Apocalypse #12: The Ultimate Doom

Now more ultimater

Initial release: April 30, 1995
Platform: PC, many ports, sort of (see review for details)
Developer: id Software

Around the late eighties through the mid nineties, it was common for up-and-coming game development houses to release their games under the shareware model: divide the game into distinct episodes, sell the first one at a loss, and slather it in ads for the full version, complete with a mailing address to send money to. These developers were often working out of their homes and garages; Commander Keen was created on computers “borrowed” from the workplace of the guys who would found id Software, smuggled out of the office after hours and taken to a rented house in Shreveport before being returned under cover of darkness on Monday morning. By the time Doom came around, id Software had their own office, cut ties with their publisher Apogee, and were making money hand over fist. Ten months later, GT Interactive had taken on publishing duties, allowing for Doom II: Hell on Earth to be sold directly on store shelves — but the original game remained a mail order product.

Enter The Ultimate Doom, what you get when id Software finally get around to putting their biggest smash hit in a box and selling it out of ̶G̶a̶m̶e̶s̶t̶o̶p̶ ̶E̶B̶ ̶G̶a̶m̶e̶s̶̶ E̶l̶e̶c̶t̶r̶o̶n̶i̶c̶s̶ ̶B̶o̶t̶i̶q̶u̶e̶ ̶S̶o̶f̶t̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶E̶t̶c̶.̶ Babbage’s. In a move that would become relatively common, the re-release would feature a whole new episode on top of all the bug fixes and new features. This new episode eschews the more straightforward naming convention of its predecessors, with the episode name and that of all the levels within (well, maybe not E4M9, “Fear”) being Biblical references. Welcome to “Thy Flesh Consumed.”

I suppose I should talk about what The Ultimate Doom brings to the table in general. Unlike re-releases of later games like Duke Nukem 3D, there are no new gameplay elements — no new enemies or weapons, I’m not sure there’s even any new textures. Certainly no new music whatsoever either, instead reusing stock music from the original game. (It’s situations like this that Doomworld’s penchant for MIDI packs intended to remedy.) There are a few bugfixes, which ironically broke user-made content, such as demo files, but most notably a change in how the engine’s tag 666 worked, which broke the early classic map Doomsday of UAC.

But that’s not what you’re here for, is it? No, you’re here for the new maps. Alright, here we go.

id Software had already been working on an expansion of sorts for Doom II titled The Master Levels, cheekily intended to compete with those shovelware releases like D!ZONE that just scraped hundreds of levels off the internet and puked them into boxes for people with shitty or no internet. To that end they’d gotten together a number of community giants, among them Tim Willits who would wind up joining id Software outright. When GT Interactive pushed for the idea of a new episode, John Romero got the band back together, so to speak, consisting of him, fellow Doom II mappers American McGee (who got his industry start by being neighbors with John Carmack) and Shawn Green (who like McGee graduated from tech support into level design) as well as Willits, Willits’ sister Theresa Chasar, and the late, great John “Dr. Sleep” Anderson. With six people designing levels the end result is a wild mishmash of styles and themes, but overall tending towards lots of wood, green brick, and subtle Quake-like use of light fixtures. It’s Hell, but it’s a different kind of hell from Sandy and Tom’s “Inferno;” that one was fire and brimstone, a heavy metal pandemonium. Aesthetically, “Consumed” seemed to hint strongly towards the upcoming Quake, and indeed most of that game’s designers also worked on this.

“Thy Flesh Consumed” does have a story, of sorts. It retcons the end of the main game by implying that you are traveling through a hellish dimension to make it back to Earth after destroying the Spiderdemon at the end of the third episode, though you could probably fudge it by saying that the locales you travel through in “Consumed” are just Earth locations consumed by Hell’s corruption. But really, who cares? When you break it down, “Consumed” is a less than straightforward episode. Romero especially was experimenting with his level design, with a tendency towards large, deep chasms the player must navigate — something we’d already seen him do in Doom II with the likes of “Circle of Death” and “The Living End.” His maps for “Consumed” constitute what are likely the most difficult maps in the episode, especially E4M2, “Perfect Hatred,” which can be utterly brutal if you didn’t do American McGee’s tight little nightmare “Hell Beneath” as perfectly as possible. The rest of the episode after “Perfect Hatred” is certainly hectic — Shawn Green’s “Sever the Wicked” is crawling with hordes of shotgunners — but never quite reaches the heights of “fuck you” as the opening two maps.

Overall I don’t particularly like “Thy Flesh Consumed.” While the orange sky lends a haunting sunset feel to the proceedings, as a mapset I find it leaving something to be desired. It might be better if some of the levels were rearranged — McGee’s “Unruly Evil” is perhaps a slightly easier start than “Hell Beneath” — but I don’t generally find the theme, if there is one, terribly interesting. I think it was iterated better in the various dimensions of Quake, though we wouldn’t see that orange sky again until Quake II brought us to the blasted surface of Stroggos.

These days, The Ultimate Doom is considered the definitive edition of Doom. And sure, why not — the extra content alone makes it worth supplanting the mail order version. You can’t even really find the retail version anymore, not unless you get really lucky on eBay or know where archivals of old Doom IWADs are kept. But I dunno, I like to keep a copy of Doom 1.9 laying around just for the authenticity when I play through the original levels now and then. (Well, that and Romero’s addition of a button to E1M1 that opens a secret door into the courtyard for deathmatch purposes triggers a purist itch that I didn’t know I had.) Still, though, if nothing else, The Ultimate Doom is a fascinating piece of Doom history.

You can get The Ultimate Doom on Steam and gog.com.

-june❤

PS: A level-by-level breakdown can be found on my new side tumblr.
PPS: If you’re looking for the original game, go here.