Doom 64

Doom 64 | DOOM64.WAD
Midway Games

For a brief, shining moment in the 1990s, Midway Games seemed like an American success story. Starting off in the late 1950s as a manufacturer of amusement equipment (hence the name) including early mechanical arcade games, they would eventually branch out into the nascent medium of video games, working closely with Taito, ultimately making big bucks with the American distribution of Space Invaders. For a time, Midway was king of the arcades; under the auspices of its parent company WMS Industries, Midway either developed or distributed Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Killer Instinct, Area 51, and several other arcade classics. They were no slouches on the home console end either, with multiple console ports of their big hits.

Somewhere around the same time Mortal Kombat was giving Congress heart palpitations, a bunch of guys in Mesquite, Texas put out a game for the young "IBM-compatible" PC platform that would really turn up the heat on the video game violence debate: Doom. Now obviously I've talked at length about the history of this game, but today we're gonna go off in a different direction. Let's talk about the unfairly forgotten middle child of the franchise: Doom 64.

It starts off in 1994 with the Jaguar port. Unlike many other console ports at the time, this one was developed directly by id Software themselves, with John Carmack personally doing the bulk of the programming. Even by 1994 standards, Jaguar Doom was inferior to the original -- though it ran pretty decently thanks to Carmack's heavy optimizations, it lacked music (due to the Jaguar running music and game logic off the same chip) and the game itself went through some pretty heavy stripping down to function on the more limited hardware. In spite of these issues, it was a big hit for the relatively small Jaguar audience.

Williams Entertainment, formerly Tradewest, had been picked up in 1994 by WMS Industries to serve as a sister studio to Midway. After serving as publisher for the Super Nintendo version of Doom, development of the PlayStation port had been handed to them. They built on the Jaguar version to create a port with its own distinctive identity, a loose mashup of Doom and Doom II with use of software-based colored lighting and an entirely new audio design by Aubrey Hodges to create a darker, scarier take on Doom.

Around the same time as the development of the PlayStation version began, so too did a far more ambitious project: The Absolution, a title targeting the Nintendo 64 with all new levels, new art, redone enemy designs, and of course the same audio design as the PlayStation version as Aubrey honed his craft for terrifying dark ambient soundscapes. Ultimately renamed Doom 64 in an attempt to avoid confusion (ironically leading people to assume that it was merely a port, as Quake 64 and Duke Nukem 64 were and as Quake II 64 was not) it was released under the Midway Games brand as Williams Entertainment was renamed in the interim. It's all mostly the same people, though, creating a thematic throughline between PlayStation Doom/Final Doom and Doom 64 to the point that some people -- myself included -- originally saw Doom 64 as a sequel, specifically, to the PlayStation games. (For the record, I used to have a similar headcanon about Duke Nukem 64 -> Duke Nukem Zero Hour, and the PlayStation Duke 3D port Total Meltdown with Time To Kill and Land of the Babes. It's a silly idea, I know.)

Doom 64 is a truly remarkable product. There are modern-day fan-made megawads that I wish had the same amount of thematic and design consistency. Between the three names on the mapper roster -- Randy Estrella, Tim Heydelaar, and the infamous Danny Lewis, yes the guy behind that atrocious "Club Doom" song -- Doom 64 is a solidly designed journey through a forgotten military base and Hell itself.

Pretty much from the moment you turn the game on -- whether that be your old Nintendo 64 cartridge, or the more recent remaster, or one of the various unofficial ports in between -- you'll see that Doom 64 is a very different experience from the original. Graphically it's much crisper than what Doomers were used to at the time, with (at the time) high-resolution graphics making solid use of colored lighting to create an atmosphere. Some impressive fakery allows for the illusion of 3D floors. Scripted events, similar to Hexen's ACS, allow for a variety of neat tricks, from watching a camera view to dramatically rearranging levels (as seen to impressive effect in "Breakdown") to spawning new enemies in without the need to sequester them in their own chambers separate from the map.

What passes for a plot in Doom 64 is pretty simple. You're Doomguy, and after having gone through so much Hell, you're kinda not doing too hot, mentally, with lots of bad dreams. One day, years after the initial invasion, a forgotten relay satellite sends images from a long-abandoned and irradiated installation. Something is still alive down there, and it's resurrecting all the mouldering corpses. You wanted a mission? For your sins, you're given one -- someone's gotta go in there and put down the demons once and for all.

There's not much else to go on. Where the military base even is, let alone who actually owns it, is up in the air -- there's little to no UAC branding in the game save for on bullet and rocket cases. An argument can be made that, as Doom 1 had you fighting on Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars, the military base is situated on Mars itself, and certainly some of the skies visible in parts of the game would support that. But it doesn't really matter, does it?

What does matter is that, for a lot of reasons that are only partly technical in nature, Doom 64 feels like a throwback to the original. Levels are smaller, tighter and scarier; encounters tend to be in groups of 3 or 4 and rely more heavily on the Doom 1 roster (and hell knights, who make for a less beefy meat wall than barons.) Some of them have had behavior changes to go with fairly radical redesigns; the most obvious one is probably the pain elemental, no longer a goofy-looking cyclopean doughball but now a twin-mouthed horror that spawns two lost souls at a time; lost souls, for their part, are weaker, but significantly more aggressive, and explode upon death, which makes PEs dangerous up close. If you're playing on -fast and turn off the lost soul spawn limit for pain elementals, they and lost souls become the game's most dangerous enemies. For technical reasons, a few of the monsters -- mostly from Doom II -- don't make an appearance: commandos, arch-viles, Spiderdemons, and revenants are all absent, though the latter's rockets are an occasional feature. In their place are the nightmare imp, a half-invisible, purple imp who behave closer to the way regular imps do in Doom's Nightmare skill level -- they move faster and throw their fireballs faster. There's also the Mother Demon, a monstrous cybernetic creature resembling a bigger, uglier, meaner arch-vile. She'll throw a bunch of crap at you, but depending on how well you've explored, she's potentially trivial...

About that. There are four secret levels in the game. The first available one, "Hectic," is accessible in the first map, but it's more of a special challenge than anything else, one that at this point is hardly necessary to surmount for the reward you receive, that is, access to a cheat menu. The other three, reached at various points throughout the game, all possess a Demon Key, an artifact that goes with a new weapon you find about halfway through the game. This weapon, variously titled the demon laser, alien laser, and the Unmaker (based on something mentioned in Tom Hall's old Doom Bible,) is a creepy device made of skin and bone lashed to a large laser emitter. If you can find all three artifacts -- each of which enhances the Unmaker in some way -- you'll be able to not only take down cyberdemons and the Mother Demon with relative impunity, but you'll also be able to seal the portals from which monsters emerge in the final battle, making for a much shorter fight.

Doom 64 remained something of an obscurity for many years. It never saw an official PC port for a long time; N64 emulation was in its infancy at the time and even now isn't perfect. Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal has been instrumental in shepherding this thing to the widespread, official multiplatform existence it enjoys now, going all the way back to 2003 with The Absolution TC, an attempt at painstakingly hand-porting the game to the at-the-time ascendant Doomsday source port (which to be fair was the best possible option for recreating the atmosphere.) A few years later he would bring a more faithful implementation in Doom64 EX, a now-deprecated source port that required a ROM copy of the game to build an IWAD from. D64EX, with the promise of a new arena to build maps in, launched a small cottage industry of user maps, but by now the port with its essentially relying on piracy to function is deprecated. A few unofficial attempts at porting Doom 64 and the PlayStation versions to GZDoom have been made over the years, but it was the 2020 remaster alongside Doom Eternal that finally brought the game to a new generation. Using Villarreal's KEX engine, the remaster is the first real, legal way to play the game since 1997, but the truth is, the engine itself is kind of... well, it's shit, with hideously uneven performance and a lack of mouselook which might not be a dealbreaker for you but it sure is for me. You will take my mouselook from my cold gay hands.

But that's okay, because we've got some other options. Doom64EX+ is the next stage of evolution for Kaiser's original port. Utilizing the DOOM64.WAD included with the 2020 release, it has all the features of D64EX and the remaster and then some, with built-in support via the launcher for Doom 64 Reloaded -- an attempt at "remastering" the game as it might have looked like on a 50meg N64 cart (or, possibly, the ill-fated 64DD) -- as well as an old, old alpha version of the game. And if that's not enough, there's Doom64 Super EX+, intended to be a more modding-friendly source port with new features. And if none of these are to your liking, there's always the many recreations in GZDoom. Or maybe you want something a little more oldschool? Then why not try Doom 64 for Doom II, which reinterprets the game as a vanilla Doom II mod? For an added bonus, combine it with one of the many Doom 64-izer gameplay mods and maybe a lighting mod to create a truly bizarre, alternate-universe experience.

Doom 64 has always stood out to me as far as commercial Doom games go. My copy was a hand-me-down from my cousin, who said it was too dark to play in the downstairs family room where his N64 was, and he said "don't let your mom see it." (I'd never.) I mentioned it to my aunt and she also said "don't let your mom see it," so, you know, I took that warning to heart. I'd played Doom before, mostly the first episode and the sequel, and Doom 64 seemed to best capture that feeling of playing "Knee Deep In The Dead," in a way that more closely resembled what it felt like to play Doom 1 than replaying it has in the decades since. Its vision of hell is honestly scary, frightening even, full of dark fortresses and ruined temples that feel far more real than the abstract weirdness of Sandy Petersen or the carefully constructed arenas and racetracks of modern megawads (or, indeed, the reboots.) Critics at the time dismissed it as an inferior version of Quake, and indeed, it certainly seems to share a lot aesthetically with Quake, but it still maintains an identity all its own.

You should play Doom 64, in any way you can. While its haunted bases and dimly-lit caverns haven't really led to a great aesthetic awakening among the Doom community -- beyond a brief love affair with Quake in the late 1990s, the community generally tends to rely on the vanilla texture set for its hellish environs -- it's still one of the best commercial Doom games out there, a title that for all its obscurity understood a lot of what made the original game so compelling.

MAP01: Staging Area

Randy Estrella

Every mapset needs a good starter map and Doom 64 is no different. Randy Estrella's "Staging Area" is a dark, spooky little techbase, with a layout very faintly reminiscent of "Entryway." It's a striking level from the first frame, with the floating pods above the room that you jump down into, and cages to either side containing zombies on higher levels. There's a couple of different encounters here, from the zombies lurking in the conveyor belt room to the horde of pinkies in the switch trap, but I think the most memorable one is dealing with the pinkies in the strope light room by the exit. If you know the secret of the nukage barrels, you can find...

MAP32: Hectic

Randy Estrella, Tim Heydelaar, Danny Lewis

This map is borderline impossible on the original Nintendo 64, and it's barely doable on PC especially on -fast. Its main purpose was to unlock cheat codes, but if you're playing on one of the Doom 64EX ports the "Features" menu is already unlocked, rendering this map and its nasty little encounters largely pointless. With a central room (with some tantalizing, but lethal, bait) and three rooms corresponding to the three keys, your job is to deal with each of the encounters in these rooms, collect the keys, and escape. You are of course permitted to give up and leave via the easy exit, but where's the fun in that? Tim Heydelaar did the yellow key dart trap room, the easiest of the bunch. Randy did the arachnotron ambush chamber. And Danny Lewis, the dastard, did the hell knight trap, which almost certainly will be what sends you running for the easy exit.

 

MAP02: The Terraformer

Randy Estrella

Randy returns with another techbase, this one with some cool lighting (I especially like the blue light-strip corridors.) The big feature of this map however is the titular terraformer, which appears to be a group of massive hammers that smash the ground flat, exposing a tunnel that leads to the yellow key. It's a cool effect, making good use of Doom 64's faux-3D. I like the blue key puzzle just for how cheeky it is.

MAP03: Main Engineering

Danny Lewis

Danny's first "real" level (not counting "Hectic") is as simple as can be, a small series of rooms, two of which have the neat effect of changing architecture right in front of your eyes. You'll also face your first nightmare imps here, but they're not terribly threatening. I like the cacodemon and pain elemental fight in the northeast.

MAP04: Holding Area

Randy Estrella

Another relatively simple map from Randy, the core of the map is a maze that continually repopulates. Grabbing the supercharge triggers an alarm, sending the dark corridors into a lurid flashing red, which is a neat effect (it does eventually go back to normal.) The toughest part of the map has to be the western chamber, which throws a bunch of lost souls at you (and they are a pain to deal with on -fast.) The puzzle here is simple, but if you mess it up, you're S.O.L. for finding...

MAP29: Outpost Omega

Danny Lewis

There's a really creepy vibe to this level, even by Doom 64 standards, in a way I can't quite explain. The main encounter here will be not one but two instances of mancubi -- your first if playing continuous -- trapped in cages but nonetheless extremely deadly. Compared to that, sorting out the storage room puzzle that nets you your first demonic artifact is easy.

MAP05: Tech Center

Tim Heydelaar

Tim's first regular level is an absolutely sprawling techbase (by Doom 64 standards) that superficially reminds one of "Tricks n' Traps" from Doom II, given that you start in a central room with eight paths to follow. There are some fun encounters here, like the outdoor storage corridor or the maze of boxy rooms to the south. Cool visuals too, like the computer station in the north east.

MAP06: Alpha Quadrant

Danny Lewis

A medium-sized level with good use of lamp props to give a sense of place; it's also got some interesting movement puzzles, including the infamous spectre pit -- a massive dark chasm with a horde of spectres waiting hungrily in the black for your dumb ass to fall in. The hell noble fight in the stairway maze is probably a more intense encounter, though.

MAP07: Research Lab

Tim Heydelaar

Very similar in style to "Tech Center," with a large maze of computer stations and labs to the west. Monsters in cages are frequent features and you'll also have to deal with the nukage sewer to the northeast. Grabbing pretty much anything in the cages in the central room triggers a fight, but I appreciate Tim's willingness to commit to the bit.

MAP08: Final Outpost

Randy Estrella

The final techbase level is an appropriately unsettling maze from Randy, full of puzzles and traps. The maze in the west is spooky, but when the walls drop and a horde of enemies come your way it might catch you off-guard. There's also the hell noble room in the east; if you're quick and lucky you might be able to trigger some infighting, but it's a tough room to deal with either way. I about pissed myself when I grabbed the soulsphere and a single baron showed up behind me -- even though I should have known better.

MAP09: Even Simpler

Randy Estrella

Even Doom 64 has a "Dead Simple" clone -- mappers just never could get enough of these, huh? This one's a little different from the original, though. It starts out similarly enough with a mancubus ambush, though you have a little bit of cover via the columns in the center. Kill them and you can access the walkway, at which point hellknights and cacodemons show up. Kill them and you can get into the third layer of the box, with barons and pain elementals to ruin your day -- and dart traps for hapless Doomers who dare to grab the items on pedestals.

MAP10: The Bleeding

Danny Lewis

A pretty straightforward little fortress kind of deal. Most of the map is dominated by the fortress proper, but you'll also be visiting some outbuildings and making your way into a creepy little watery cave. Mostly what you'll be doing is throwing switches to reveal new areas and murdering their inhabitants, though you'll have to deal with not one but two waves of assholes flooding the outer yard of the fortress. The cave is really memorable looking, especially the animated gargoyle that you can push to access the BFG.

MAP11: Terror Core

Danny Lewis

The weather takes a turn for the worse in Danny's "Terror Core," a series of interconnected bridges and underpasses as a storm rumbles overhead. It reminds me a lot of Quake, actually, especially some of the stuff in the second episode like "The Crypt of Decay." I like the fight when you throw the switch in the yellow key area.

 

MAP12: Altar Of Pain

Tim Heydelaar

A stunningly good-looking temple encircled by a stone wall cut into the rock, "Altar of Pain" is a bit of a tough nut to crack as your job is to find a way into the inner sanctum, which in turn requires successively climbing and conquering the outer walkways. It can be a bit confusing at first, but getting inside is worth it thanks to the presence of the Unmaker, a nasty little laser lashed together out of flesh and bone and tech. If you've already found the first artifact in "Outpost Omega" this thing will show its worth right off the bat if you unload it on the barons who show up to stop you. Great looking level, I really like the candle-lit cave tunnel.

MAP30: The Lair

Danny Lewis

A surprisingly tiny little map from Danny. If you hadn't done Hectic -- and I won't blame you if you haven't -- you'll meet your first arachnotrons here, but they're not a big threat. You'll face stiffer resistance in the courtyard between the opening structure and the building in which this level's artifact is stored. I really like the spiral staircase down into the tunnels below.

MAP13: Dark Citadel

Tim Heydelaar

My favorite level. Tim so far has repeatedly shown a knack for atmosphere and that is especially apparent in "Dark Citadel," an immensely creepy castle under a cold starry sky. The map revolves around a large inner sanctum that you won't be accessing until the end; in the meantime you'll have to deal with everything from an infested courtyard, a trap-filled collonade, and a spooky occult library patrolled by shotgun guys and hell nobles. Each one of these encounters is memorable in their own right but I think it's the spectres lurking in the western gallery that make me jump the most.

MAP14: Eye Of The Storm

Danny Lewis

Danny brings the thunder in this gloomy, watery fortress. It's generally pretty symmetrical along a northeast/southwest line, so feel free to tackle either side in either order. Cool fight in the back end as you near the entrance to the inner sanctum, and I like the crenulations on the platforms in that area.

MAP15: Dark Entries

Randy Estrella

Randy once said he really likes revenants, and while Doom 64 has no screaming skeletons to speak of, you'll definitely have to face down their homing fireballs as you enter the main hall. (Fun fact: as the two launchers hang over each end of the room I've taken to calling this area the basketball court as far back as when I was a kid.) Randy throws some interesting little moments like the soulsphere puzzle and the rush across a bridge as darts fire at you. The majority of the carnage is probably the outdoor area with the big central building and several arachnotrons and hell nobles throwing shit at you.

MAP16: Blood Keep

Randy Estrella

A creepy little complex of stone amidst some barren mountainous terrain, a bleak dusk-lit cloudy sky overhead. This one's sort of a catch-all of various hellish themes, from the gallery of sepulchres to the multiple dark libraries (smaller, but more fiercely defended than the one in "Dark Citadel") to the blue-lit cave tunnel occupied by imps. Lots of zombies about as well, and they have a nasty tendency to shoot at you from cover as you're wandering around outside. Fun level.

MAP17: Watch Your Step

Danny Lewis

If you're coming at Doom 64 after having played Doom 2016 this area might look slightly familiar to you. Danny gives us a pair of boxy arenas, linked by a corridor (and later by the exit room.) The gimmick here is that in the western area, stepping on the tiles with a cross pattée summons monsters, and you can trigger quite the large heaping of trouble -- including lots of pain elementals -- if you run the entire circumference of the arena stepping on the tiles along the way -- which you'll have to do to reveal the blue key. The other big fight is back in the bigger arena to the east -- progressively tougher waves of enemies warp in culminating at least one cyberdemon. Pretty straightforward, you'll just be pretty busy.

MAP18: Spawned Fear

Randy Estrella

A creepy little library complex set in a cavernous region. Pain elementals are everywhere here, though you'll also have a heaping helping of zombies (who often seem drawn to libraries in this game...) The PEs and hell knights that spawn in when you open up the firepit in the darkened room might catch you off guard, but for me it was the messy series of fights in the rocky outdoor area to the southeast. Cool visuals.

MAP31: In The Void

Tim Heydelaar

With one of Doom 64's rare hot starts, Tim brings us one of the most striking levels in the entire game, a creepy complex of boxy stone paths and platforms suspended in a blue fog-choked void. Pain elementals float about filling the air with lost souls, but it's otherwise a pretty straightforward go-here-get-key kinda deal. Of course, once you grab the third and final demon artifact, all bets are off.

MAP19: The Spiral

Tim Heydelaar

A very short level from Tim, but very memorable. If you're coming here from In The Void and you've got ammo for your newly-improved Unmaker, it'll go a long way towards getting you up to the top of the steps with minimal fuss. But you might want to save it for the horde of pain elementals who show up once you're in the top room. Nasty.

MAP20: Breakdown

Randy Estrella

One of Randy's more creative maps, "Breakdown" is an unsettling maze that's constantly shifting and changing. Leave the starting area and when you come back it's gone; in its place are steps upward. New corridors open up as you poke around. The red key throws a lot of hungry pinkies at you, but they're not really a threat... unless you're playing on -fast. The brick maze to the south east throws a lot of zombies at you with wonky cover, but at least you won't have to deal with pain elementals, just lost souls.

MAP21: Pitfalls

Tim Heydelaar

This one is set largely in a crumbling underground temple complex. The main room is a large cavern that is actively falling apart, with a toxic floor at the bottom to keep you from just jumping off to avoid enemies. It's a style reminiscent of Plutonia's "Anti-Christ," albeit more densely packed with terrain that is difficult to traverse due to the lack of jump. There's a separate maze of corridors that eventually leads into the blue key temple, and while it's pretty straightforward, it might have you a bit jumpy with all the zombies and hell knights waiting around every corner.

MAP22: Burnt Offerings

Randy Estrella

Flames crackle in the distance as a corrupted temple is crawling with arachnotrons. There's a lot here that resembles an old church, from the nave haunted by spectres to the votive candles in a nearby chamber. There's a lot of interesting encounters here, from the dart trap in a courtyard to the hell knight who sneaks up on you in a trapped secret, but for me it was the horde of spectres pouring out of the columned area while arachnotrons tried to draw a bead on me.

MAP23: Unholy Temple

Tim Heydelaar

Reminiscent of "Altar of Pain" in that the core of the level is a tiered central structure, there are four different chambers in the cardinal directions, each with their own conceit. The western one is probably the toughest encounter for the way it literally drops pinkies and hell nobles on you, and that's after a surprise arachnotron moshpit. The southern section repeatedly messes with you by playing keep-away with the yellow key, forcing you to fight barons each time. The north is constantly reconfiguring itself, ultimately settling on a nasty little bloodfloor trap room with platforms you have to jump across while fighting cacos and hell knights. And the east chamber has three switches, each marked with a color, and you have to throw them in a specific order to unlock doors or raise bars to progress. Input a bad combination and prepare to fight -- a cool concept.

MAP24: No Escape

Randy Estrella

You'd be forgiven for thinking this was a boss map. You start off in a high chamber that you drop down from; waves of enemies fill the courtyard that you find yourself in. There's lots of offshoots you can run to for cover and supplies, but they pose their own dangers, such as the colonnade where zombies teleport in, or the toxic spiral staircase with the mancubus ambush. On higher difficulties you'll have a cyberdemon stomping around already, but he's not alone -- your ultimate goal is to destroy all cybies and that means figuring out a couple of switch puzzles to open up the pen they're in.

MAP28: The Absolution

Danny Lewis

A very straightforward boss arena. You're dumped with more rocket ammo than you could ever need (and conversely not enough cell ammo) plus every weapon in the game and sent on your way. If you've got the demon artifacts this fight is trivial; otherwise, you're gonna have a Bad Time. You can use the artifacts to seal the three portals from which demons pour out; you'll likely have some stragglers, but once everybody's dead, the Mother Demon comes down to investigate the noise. Fighting her is trivial with a tricked-out demon laser but otherwise you'll have to deal with her homing rockets and flame trails. Disappointing fight overall but ah well, classic Doom has never had the most thrilling boss fights.

-June <3

Sing for absolution
I will be singing
And falling from your grace, yeah
Our wrongs remain unrectified
And our souls won't be exhumed

Part of a series on Classic Doom

Doom	The Ultimate Doom
Doom II: Hell on Earth
The Master Levels	No Rest for the Living
Final Doom
TNT: Evilution	The Plutonia Experiment
Doom 64	The Lost Levels