Doom [PC - Alpha / Beta]

The development of Doom began in 1992 as a tie-in of Aliens, but the first concept of the game, “Evil Unleashed”, was finished only in febraury 1993. As we can see from the ToastyTech website, this demo had only a room and three enemies: an imp, a demon, and a baron of hell. The hud was very different, and with more status informations, but  still not functional. They were still testing the textures and the lighting system, so it was possibile to change them using the keyboard.

The next build of Doom that we have, the alpha 4-22 (dated april 1993), included, instead, early version of many levels (Spawning Vats, Containment Area,Refinery, Computer Station, Central Processing, Command Control, Nuclear Plant, Pandemonium) and a test map that was discarded. Some sections (like a room where marines are playing cards, that was supposed to be the beginning of the game, or the showers and the lockers) and objects (like the office chairs) of the stages were completely removed, in part probably because the story of the game was at the beginning much more complex, and there were five playable characters (Lorelei Chen, John Pietrovich, Dimitri Paramo, Thi Barrett,Buddy Dacote). Items couldn’t be collected, and their design was still unfinished. The chainsaw was already there, though. Also, there were some removed pickups, like a strange circle of skulls, and you used a bayonet for melee attacks. Enemies weren’t moving and they still couldn’t be killed, but they had already created the graphics for a first version of the Lost Souls, even if they weren’t accessible in the game.

A subsequent alpha, the 5-22 (dated may 1993), showed a game much more similar to the Doom we know. Familiar elements like toxic pools, keycards, explosive barrels, medikits, the overworld map, were added, enemies now could be killed (but they just disappeared and they were still without A.I.), items could be picked up, switches and elevators worked, the Cacodemon and the Zombieman were created but still not inserted in the game. A press release demo made shortly before the final version had still few strange items and some differences in the layouts of the three levels included. Interestingly, it still keeped the score like in the alpha 5-22, even if it wasn’t in the hud anymore.

Some of the pre-release versions are available in the idgames archive. You can find them on Doomworld, or do a search for “/idgames/historic/”.

Thanks a lot to Nathan for the contribution, to Deepcut for the link and to SquarePulse for some of the videos!

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