo’s hardware offerings would’ve been tantamount to corporate suicide, and their turn as a software house at least managed to yield some returns on investment for them — between the resounding successes of the Army Men and Might and Magic franchises, and intriguing gambles such as the premiere 3D MMORPG Meridian 59. While the company would still eventually succumb to bankruptcy in 2003, they had at least managed to carve out a niche for themselves during a roughly seven year period; having endured far longer than their own titular console, and having made more of an impact on the market with their games than said system ever had.

Of all the parties involved in 3DO DOOM‘s production, it would be none other than Rebecca who came out the other end of it in the best shape. Her career in games continues to this very day, with what I must again stress are far too many industry contributions along the way to even try and account for. We’ll cover just a couple of points: Rebecca evidently got along well enough with Art Data’s Tristan Anderson, that when it came time to develop her next game, she would hire him as part of Logicware in order to serve as a tester and level designer. That game in question would be the PC conversion of the aforementioned 3DO first-person shooter Killing Time, which necessitated rebuilding the game from nearly the ground up — designing all-new levels and assets from scratch, in still attempting to mimic the presentation of the 3DO original. For what it’s worth, Killing Time [in either of its iterations] is a pretty novel bit of FPS action; leveraging FMV within gameplay in the form of interactable apparitions, fairly elaborate theming / environmental design given the limitations of the era, and satisfying shooting action in which you get to unload some vintage 1930s firearms on large crowds of enemies — including akimbo revolvers (enough to earn any game an instant five out of five for me), a Tommy gun, and a crowbar for melee roughly three years before Half-Life landed on the same idea. Unfortunately, that PC version is particularly difficult to play on modern machines, which makes it harder to appreciate the finer points of some of Becky’s unique designs for it.

Logicware persisted into the early 2000s, tackling a number of ports and conversions along the way. As Rebecca continued to demonstrate her propensity for realizing and re-imagining games on new consoles – some highlights including Aliens versus Predator: Gold Edition, Quake II, and Tempest 2000 on Mac – Tristan would similarly gain experience as a tester, before moving on to ply his trade at other studios. Not quite as flashy a role in the industry as he had hoped to demonstrate to Art Data back in the day; where he reportedly earned his ‘Project Manager’ position by bringing a semi-automatic rifle to his interview, firing deafeningly loud blanks in conjunction with clicking the mouse to fire in-game, and telling Randy that “We need to come out with a peripheral like this, an accessory that will give the impression that you really are blowing people’s heads off.”^[4g] He had also apparently “built a Doom level as an exact replica of Small Small World in Disneyland” — a described WAD which would never materialize online, and which you would imagine Randy would’ve angled to include in some form within 3DO DOOM if it were actually real? I’m leaning toward Scott exaggerating Anderson’s bona fides here, and doing his damnedest to sell him as a “bizarre genius” type / major get for the company. In any event, Tristan’s own career would continue into 2003, where his final credited game (according to public record) would be a PC-exclusive Barbie spin-off by the name of Shelly Club. A far cry from contributing to the likes of DOOM before it, but a paying gig is a paying gig!

Eventually, Logicware would fold, seemingly brought on (at least in part) by Valve pulling the plug on their port of Half-Life to Mac just three weeks before it was due to be completed.^[7d] Rebecca’s continuing career would see her contributing across various different companies and studios; including her self-founded Contraband Entertainment, contract work for Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, and ‘Senior Software Engineer’ positions at the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony. Say what you will about the modern-day reputations of some of those corporations, but Rebecca’s programming prowess had clearly reached the status of “legendary,” and saw her in a unique position to be recruited by some of the most recognizable names in technology. All that being said, it’s clear that Becky’s passion still lies in game development, and that she’s most comfortable in helming smaller studios dedicated to contracted conversion work — her specialty as an engineer. To that end, she established her latest company Olde Sküül in 2013, alongside her wife Jennell Jaquays — herself an accomplished industry veteran, with a similarly substantive resume to Rebecca’s. (You can hear Rebecca list off just a small sampling of Jennell’s career highlights over the course of our own interview with her.) It seems as if self-owned studios suit Rebecca best, allowing her the opportunities to dictate her own projects and the pace at which she can complete them — a welcome change from last-minute contracts and personal favors to console manufacturers, to be sure. It also frees up her time to allow her to serve on GLAAD’s board of directors, to volunteer at Frisco Texas’ National Videogame Museum, and to update her webcomic Sailor Ranko — a crossover between Ranma ½ and Sailor Moon, and maybe the most endearingly dweeby thing I can point to as proof of her deep-rooted nerdom. Sorry folks, but we have no choice but to stan our lesbian weeb queen.

Given the substantive nature of Becky’s body of work, it honestly feels a bit odd for us to have to tether her to one of the lowest points in her career — to only be able to highlight her within the context of 3DO DOOM. Such is the nature of our goofy website, I suppose. But in fairness to us: It’s a subject which Rebecca seems more than happy to revisit, between her own tell-alls and interview prompts. Perhaps the most significant first-hand source on the game’s development comes in the form of an installment in her own ‘Burgertime’ series of game post-mortems, hosted on her YouTube channel.^[16d] It’s in this format which she was seemingly first able to speak unfiltered on the subject of 3DO DOOM’s production, and dish out dirt on the likes of Randy Scott as she is uniquely entitled to do. In addition to detailing the game’s tortured development, Rebecca also did the preservation community the favor of releasing the game’s source code in full to GitHub on December 11th, 2014.^[26] Within the readme for this release, Rebecca conveys her hope that “everyone who looks at this code learns something from it,” and her willingness to “answer questions about the hell I went through to make this game. I only wished I had more time to actually polish this back in 1995 so instead of being the worst port of DOOM, it would have been the best one.” Releasing the source code to her developed games is a practice Becky seems to firmly believe in, and one which provides an opportunity for developers and enthusiasts to learn from and make use of her clever engineering.

Enter PhoenixDoom: An application built from Rebecca’s GitHub source code [by developer Darragh Coy], designed to play 3DO DOOM on PC with all the extended amenities the environment offers. In addition to seamless mouse and keyboard control, it also runs at full speed — even with the screen size maxed out! Novel concept, I know. It also goes ahead and fixes a few other issues inherent to the 3DO version; including an issue with unnaturally bright sprites cast against dimly lit environments, some bugs in the monster AI, and reverting various other tweaks made to game behavior — both intentional and unintentional on Becky’s part. Personally, I prefer to play 3DO DOOM with all its original warts and quirks, since that’s the stuff that makes it so unique in the first place! Seriously though: It’s easily the best way to experience the 3DO version of DOOM, and to see what changes to the levels were made all stemming from that original Atari Jaguar version. In that way, you can think of the source port as something like “Console DOOM on PC,” and experience Carmack’s compromised vision in as accessible a way as you’re likely to find. Is it the best version of DOOM you’ll ever play? Almost certainly not. Does it become the best console version of DOOM with the benefit of steady framerate? Nah, that honor still goes to either the PS1 or N64 versions (barring modern-day, direct PC-to-console ports). Is it at least the best version of 3DO DOOM? Hell yeah it is, for whatever that distinction may be worth! In any case, it does still require you to “own” a copy of 3DO DOOM in order to launch — or at the very least, a disc image in the appropriately readable format.

And that’s just about all I can think to cover on the subject of 3DO DOOM! Hopefully, we’ve provided the most thorough and up-to-date detailing of its history currently available on the web, and corrected a handful of misnomers along the way. In these closing thoughts, I’d like to again highlight Rebecca Heineman’s contributions to the industry, and herald her as an unsung hero of game development: Conversion work may not be the most glamorous or prolific within the business, but it’s an absolutely vital component in making games accessible to audiences beyond initially-targeted platforms, and requires an understanding of multiple different consoles’ architectures that eludes even some of the most talented programmers and engineers. I also have to personally thank her here for making herself so accessible in reaching out to me, and being gracious enough to spend an hour and a half of her time answering my silly questions for our interview. We may well end up visiting some further games she had a hand in here on this site (we already have one prior in GoldenEye: Rogue Agent), and I hope to be able to reach out to her again as the cases may call for. I’ll also use this space to further shit on Randy Scott, whose utter refusal to learn the intricacies of the game business wound up giving Becky such a headache in having to deal with: His role in this story is unfortunately indicative of an issue which still permeates the industry today, as top executives at many of the major publishers enter into their roles with a “get rich quick” attitude and a similar contempt for consumers — if not a contempt for the very medium itself. Corner any one of these corporate ghouls and ask them to speak on their supposed “passion” for producing video games, and see how quickly they demonstrate their total lack of understanding as to what makes interactive software such a compelling and vital art form. Of course, all that’s pretty well inconsequential when we’re talking about an accused child molester, in the case of Mr. Scott.

3DO DOOM is a fascinating release, between the saga of its production and the end product distributed to consumers. Statistically speaking, it had to have served as the first time some non-insignificant number of players were first able to experience DOOM, and a stamp-sized window into one of the most historic games of all time. It may not have launched in time to be a Christmas present in 1995, but it still must’ve made for a helluva experience to unwrap — opening their eyes to the potential of the first-person shooter format, and giving them a taste for dynamic action largely unseen on their console of choice. Not to knock the 3DO too harshly (I really do respect the impractical box of chips and circuit boards), but DOOM in its original format is true testament to the fact that engaging gameplay trumps cutting-edge visuals; where the 3DO prioritized pushing polygons at a decidedly leisurely pace, and promptly had its proverbial lunch eaten by the emerging PC games market — even as “true 3D” was still a couple years away from becoming commonplace on the computer platforms of the time. Perhaps if 3DO DOOM had proven presentationally competent (speaking in terms of framerate) and successful in sales, it may well have led The 3DO Company to alter their practices and priorities somewhat. Probably not significantly enough to save the floundering console from its own inevitable doom, but maybe it’d have led to their marketing certain titles above others — making more of an effort to promote faster-paced titles, or otherwise invest in developing more innovative experiments in the first-person perspective? Of course, that’s all just my own speculation, and not a particularly thorough thought exercise at that. What’s most important here is the fact that DOOM did ultimately make its way to 3DO – in however compromised a fashion – and helped introduce lucky (?) buyers to a new dimension in gaming. That, and the fact it gave us an excuse to talk about DOOM at length on the Bad Game Hall of Fame — something that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, if there weren’t a particularly infamous version of it available to cover! Ain’t that a December miracle?

** This is an odd case, as there is a 1992 game titled Nick Faldo’s Championship Golf which was released well before Art Data Interactive’s own formation. This initial version of the game had already made its way to Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and Amiga; before Art Data appeared to promote their own retitled (and presumably retooled) version of the game. Promotional graphics available on the Art Data website did appear to demonstrate a very similar version of the game to its original DOS release, which leads me to believe that this might actually be a similar deal to how Art Data secured distribution rights to Rise of the Robots — where they simply invested in acquiring a number of copies of the existing game, and resold them through their own channels. If this is the case, their re-branding of the game as ‘Nick Faldo Championship Golf Challenge’ might just be an odd bit of obfuscation on their part, in attempting to make their release seem distinct from the original product?

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[2] b c “Atari Jaguar Related Quotes (Jan.22,1994).” AtariArchives.org. Archive of ‘Atari Explorer Online’ newsletter, originally distributed February 20, 1994. Web.
[3] b “Orange County music teacher charged with lewd acts on 2 young students.” ABC7 KABC. July 20, 2017. Web.
[4] b c d e f g Westley, Dave. “Secret of Success – Art Data Interactive.” 3DO Magazine (UK), Issue #3. Paragon Publishing. April 1995. Print. (Scan available)
[5] b c d e f g h O’Reilly, David. “Rebecca Heineman.” Don’t Die. March 4, 2016. Web.
[6] “News – The Art of DOOM” 3DO Magazine (UK), Issue #1. Paragon Publishing. December 1994. Print. (Scan available)
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[8] Bell, Brian C. “40 years on, videogames icon Rebecca Heineman found herself beyond her ‘escape.’” Outsports. November 12, 2020. Web.
[9] Barton, Matt. “The Burger Speaks: An Interview With An Archmage.” Game Developer. December 27, 2010. Web.
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[14] b c Heineman, Rebecca. “Out Of This World: How It Was Done – Rebecca Heinemann.” KansasFest 2020, virtual event. July 24, 2020. Keynote. (Video available)
[15] Johnson, Jess. “Interview: Rebecca Heineman.” GrokCode. October 17, 2008. Web.
[16] b c d Heineman, Rebecca. “Burgertime 7/12/2015: DOOM 3DO.” YouTube, uploaded by Rebecca Heineman. July 12, 2015. Web.
[17] b c d Moss, Richard. “The gory story of Doom’s 3DO nightmare.” The Archive. September 2, 2015. Web.
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[22] “Review: DOOM.” 3DO Magazine (UK), Issue #9. Paragon Publishing. February 1996. Print.
[23] “Interactive.” 3DO Magazine (UK), Issue #10. Paragon Publishing. March 1996. Print. (Scan available)
[24] “And The Winner Is… 3DO Awards Honor Best of the Best for 1995 […]” Business Wire. December 19, 1995. Web.
[25] Goethals, J. “In re RANDAL LETCHER SCOTT on Habeas Corpus.” California Courts of Appeal. December 21, 2018. Available on web through Casetext.
[26] Purslow, Matt. “Source code for Doom’s 3DO port has been released online.” PCGamesN. December 12, 2014. Web.