Doom 64, which recently received a port to PS4, Xbox One, Switch and PC and was bundled with Doom Eternal as a preorder bonus, is a classic creature feature in video game form.
The only Doom game developed outside of id Software, Doom 64 was farmed out to Midway while Doom’s creators were hard at work on Quake II. Many players assumed the 1997 game was a port of the original Doom— after all, the SNES received a straight Doom port four years earlier. But, playing the game for any length of time reveals something quite different and more ambitious.
Doom 64 is an unholy fusion combining the level design philosophy of Doom and Doom II: Hell on Earth with the 3D graphics afforded by the N64’s 64-bit GPU.
The result is a complete reimagining of Doom’s odiously fleshy menagerie. Adrian Carmack’s original pixel art designs gave the Doom series one of the most memorable bestiaries in all of gaming. The bulbous pink cacodemon. The spiky, brown, fire-hurling imp. The gruesome spiderdemon; a mass of brains mounted on an eight-legged Gatling gun. All wonderfully imaginative and impressively timeless — these demons have all returned in fully-realized HD form in Doom Eternal.
Doom 64 becomes all the more fascinating in retrospect. Carmack’s designs for Doom and Doom II are memorable, but primitive, and each game from Doom 3 onward has embraced increasingly high fidelity realism (that is, whatever realism means when demon guts are the thing being rendered). Doom 64 is a fascinating lost chapter; a footnote in the story of our photoreal present. While its graphics were almost certainly seen as a step forward at the time, with the benefit of hindsight, they’re maybe more accurately viewed as a step sideways.
One effect of the weirdness of early 3D graphics is that Doom 64’s demons have added polygons but no added realism. Instead, they read as an embrace of stop-motion; an artificial attempt at recreating the jerky tactility of 1933’s King Kong or 1954’s Godzilla. Doom 64’s creatures move in more or less the same way as the demons of Doom and Doom II, cycling through animations with little in the way of transition between sprites. But here their bodies appear to be built out of clay or rubber.
The roster splits the difference between Adrian Carmack and Ray Harryhausen.
As a result, Doom 64, more than maybe any other Doom game, feels like it has roots in effects-driven horror. Id Software has long described Doom as a mash-up of Aliens and Evil Dead 2, and that combination was never more obvious than in Doom 64; the one game in the series whose monsters wouldn’t look out of place in a classic horror film.
