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Doom 3
(Link is for Doom 3 Demo, BIG, Really big...)

It was the janitor who showed John Carmack that the world had changed. In 1993 Carmack was working on a new kind of video game for a tiny company called id Software. He had written games before, but nobody except computer geeks had cared much about them. "I remember showing some people games that I liked on the Apple II," Carmack remembers, "and just having them sit there, completely not comprehending what could be enjoyable about moving these little guys around. People just did not get it." But this game was different. "We noticed that the janitor coming in to empty the trash had just been sitting there staring at the game — for a long time," he says. "The game had this power: it could affect normal people."

The game was called Doom, and the janitor was among the first of us normal people to get a look at the electronic frontier of the coming century. With Doom, Carmack and his colleagues had created a three-dimensional virtual world so powerful, compelling and disturbing that it would change the real world around it. This week id will launch Doom 3, four years in the making. It is, if anything, a little too real.

In 1993 id consisted of six rootless dorks in an office in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Carmack, their programming ringer, was a 23-year-old who had spent a year in juvie and completed exactly two semesters at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Carmack is an odd duck: blond, skinny, with a fixed, unblinking gaze and a curious vocal tic — his sentences often end with an involuntary noise that sounds something like Mn! Despite his otherworldly demeanor, he is artlessly charming, although he does not make anything resembling small talk. It's not because he's too busy or aloof; you get the impression he doesn't make small talk because he has never heard of it.

Before Doom most games took place in flatland: they were two-dimensional, like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man. But Carmack figured out a way for the cheapo, underpowered personal computers of the day to create depth, to render three-dimensional spacea miniature theater, a virtual dreamworld in which the player could move around at will. "You could have fun with those old games, but it was more of a detached, abstract sort of fun," Carmack says. "But when you take the exact same game play, put it in the first-person perspective, and you go around a corner, open up a door, and there's a monster, like, full-screen, right there, you saw people just go aggggghhh and jump back. That's something you never, ever could have done before." With Doom the monitor screen became a magic rabbit hole, and you fell down it, screaming all the way. Mn!

Doom was packed with high-tech innovations. It pioneered multiplayer gaming over networks, online distribution and an open architecture that promoted user modifications. Today video games are a $7 billion industry, and most of them rip off Carmack's work in one form or another. The military used multiplayer Doom to train soldiers for combat. Architects use the graphics engine for Quake, Doom's successor, to explore their buildings before they build them. Doom and Quake have pushed computer manufacturers to make (and gamers to buy) faster, more powerful machines.

Doom had a cultural impact as well. Its fluid, hyperkinetic rhythms have become part of the visual language of movies and TV. "Kids can absorb information on the screen more rapidly, and they react to it much faster as well," says producer Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Enemy of the State). "They also don't have the patience of older audiences, so we have to make our stories move along at a faster pace." The game was also exceptionally violent ("It's going to be like f___ing Doom!" one of the Columbine killers famously said), to an extent that shocks us and ultimately attracts us. We don't have to be happy about it, but five years after Columbine, it is no longer possible to deny that Americans passionately enjoy pretending to shoot one another with guns, and fears that such a pastime would give rise to a generation of spree killers have not borne fruit. Ignoring the mass appeal of virtual violence seems as pointless as wagging a finger at those darn long-haired rock 'n' rollers.

As radical as it was 11 years ago, Doom looks pathetically crude compared with Carmack's new brainchild. A first glance at a computer screen running Doom 3 is confusing to the eye: the illusion the game creates is so realistic. The secret? Light. Carmack has spent the past four years painstakingly studying optics, and he has figured out how to make photons bounce around in a virtual space in much the same way that they do in the real world. Suddenly, pebbly surfaces cast pebbly shadows. Air ripples from the heat of a broken steam pipe. There is a crispness to details, a weight and solidity to objects and figures, a lifelike sheen to surfaces in Doom 3 that is unlike anything we've seen before.

The original Doom told a rather disposable story about a space Marine posted to some kind of high-powered research facility on Mars. An experiment goes wrong, yada yada yada, and a portal to hell opens, flooding the station with demons, which the player must dispatch with an assortment of high-caliber weapons. Doom 3 tells the same story but this time treats it with surprisingly artistic tenderness. Carmack's light engine allows the game's designers to paint the story the way a film director would, with light and shadow, like a noir mystery. Scenes are lit by broken light fixtures, flickering and swinging, or cut up by the shadow of a spinning overhead fan. id's designers have worked wonders, despite the newness of the technology. "It's like making a movie while you're inventing the camera," says Tim Willits, the game's lead designer.

As virtual worlds go, Doom 3 is big. To play through it just once, never mind multiplayer matches and replay time, takes upwards of 30 hours. (Take that, Peter Jackson!) Despite its size, it is meticulously detailed. The monsters of the original Doom were barely animated blobs of pixels; this time the game is populated by a gallery of fascinating grotesques and gargoyles created by Kenneth Scott, id's soft-spoken lead artist, whose work references Francis Bacon and cheesy fantasy artist Frank Frazetta with equal reverence. The ghouls are excruciatingly detailed. As you're being devoured by a swarm of demonic cherubs, you can admire the iridescent patina on their insect wings. To play Doom 3 is to feel your skin prickle with atavistic fear. It's a bit too lifelike for comfort.

Doom 3 is sure to be big business. It had better be: id Software releases only one product every few years, and developing a game like Doom 3 costs from $15 million to $20 million. Unless it confounds all expectations, Doom 3 should sell well into the millions, at $54.99 a pop. And id will license Carmack's technology to a swarm of game developers. Although conventional wisdom has it that games like id's appeal to just a narrow, nerdy hard-core subculture, they're actually wildly popular. Even before Doom 3 hits stores, 6 of the top 10 computer games in June were hard core. And two other games of that ilk, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, are expected to post big numbers later this year. Universal Pictures has a Doom movie set to film in Prague this winter, with producer John Wells — of such respectable fare as ER and The West Wing — attached. (The Rock reportedly has his sights set on the starring role.) The hard core has become the mainstream. This isn't a subculture, it's a culture.

A generation is defining itself through virtual combat, without the casualties or consequences of World War II and the Vietnam War. And who knows? Maybe one day we'll figure out less destructive ways to have fun in Carmack's dreamworld. After all, it would be a shame if, having invented cinema, we made only war movies. Carmack might even be the one to broker that virtual peace. He has a life outside Doomhobbies, charities, not to mention a wife who's eight months pregnant. He doesn't spend much time gaming anymore. But he isn't giving up on the virtual frontier he opened. "There's something fundamentally interesting about that, about the world in a box," he says. "If somebody can be an emperor in a virtual world, with only a cheap computer, is that really a fundamentally bad thing?"

Doom 3

Doom 3 is a science fiction horror first-person shooter computer game developed by id Software and published by Activision on August 3, 2004. Doom 3, despite its name, is not a direct continuation of the original Doom series storyline, but rather a reimagining of the first game in the series, with the addition of a completely new game engine and graphics.

Set in the year 2145 in a fictional Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) research center on Mars, Doom 3 has the player take control of an anonymous space marine as he fights to survive a mysterious invasion of inter-dimensional demons. In the process, the marine learns more about the nature of the shadowy research being conducted within the massive base and its main instigator, Dr. Malcolm Betruger.

Doom 3 was developed for Windows and ported to Linux in 2004; five months later, it was also released for Mac OS X (ported by Aspyr) and Xbox (co-developed by Vicarious Visions). The Xbox version is graphically similar to (although less detailed than) the original and features an additional two-player online co-operation mode. An expansion, Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, developed by Nerve Software and co-developed by id Software, was released on April 4, 2005. A Doom movie, loosely based on the franchise, was released roughly six months later on October 21, 2005.

Doom 3 inherits a number of weapons from its predecessors Doom and Doom II, while adding several new weapons and modifying several of the old standbys. The iconic chainsaw and BFG 9000 return, as do the pistol, shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, and plasma gun. New additions include the flashlight (vital as a light source), hand grenades, a machine gun, and an alien artifact known as the Soul Cube. The double-barreled shotgun, also from the old Doom games, appears in its expansion pack as well as the ionized plasma levitator or "the grabber"

An important element in the gameplay and action of Doom 3 is light. Most levels in the game have a variety of moody lighting effects and are quite dark overall. This design choice is not only meant to foster feelings of apprehension and fear within the player, but also to create a more threatening game environment, as the player is much less likely to see attacking enemies.

This aspect is further enhanced by the fact that the player can only either wield a weapon, or the flashlight, and not both simultaneously. This forces the player to choose between wielding his or her light or weapon upon entering a room, which consequently leads to a more cautious and gradual pace for the player more conducive to a horror game. However this aspect of the game has been criticised by some players as being an artificial constraint that should have been avoided, given that the flashlight could have been held by a second free hand or strapped directly onto the player's weapon.

A third party modification "duct tape mod" provides the capability to add a light to the shotgun and machine gun weapons to provide light while in use.

A frequent design element found throughout Doom 3, and one which has been greatly criticized by many, is the so-called "Monster Closet". This is where after a certain trigger (in most cases when the player picks up a box of ammunition or health), a formerly unseen enemy springs out to startle and attack the player. These Monster Closets take a variety of forms within the game, including doors disguised as wall panels, corpses "playing dead" before suddenly springing to life and attacking when the player draws near, or monsters simply teleporting in directly in front of or behind the player.

Doom 3 was released with a four-player deathmatch multiplayer component only. However, computer game modders released an eight-player support patch soon after release, and this aspect was included in the Resurrection of Evil expansion.

As with most deathmatch multiplayer components, the objective of the game is to kill other players as many times as possible within an allotted amount of time, or to reach a specified number of kills before the opposition does. The player begins each game and respawn with a basic set of weapons (flashlight, pistol with four spare clips, and two grenades; RoE adds a machinegun with 30 bullets), and may acquire power-ups and most of the weapons featured in the single-player campaign during the course of each match. There is also a new twist, as players can steal other players' weapons by attacking them with the fist. When a player is punched, they forfeit the current weapon they are holding to the attacker.

In addition to deathmatch, three similar gametypes exist. In team deathmatch, players are placed on either the Red team or the Blue team, and the opposing teams fight. In tourney mode, two players duel while the others wait in line; at the end of the match, the victor faces the next challenger and the loser is put at the end of the waiting line. In last man standing, players are each allotted a specified number of lives; when a player loses all their lives, they are forced to spectate until the end of the match.

Three power-ups exist in multiplayer: berserk, mega health, and invisibility (the latter two do not appear in the single-player campaign). Berserk lasts for 30 seconds, enhancing the player's speed by a factor of 1.5 and tripling their damage given. Mega health boosts the player's health to 200, exceeding the health limit of 100. Invisibility lasts for 30 seconds, and renders the player nearly invisible; the power-up emits a subtle green glow, and does not conceal wounds.

The Xbox version of Doom 3 included four-player deathmatch over Xbox Live and system link, as well as two-player co-op on Xbox Live and system link.[1]

Similar to the story of the original Doom, the game focuses on an anonymous marine who is transferred to an extraterrestrial base on a routine mission. Following the unexpected arrival of demons through experimental teleportation gates, the marine is forced to fight his way through a variety of demonic monsters to reach safety. Also in both cases the protagonist visits Hell, though in the original Doom, it is the third episode Inferno (Ultimate Doom adds a fourth, Thy Flesh Consumed, which also takes place in Hell), whereas in Doom 3 it is only one level.

Though Doom 3 retains the rather basic premise of the first game, it also makes a number of changes, most notably a much more detailed plot which adds an alien aspect into the story. Other differences include the game taking place on the planet Mars itself, rather than its moons Phobos and Deimos, and the environment of Doom 3 being much more realistic (where the original Doom gives the two moonlets Earthlike gravity and breathable atmospheres, Doom 3 takes place in the weaker gravity of Mars, with its atmosphere depicted accurately as unbreathable).

There are 27 levels in Doom 3. Most of them are quite large and, depending on the difficulty level selected, may require nearly an hour each on a player's first run through the game.

For Doom 3 id Software employed professional science fiction writer Matthew Castello, who worked on the games The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, to write the script and assist in story-boarding the entire game. id focused on retelling the story and creating a tense horror atmosphere. The game's events and atmosphere show a great deal of influence from George Romero's Living Dead series and James Cameron's Aliens, as well as Valve Software's Half-Life.[citation needed]

Cut scenes give purpose and context for the player's actions and introduction to new enemies. Similar to other science fiction action/horror games such as System Shock, System Shock 2, and Aliens versus Predator 2, hundreds of text, voice, and video messages are scattered throughout the base. These messages are represented as internal e-mails and audio reports sent between lab workers, administrators, maintenance staff, and security personnel at the Mars base. The messages help to explain the background story to the player, show the feelings and concern of the people on the Mars base to build atmosphere, and reveal information related to plot and gameplay. Augmenting these are video booths and televisions which give planetary news, corporate propaganda, visitor information and technical data about the base.

Ken Levine, lead designer of System Shock 2, though a pioneer of this story-telling method, criticized how it was implemented in Doom 3: "It amazed me when I played Doom 3 that they didn't mix their recordings into the ambient space of the world. The people sound like they're in a recording booth."[2]

Doom 3 also utilizes a number of other classic horror elements, the most prominent of which is darkness. The great majority of the levels in the game have little or even no strong lighting. Also, power outages are occasionally simulated (especially in earlier levels) which bathe the player in near-complete darkness. These aesthetics are explained by the game as resulting from the immense amount of power being diverted to the mysterious Delta Labs for the costly teleportation experiments being conducted there.

Frequent radio transmissions through the player's communications device also add to the atmosphere, by broadcasting certain sounds and messages from non-player characters meant to unsettle the player. Early in the game, surrounding the time of the event that plunges the base into chaos, the player often hears the sounds of fighting, screaming and dying coming through his radio transmitter. The ambient sound is extended to the base itself through such things as hissing pipes, footsteps, and occasional jarringly loud noises from machinery or other sources.

The emergence of stronger enemies (bosses) are backed up by new lighting effects and cutscenes, which often happens in a dark or darkening room.

The story of Doom 3 surrounds the discovery of ancient ruins underneath Martian soil. Tablets found at these sites record how an ancient Martian race developed a form of teleporter technology. They realized an important fact all too late, however; the route the teleporter took passed through Hell. Quickly invaded by demons, this alien race created and sacrificed themselves to a weapon known as the Soul Cube. This cube, powered by the souls of almost every being of this alien race, was used by their strongest warrior to defeat and contain the demons in Hell.

Having done so, the remainder of the alien race constructed warnings to any who visited Mars, warning them not to recreate this technology; to avoid opening another gate to Hell. They then teleported to an unknown location, fleeing Mars; there are hints that at least some of them fled to Earth, and that humans are descended from them. It is also stated that the demons once inhabited Earth in an unknown context, but lost possession of it due to an unknown cause. The UAC, discovering the Soul Cube and the warnings, used them to invent the same teleporter technology. Discovering that they opened a gate to Hell, scientists decided to explore further (encouraged by the head scientist, Malcolm Betruger), sending teams in and even capturing living specimens from the realm at great loss of life. The portal experiments also had strange and disturbing effects on the Mars City research facility where the experiments were conducted. Scientists and workers, unaware of the nature of the work being performed by Dr. Betruger and his team, frequently reported strange phenomena and unlikely industrial accidents. A general sense of paranoia and fear spread throughout the facility, leading many workers to request a greater marine presence and/or weaponry accessible by themselves.

In response to numerous industrial accidents, complaints, and requests for transfers off Mars, the UAC on Earth sends Counselor Elliot Swann to investigate these problems. Accompanying Swann are his personal bodyguard Jack Campbell (with attach้ case) and a single marine (the player). Upon checking in, the marine is called to Marine HQ to meet Master Sergeant Thomas Kelly, the marine commander of the facility. He sends the marine to track down a missing member of the science team. On the way, he overhears a tense meeting between Swann and Betruger. The marine finds the scientist in a decommissioned communications facility, preparing to send out a warning message about Betruger's extreme portal experiments. The message warns that Betruger's tests are threatening to overload the portal's containment fields, which would create a catastrophic scenario. The scientist was unable to finish and send his message before the next portal experiment.

As soon as the portal opens, Betruger takes the Soul Cube into Hell and apparently made an unknown kind of deal with the creatures there. Under his direction, the demons again invade Mars, confident that the only key to their defeat lay safe in their hands. The marine and scientist watch on the monitors and radio as chaos erupts throughout the base. The marine watches as a fellow marine in the Delta Labs is possessed by a demon, as another flies through the screen to possess the scientist. Under Sergeant Kelly's orders to all units, the marine returns to Marine HQ. Along the way, the marine overhears radio chatter as various teams attempt to coordinate their efforts or give their last screams for help. Returning to Marine HQ, the marine is sent by Kelly to assist Bravo Team (one of the few surviving squads) in reaching the Communications Tower to send a distress signal to the fleet. Bravo Team is carrying a military transmission card which contains the encoded message. The path to the tower leads through the Alpha Labs and Energy Production plant, both of which are heavily infested with demons. The attack has left most of the Mars base population either dead or as zombified slaves. Most marines who had survived the first attack were wiped out by the demons and the undead Mars security forces in a matter of minutes.

After entering the Administration sector, the marine overhears another conversation between Swann and Betruger. Insisting on taking over command of the situation, Swann is rebuffed by Betruger, announcing that he will handle things personally from the Delta Labs. Swann realizes he must take matters into his own hands, and Campbell opens his case to commence "Plan B."

As the marine enters the EnPro facility, Bravo Team is ambushed at the nearby motor pool. Before the marine can reach them, he learns that Swann is also heading for the communcations tower. However, Swann wishes to prevent the transmission to the fleet. Unable to find Bravo Team's communications card, he and Campbell grab a vehicle and drive to the tower. The marine later obtains the card from the last member of Bravo Team, who was hiding from Swann. The marine is catching up, but was not able to get to the tower's control room before Campbell destroys the computers with his BFG9000.

Believing they have succeeded in stopping the transmission, they head off towards the Delta Labs, where the main portal (and source of the invasion) is located. However, the marine is able to find a way into the satellite control room and access the transmitter directly. The transmission calls for a full ground engagement with no orbital bombardment. Swann contacts the marine and tells him to abort the transmission, arguing that until they understand what they are up against, the base must remain cut off from the outside world. Kelly presses the marine to send it. The marine must make a choice.

After leaving the communications tower, the skyway to the monorail station is crushed by an invisible power, forcing the marine to find an alternate route through the waste treatment plant. In the plant, he learns that Betruger plans to wipe out the reinforcements that are on their way, and then use their ships to take the demons to Earth in order to conquer it. If the marine aborted the transmission at the tower, Betruger announces that he will send the distress signal himself. Betruger then attempts to trap the marine in the plant, which is filling up with toxic gas.

Surviving the attack and fighting his way out of the plant and through the monorail station, the marine ultimately reaches the Delta Labs, where the main portal is located. The marine also learns of the Soul Cube and the portal to Hell where it is held.

The marine, pursuing the Soul Cube, is sent into Hell by Betruger via the main portal in the Delta Labs. After losing all his weapons during the teleportation, he rigorously picks up the scattered weapons while fighting his way through the demons. Finally reaching the Soul Cube which calls out to the marine, "Save us," he is confronted by The Guardian of Hell — a gigantic, near-blind demon who uses smaller creatures, named Seekers, to "see." With the Guardian of Hell defeated, the marine takes the Soul Cube back through the teleporter to Mars, where he learns that his actions have made Betruger unable to use the teleporter technology. Resurfacing at the Delta Complex, the marine must again find his weapons, and battle the remaining demons in the base. Betruger, upset by his loss of the teleporter and the Soul Cube, vengefully tells the marine of a natural portal to Hell which could transport millions of his minions from Hell. On the way to the new portal, the marine encounters Counselor Swann, who is found wounded and unable to move. Swann, who is unwilling to allow the invasion of Earth, grants his PDA to the marine, and directs him to go through Central Processing and then to the caverns, where the portal is located. Swann warns that Sarge is no longer human and that Campbell has gone after him.

In Central Processing, Campbell is found dying on the floor without a weapon as he dies he says "Sarge, he's got my gun". As he dies, a demonic voice begins to taunt the marine, who is approaching the mortifying monster. Once the arena is treaded on, the BFG-wielding Sabaoth reveals himself as a mutated hybrid of Sarge and a military tank. After the battle is over, the spoils — the BFG9000 — is seized by the marine as he advances to Site 3 and transfers to the caverns.

At the Primary Excavation site of the caverns, the portal to Hell has been opened at the site of the alien ruins. There, the marine uses the Soul Cube to defeat "Hell's mightiest warrior", the horrific Cyberdemon, and seal the portal. The ending scene shows the marine (revealed in Doom 3's expansion pack, Resurrection of Evil, to be the only survivor) being rescued by the fleet, and Betruger reincarnated as a dragon-like demon called the Maledict.

According to John Carmack, the lead graphics engine developer at id, the "tripod of features" in Doom 3 technology is:

The key advance of the Doom 3 graphics engine is the unified lighting and shadowing. Rather than computing or rendering lightmaps during map creation and saving that information in the map data, most light sources are computed on the fly. This allows lights to cast shadows even on non-static objects such as monsters or machinery, which was impossible with static lightmaps. A shortcoming of this approach is the engine's inability to render soft shadows and global illumination.

To increase the interactivity with the game-world, id designed hundreds of high-resolution animated screens for in-game computers. Rather than using a simple "use key", the crosshair acts as a mouse cursor over the screens allowing the player to use a computer in the game world. This allowed an in-game computer terminal to perform more than one function, such as a readily apparent door-unlocking button, combined with a more obscure function allowing an astute player to unlock a nearby weapons locker. According to the Doom 3 manual, the Gui designer Patrick Duffy wrote over 500,000 lines of script code, and generated more than 25,000 image files to create all of the graphical interfaces, computer screens, and displays throughout Doom 3.

Other important features of Doom 3 engine are normal mapping and specular highlighting of textures, realistic handling of object physics, dynamic, ambient soundtrack and multi-channel sound. Doom 3 on Xbox supports 480p video display resolution and Dolby 5.1 surround sound.[1]

In June 2000, John Carmack posted a plan [3] announcing the start to a remake of Doom using next generation technology. This plan revealed controversy had been brewing within id over the decision.

Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack, two of id Software's owners, were always strongly opposed to remaking Doom. They thought that id was going back to the same old formulas and properties too often. However, after the warm reception of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the latest improvements in rendering technology, most of the employees agreed that a remake was the right idea and confronted Kevin and Adrian with an ultimatum: "Allow us to remake Doom or fire us" (including John Carmack). After the reasonably painless confrontation (although artist Paul Steed, one of the instigators, was fired in retaliation),[3] the agreement to work on Doom 3 was made.

id Software began development on Doom 3 in late 2000, immediately after finishing Quake III: Team Arena.[4] In 2001, it was first shown to the public at Macworld Conference & Expo in Tokyo [5] and was later demonstrated at E3 in 2002, where a 15-minute gameplay demo was shown in a small theater. It won five awards at E3 that year.

Some speculated that id software was targeting the 2002 holiday season, although others believed a 2003 release date would be more realistic. After E3, there was no further press release from id Software regarding the project; the company's website only had Return to Castle Wolfenstein as the latest game. Late in 2002, a couple of employees at ATI Technologies leaked a development version of Doom 3 onto the Internet.[6]

Next year, a new trailer was shown at E3 2003 and soon afterwards the id software homepage was updated to showcase Doom 3 as an upcoming project but it was also announced that Doom 3 would not be ready for the 2003 holiday season. According to some comments by John Carmack, the development took longer than expected. ', in Christmas 2003. Doom 3, and Halo 2 were considered among the most anticipated games since their announcements in 2001/2002, though both of them would not make the planned 2003 holiday season.

Doom 3 achieved gold status on July 14, 2004, and a Mac OS X release was confirmed the next day on July 15, 2004. Doom 3 was released in the U.S. on August 3, 2004. Additionally, a Linux version was released on October 4, 2004. Due to high demand, the game was made available at select outlets at midnight on the date of release. The game was released to the rest of the world on August 13, 2004 (except for Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, where official localisation was delayed and caused the game to be released about four months later, on December 10, 2004).

Two days before its official release, Doom 3 was released by pirate groups onto the Internet. As the game's focus is its single player mode, the need for a valid retail serial number for online multiplayer gaming was a weak deterrent against piracy.

A week before the game's release, it became known that an agreement to include EAX audio technology in Doom 3 reached by id Software and Creative Labs was heavily influenced by a software patent owned by the latter company. The patent dealt with a technique for rendering shadows called Carmack's Reverse, which was developed independently by both John Carmack and programmers at Creative Labs. id Software would have been putting themselves under legal liability if they used the technique in the finished game, so to defuse the issue, id Software agreed to license Creative Labs sound technologies in exchange for indemnification against lawsuits. [7]

Shortly following the announcement of Doom 3's development, a promotional website(www.ua-corp.com) was released that serves as the homepage of the fictional corporation operating on Mars in the game. Until the announcement of gold status, the site served as a teaser; later a countdown to the release date was added. The website for Martian Buddy, a fictional corporation prominently featured in the game, was also revealed before the game launch.

Some other developers have also created websites for in-game companies in the past. For example, Rockstar Games created sites for most companies mentioned in commercials on the in-game radio in Grand Theft Auto.

Doom 3 was announced at E3 2001, and the gameplay demo was shown in both E3 2001, Quakecon 2002, and E3 2002. At E3 2002 and Quakecon id showed an interactive demo. This version, known as the alpha version, was leaked on the Internet; speculation indicated that it may have been leaked by ATI.[6] id Software developers were extremely concerned by the quality of the leaked product, as it was still a bug-ridden, experimental stage of the product's evolution. Despite fears of poorer sales, the game went on to sell well.

A Limited Collector's Edition of Doom 3 was released for Xbox in tin packaging containing ports of Ultimate Doom and Doom II (including full multi-player splitscreen support), G4's Icons making-of documentary, developer interviews, and concept art.

Doom 3 continued id's long track record of creating games that were Linux compatible. This was primarily a result of id's decision to use the OpenGL standard for the graphics engine as opposed to Microsoft's proprietary Direct3D API which is only available for the Windows line of operating systems. The executable for the Linux version can be found on id's FTP [2]. It can also be downloaded from Doom Wad Station. TTimo also has a Wiki with information regarding the Linux version [3].

Few games have polarized gaming as much as Doom 3 has,[8] causing the two group's reactions to the game to be wildly different.

Some critical reviewers consider that the technological level of Doom 3 is similar to that of other games of 2004, and that features such as bump mapping had already become industry standard.[citation needed] For example, an often mentioned feature of Doom 3, per-pixel lighting and stencil shadowing, had already been implemented in many games released in 2003, even a budget title from Activision Value called Secret Service: Security Breach.

Lastly, fans of the original series also criticize Doom 3 for having the demons and the main characters look radically different from their original counterparts.

Many gamers argue the apparent shortcomings are not shortcomings at all, but are integral to the gameplay id determined to display for Doom 3.

Since Doom 3 is a remake of the original Doom - a game which did not have high-end concepts common in today's more complex games - remaking Doom with too much complexity would remove a key component that made Doom popular in the first place.[9]

The flashlight is a key element of Doom 3's gameplay: the player must balance between seeing the enemy, and defeating it. In the default game (without any modifications added), almost every monster has glowing eyes, or some aspect of bioluminescence which offers a target for the player. Modifying the weapons to project light, results in the mystery of "the unknown" to be less potent and frightening. Additionally, muzzle flashes can be enabled for marginally better visibility while firing.

Another rebuttal concerns the story of Doom 3, which is done through the use of audio and video logs. The use of logs in this way is similar to the use of logs in System Shock 2. Ken Levine, lead designer of System Shock 2 said of the logs in Doom 3 "It amazed me when I played Doom 3 that they didn't mix their recordings into the ambient space of the world. The people sound like they're in a recording booth."[13]

A few of these criticisms of Doom 3 are based on expectations for other types of FPS games. During development, it was often compared with the equally anticipated Half-Life 2. Some have argued that since Doom 3 was released before Half-Life 2, many have come to expect things from it that they previously had expected from Half-Life 2.[citation needed]

With regards to a minimal multiplayer mode, the designers intended that Doom 3 would be played and remembered primarily for its single-player story experience, as opposed to id Software's previous titles which were known far better for multiplayer deathmatch. (The follow-up Quake 4 would have a return to multiplayer focus using Doom 3's engine.)

The Xbox port of Doom 3 did implement co-op mode, which was engineered to work with single-player levels augmented with multi-player spawn-points (to accommodate both players); but, in the end, new co-op levels were created anyway.

Despite its apparent flaws, the game was still a commercial success for id Software, with the planned total revenue estimated by Activision at $20 million.[citation needed] The financial success was bolstered by the near-record number of pre-orders placed for the game. id Software also typically benefits from licensing the engine to other developers. Several games have already been developed using a modified Doom 3 engine, including Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Castle Wolfenstein (tentative title) and Prey.

As of August 23, 2006 Doom 3 has garnered an average review score of 87%, according to 97 media outlets on GameRankings.com. By the same source, it is in the top 10 PC games of 2004.

E3 2002 Game Critics Awards: Best of Show, Best PC Game, Best Action Game, Special Commendation for Sound, Special Commendation for Graphics

While the character designs are radically different in comparison to the original game's characters, it can be said that most of the old monster designs are not as fear-instilling as the new ones. Also, the designer from the Doom games left id a long time ago.

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