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Doom 64, released on March 31, 1997 for the Nintendo 64, is a sequel to the Doom games, taking place after Doom II. The game has all new graphics and music and runs with a modified version of the Doom engine (first used in Doom PSX and Final Doom PSX)[1]. The music is shared with PSX Doom games.

"The PSX version was a two-for-one byproduct of the N64 deal," explained Aaron Seeler, "and served as a development base for all the research-and-development tech and tools we would need to bring up for the N64, which was not anywhere close to specs or silicon. All the N64's capabilities were wild guessing."

The plot focuses on the events following the original Doom (in particular Super NES Doom) storyline. An evil entity known as the Mother Demon has survived and brought back the decaying dead creatures you once killed. It is up to you, the Doom Marine, to stop the legions once again.

D64StagingArea1

Start Point of MAP01: Staging Area.

Background[]

Story[]

Quoted from the game's product page:

Dawn of the Undead

An unseen entity from beyond, cloaked by radiation, has rejuvenated the rotting carnage of Phobos. The demons are back. Your assignment is clear. Total annihilation

Quoted from the Doom 64 manual:

"Your fatigue was enormous, the price for encountering pure evil. Hell was a place no mortal was meant to experience. Stupid military doctors: their tests and treatments, were of little help. In the end, what did it matter - it was all classified and sealed. The nightmares continued. Demons, so many demons; relentless, pouring through.

Far Away...

The planetary policy was clear. An absolute quarantine was guaranteed by apocalyptic levels of radiation. The empty dark corridors stand motionless, abandoned. The installations sealed.

The Present...

A long forgotten relay satellite barely executing, decayed by years of bombarding neutrons, activates and sends its final message to Earth. The satellites message was horrific, from the planetary void there came energy signatures unlike anything sampled before.

The classified archives are opened. The military episodes codenamed "DOOM" were not actually completed. A single entity with vast rejuvenation powers, masked by the extreme radiation levels, escaped detection. In its crippled state, it systematically altered decaying dead carnage back into corrupted living tissue.

The mutations are devastating. The demons have returned even stronger and more vicious than before. As the only experienced survivor of the DOOM episode, your commission is re-activated. Your assignment is clear: MERCILESS EXTERMINATION."

The new release includes additional storyline linking Doom 64 to Doom (2016) in the form of the The Lost Levels.

Following defeating the Mother of All Demons, Our Hero spent time tearing up Hell. The Mother's sister Resurrector kicks the Marine out of Hell back into a base on Earth, and tries to kill him. He fought his way through the base to find a portal back to Hell. He fights his way through this new section of Hell, and kills the sister.

Gameplay developments[]

Changes were made to the computer Doom engine for use in Doom 64, and gameplay elements were altered. Doom's core gameplay, however remained the same: the exploration of demon-infested corridors, looking for keycards, switches and ultimately the map's exit while surviving deadly traps and ambushes.

Key differences from the computer games in the series include:

  • 32 exclusive new levels
  • New, larger sprites for all enemies, items, weapons and projectiles, created from high-poly rendered models, which were anti-aliased when close to the player to prevent pixelation.
  • New, high-quality sound effects (the same as used in the PlayStation and Saturn versions of Doom).
  • A more horror-based atmosphere than the science fiction-oriented one seen in earlier games, including darker and more foreboding color schemes used to increase a sense of fear in the player.
  • All new textures, scrolling skies, limited room-over-room architecture and more advanced line triggers.
  • Scripted events through macros, such as almost-complete alterations of room structures.
  • Extensive use of events triggering when enemies are defeated. While this is extremely rare and usually reserved for boss or special encounters in Doom or Doom II, it is more commonly used here.
  • Enemies that appear out of thin air after triggering a tripwire or switch.
  • Tripwire booby traps, from darts to homing fireballs.
  • Camera effects.
  • More advanced atmospheric colored lighting and effects, such as parallaxing skies, fog, and lightning.
  • A more ambient soundtrack instead of the rock music of past Doom games.
  • More extensive usage of Satanic imagery (pentagrams, inverted crosses, depictions of sacrifice) than the computer version of Doom with differing usages of horror schemes.
  • No Commandos, Arch-viles, Spiderdemons or Revenants. This was perhaps removed due to the given limited storage capacity of Nintendo 64 cartridges at its time and deadlines to follow.
  • The Nightmare Imp and Mother Demon are introduced as new monsters.
  • The player's viewpoint is from chest level, rather than eye-level, making all objects and characters appear larger in relation to the player.
  • The Hell Knight and Baron of Hell can hurt each other with their projectiles, and infight as a result, contrarily to the PC version where there is a hardcoded exception for them.
  • Certain monsters were rebalanced with new behaviors or attack properties (e.g. such as giving the Arachnotron a weaker twin plasma gun instead of a stronger single-barrel one).
  • Re-designed weapons that act more devastating than previous installments of the game series (realistic jostling movements when firing the weapons are also present, including being knocked back a few inches from a fired rocket).
  • A new weapon introduced: Unmaker. It is also the only projectile weapon in the series to be upgraded. It is also the only weapon to not be named, alongside using censored profanity when collected.

Weapons[]

All the weapons from the original computer game are present, but redrawn. A new weapon known as the Unmaker or the LaserGun (referenced in-game as "What the !@#%* is this!") has been added. It was first mentioned in the Doom Bible and was planned to be featured in the computer Doom games but never appeared. Its appearance in Doom 64 is its only official appearance, and with the power of three ancient artifacts (known as "Demon Keys" or pentagrams) found in the game, it becomes more powerful by a faster fire rate and a max of three laser beams fired with all three "demon keys". (1st makes Unmaker fire faster, 2nd gives it a second beam, 3rd gives it a third beam).

Weapons include:

Chainsaw, Fist, Pistol, Shotgun, Super Shotgun, Chaingun, Rocket Launcher, Plasma Gun, BFG9000, and Unmaker. (in order of weapon cycling)

SPOILER WARNING: Plot details follow.

The Demon Keys are also a means to clear MAP28: The Absolution: Each teleporter in the map has a symbol representing each key behind them and if the player has the right key, the corresponding teleporter is disabled, making the battle against the horde of demons that teleport in, easier. Also, when killing the Mother Demon, the Unmaker with all "Demon keys" will kill her very quickly.

Spoilers end here.

Levels[]

Doom 64 featured 32 original levels (39 for the re-release):

Monsters[]

Doom 64 includes the following monsters from Doom and Doom II:

Doom 64 also has new monsters, which are:

Doom 64 had monsters that didn't make it to the final cut:

Source ports[]

The following source ports are capable of running Doom 64:

Doom 64: Absolution TC for Doomsday[]

Since the release of the Doom source code for the computer games, programmers have created feature-enhanced versions of the computer Doom game in their own source ports. Several fans of Doom 64 decided to work to convert the game's exclusive content to the computer using Doomsday engine. This stand alone mod, built on the 1.7.14 release of Doomsday, titled Doom 64: Absolution, was released in 2003. It included near-identical, albeit limited representations of the original Doom 64 levels game along with some new maps of its own. It appealed to many fans as a way to play through the game on a computer without using emulation. However, one of its authors, Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal, not being pleased with the feel of the game, started working on a more faithful representation of the console game, which later led the TC to be succeeded by Doom 64 EX.

Doom 64: Retribution for GZDoom[]

In December of 2016, it was announced on the ZDoom forums that Doom 64 was being modded to work with OpenGL-capable source port GZDoom. Upon its version 1.0 release on March 31, 2017, it included two options after choosing "New game" -- Doom 64, which let you play through all of the original Doom 64 levels; and Bonus Fun Maps. Selecting Bonus Fun Maps would take you to a hub where you can choose to play a few of the secret levels in Doom 64 -- Cat and Mouse, Hardcore, and Playground. Two new maps are accessible through the Bonus Fun Maps hub: TitleMap (which was the very map used for Doom 64's opening animation) and Test Facility (which allows the player to view different rooms to test certain items and effects, such as fog, lighting, props, and enemy interaction through a monster-versus-monster arena). Another new feature was the addition of "modern" weapon animations, which are reminiscent of weapon animations from Doom and Doom II. The port is available as its own IWAD but requires an external file for music. Another bonus episode planned for a future update is titled "Retribution".

Reception[]

DOOM 64 received "generally favorable" reviews on Metacritic getting a metascore of 75/100 on PS4[3] and 77/100 on both Xbox One[4] & Nintendo Switch.[5]

Behind the scenes[]

Though the game was heavily marketed as a return to Phobos (see Doom 64: The Story So Far (N64)) by Nintendo at the time (or the implication that the Demon's had only invaded once before according to the box): the manual was less specific referring to it as being one of the space stations/installations that the Doom Guy had already cleared. It could very well have been meant to be an original location as implied by some early previews[6], or even a return to the moon of Jupiter from Final Doom: TNT/Evilution as they were working on the PlayStation version of that game when they began development of Doom 64. One preview even went as far to suggest that Mother Demon was actually a heavily mutated Archvile that escaped death in Doom II, and mutated after radiation. [7] Technically while Doom II was on earth and hell. Some might consider Final Doom to be continuation of Doom II (they are Doom II megawads in fact), which could again link them to events of Final Doom (that being said Archviles do not appear in any of the Midway trilogy technically (only the PC releases at the time).

External links[]

References[]

  1. https://www.shacknews.com/article/117322/terraform-the-making-of-doom-64
  2. https://web.archive.org/web/19971012010005fw_/http://www.nintendo.com/product/n64/doom/enemies.html
  3. Metascore for DOOM 64 on PS4, Metacritic, Retrieved June 18, 2020
  4. Metascore for DOOM 64 on Xbox One, Metacritic, Retrieved June 18, 2020
  5. Metascore for DOOM 64 on Nintendo Switch, Metacritic, Retrieved June 18, 2020
  6. An early preview for Doom 64 in GamePro (issue 96, Sepember 1996) claimed that the story was gonna be: Doom's story has always been simple--you against the forces of hell--and Doom 64 is no exception. The story picks up right after Doom II: It starts right on a space station, with a planetary expedition that's gone wrong and end's in hell.
  7. A preview in Electronic Gaming Monthly 092 (March 1997) claimed this as the story suggesting that one idea for the game was that it took place on Earth: The story goes down like this: In Doom II the big, bad space Marine who gamers control destroyed everything that even had a hint of being demonic so he thought. The problem was that one of the Archviles was still barely alive. Even though the demon didn't seem to have much of a chance of surviving with the many bullet holes in its gut. somehow the fiend lived. The only enemy left, this particular Archvile, healed and slowly started resurrecting its demon pals. Since the healing process wasn't quite finished, its resurrecting powers mutated the enemies when they came back from hell (hence the new look). Now it's time to get killing once again.
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