DOOM 64 Deserves its Cult Classic Status

The Little Game That Could(n't)

The Doom Slayer (ha ha we love our jokes here on giant bomb dot com)

DOOM 64 was not exactly set up for success. I mean, just look at its release date: nearly a year after the release of Quake, a game which was (like DOOM before it) more or less a revolution in the way that people played first person shooters, a genre which (by 1997) was evolving enough to make the idea of a game where you can’t look up and down (or jump, or really aim that much) feel extremely old. Even if we were talking games releasing on the Nintendo 64, the game was beat to the punch by Turok: Dinosaur Hunter by a month, and while Goldeneye’s graphics are not exactly what you would call uh, exciting to look at, that was going to come out in August of that year and blow everyone’s fucking minds with its four player multiplayer. I myself remember a friend renting DOOM 64 from the local Blockbuster video, and after we played a little of it we ended up abandoning it in order to play Turok. I think past me probably made the right call – Turok was extremely cool and had dinosaurs (and fog, so much fog), whereas DOOM 64 was extremely dark and hard to see.

Oh, and a port of Quake to the N64 would drop in 1998, effectively burying DOOM 64 and whatever memories people would have had of it. I mean, that makes a sick kind of sense when you think about it – how many N64 games made any sort of lasting impact? Who the fuck thinks of DOOM 64 when someone mentions DOOM these days (I mean shit, most people probably don’t even think of DOOM ’93 anymore). That being said, I’m not about to pretend that the game didn’t have its devotees in those days – or that people weren’t scrambling to dump the cart and put it on PC as soon as possible so that you could play it with things like saves and also mouse and keyboard As God Demands (not Romero though, that dude still plays with the arrow keys which is bonkers).

The question becomes then, why it got fans in the first place. I mean, the DOOM port to the PSX has its fans for its moodier soundtrack, but it was more or less just a straight port. Nobody remembers the SNES port fondly, they just remember the story behind its porting (if they remember it at all), and no other port has the hold on people that DOOM 64 seems to have. Which is not surprising, if you’ve ever looked at DOOM 64: it’s a completely new fucking game! You already know this! Don’t act surprised!

They gave the Pain Elemental too many mouths and too few buttholes

Extreme Makeover: Hell Edition

All the monsters (at least, all the monsters who made it into the game – Chaingunners, Archviles, and Revenants were all cut thanks to the need to fit everything on a cart – see also the fact that Shotgunners and Soldiers look identical and the absolutely pathetic super-shotgun reloading animation, which is less an animation and more just a little shudder of the shotgun sprite) got complete overhauls. The Pain Elemental probably got the biggest shift in appearance, getting two mouths instead of two buttholes, whereas Lost Souls look more or less the same (and are still the worst enemies in the game, seriously undefeated in terms of Annoying Goddamn Pest enemy for the life of the entire series, except for maybe DOOM³ where they don’t actually feel like that much of a threat (but basically nothing that isn’t either a Hell Knight, Commando, or an Archvile feels like a threat in DOOM³) and are not half as annoying as those goddamn Cherubs or the Spiderlings).

Cacodemons actually look more like the original Pain Elementals and are wearing broken manacles for some reason, Arachnotrons don’t look that different, and Mancubuses (Mancubi?) got a slight visual upgrade and look like they are wearing little backpacks. Imps and Pinky demons got visual shifts but don’t look that different, they more look like they’ve been given a less-cartoony style but that’s about it. The animations also got changed – most notably, Imps flex at you when they throw fireballs, and Pinky Demons make little grabby hands when they bite you.

No seriously just look at this lighting

The first thing most people would point out is that the game has a look, which is one of those “of course it fucking does” things because DOOM has always had a style of its own, but DOOM 64 has a LOOK, which is to say it has crazy lighting effects that the original engine simply was not going to ever give you. Some of the previews of the game cited the wild lighting effects specifically as showcasing the “power of the N64” which is one of those lines that is bizarre in retrospect but at the time we were all nodding furiously. It really does deliver on those lighting effects from the jump, too: even the first level has a few little bits of lighting where you think “hmm I don’t remember DOOM having it like that” and then you get to a level where all the lights are out until you hit a switch, and then they slowly come up to a bright blue (because there’s a blue key area, you see) and it is one of those moments that sticks in the brain once you see it. It’s neat now, in 1997 it would have blown minds.

That lighting allows DOOM 64 to give the whole game a much more anxiety-inducing feel. The sort of big dark areas and low lighting that really gets a boost from the much darker palette of the game’s colors in general. This is a horror-tinged DOOM before DOOM³, which makes sense given the game’s plot (which is to say, the little bit of text in the instruction manual) which reads as follows:

“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”

Which is to say, you are the traumatized, barely-holding-it-together Doomguy who gets sent to sort out another surprise incursion of demons. You survive all of DOOM and DOOM II (saving the world) and then instead of getting to retire, you get called back in for one last job. No wonder you end up deciding to stay in hell, it isn’t like you’re being left alone on earth. Which explains the darker tone of the game narratively, if you are a sicko who wants to do a narrative analysis of DOOM 64 (I am that sicko, but I’m sparing you from having to read it). Join the slightly more dour tone of your story with spookier lighting and add a slight sprinkling of more “realistic” coloring and monster design (for a given definition of “realistic,” obviously) and – surprisingly – way more Devil Shit like people being clearly sacrificed and lots of inverted crosses and whatnot than you really get in DOOM or DOOM II (and no FIREBLU, instead you get cool animated flames in the sky or foggy voids or what-have-you) and you’ve got a decidedly horror-adjacent game on your hands – and that’s before we get into the soundtrack.

Now just add the sound of wailling children crying out for their lost mothers and we're there

The soundtrack for 64 is, frankly, harrowing. It’s got more in common with Quake’s soundtrack than with DOOM’s – instead of metal, it’s ambient droning and spooky noises, including horror standbys like crying children and moaning and I’m pretty sure some cats? It’s oppressive, is the thing, it is like a spooky cloud hanging over your head as you attempt to figure out what the fuck just happened in the level (here’s what happened: four fucking Pain Elementals spawned in and now you can hear the bastards spawning Lost Souls like it’s going out of style. Better hope you have enough chaingun ammo (or cell ammo for your Unmaker if you don’t have patience), or those fucking flaming skulls are gonna chew through your health with a shocking efficiency).

The sound design overall is spookier – the moans of a zombified soldier or the fleshy slaps of imp feet on the floor, or the growling of a Cacodemon. I tend to clear out levels of all enemies not because I am a completionist, it’s just to get them to stop making their various awful noises while I’m trying to figure out how to get a megahealth. The weapons have new sounds as well – the super shotgun sound is, to me, not as chunky-sounding as it is in DOOM II, and absolutely part of that is probably just because you don’t get the image of popping the spent shells and slamming two new ones in (here’s an aside: did we all notice the super-shotgun in the DOOM: The Dark Ages trailer also doesn’t do that and in fact seems to resemble the look of the super-shotgun in DOOM 64? We did? Good). I can’t fault it too much though, it’s still a hell of a weapon and frankly I get through most of the game relying on it and save all my bigger guns for Barons of Hell and above.

Leveloution in 1997

So much for the sound and visuals – they’re really impressive, but for me the real thing that makes it shine is the level design itself. Thanks to the fact that Midway was working with an improved engine, they were able to do all kinds of weird shit with the levels. Maps can still be these big sprawling affairs that reward exploration just like in the previous two games, sure, but also they can be these tightly packed maps which are constantly reconfiguring themselves. There’s levelution happening in this game – holes get dug into the ground to reveal new pathways, or the architecture of a room will shift to grant access to a key that wasn’t there before. It’s the kind of stuff that Romero started playing around with in SIGIL and then really kinda perfected in SIGIL II, so it is certainly possible to do that sort of thing with the original DOOM now (I am sure other mapmakers were on this shit before Romero, obviously, but those are the two examples that spring immediately to mind). The point is, people were probably not doing that shit (in DOOM, anyway. Duke Nukem 3D and other Build Engine games made this kind of thing their signature) in 1997, unless they were level designers working on DOOM 64.

The other thing the levels have, along with their shifting geography, is traps. So many traps! Did you step on this different colored tile? I hope you enjoy spawning in more demons! You should have paid attention to the fact the level is called “Watch Your Step,” don’t you think? It also adds in little wall decorations that shoot darts, and this game simply cannot get enough making the floor fall out from under you. It’s part of its charms, although the first time I went through the game I was ready to murder someone.

The Boss Will Kill You (Unless it Doesn't)

Images taken before unfortunate events (for them)

Finally, I gotta say it’s got a good final boss! Hard as nails if you haven’t done the work to get the demon keys in the secret levels, but a bit less of a hassle otherwise. Without the keys, you get absolutely rocked by what feels like a never-ending stream of demons, and once you get through that the damn actual boss (who okay she does look a little silly) sends out waves of fireballs which chew through your health in a way that is deeply disheartening. She also screams a lot. It’s not pleasant! I took her ass down in under a minute on my most recent playthrough because I had the Unmaker fully juiced. It was hilarious.

I’m not going to say how long it took me to beat the damn thing my first go-round, but it was more than an hour, probably? I don’t completely remember, and I think we’re all better off that I don’t. In fact, if we’re being honest (and alas, I am an honest man), I had such a frustrating time with the boss that I came away from the game feeling pretty down on the game as a whole. It wasn’t until I booted it up again on my Switch (the less said about how many copies of each DOOM game I own on modern platforms, the better) and realized that actually, it’s not as difficult as I remembered.

The point is, of course, that with its uniquely oppressive atmosphere and ever-shifting level design, it’s not that surprising that even with the existence of other, more technologically-advanced games, the game managed to maintain a sort of cult following. It helps, of course, that one member of that cult was Hugo Martin, which is (probably) one of the big reasons why we got a nice PC version of the game as a pre-order bonus when DOOM Eternal came out. It’s a good port too: running on the KEX Engine, which can do no wrong, and with those nice quality of life things like a cheat menu if you just wanna warp around blasting shit and, you know, support for mouse and keyboard and all that good stuff.

It plays fine on a controller – like I mentioned, I’ve got it on my Switch, and I also have it on my Steam Deck now. I’m pretty sure that it didn’t run quite this smooth on a N64, but it’s good to have a version that both looks incredible (again, my memory of it on the N64 is far muddier, but also I would have been on a CRT instead of an OLED monitor running at 1440p, so you know, maybe it always looked this good). We even got additional levels with the release that gives you a bridge into DOOM 2016, which is fucking hilarious and exactly the sort of nerd shit that I love.

In Which I Abandon the Whole Hidden Gem Conceit

I don’t know that DOOM 64 is like, a “hidden gem” or anything – between the fact that Hugo brings it up any time he’s talking about DOOM and the fact that there’s, you know, a PC and modern console release (and it’s on Game Pass) it’s probably fairly well-known at this point. Still, I feel like it’s the one that people tend to forget, and that’s no good! I think it might actually be pretty high up there in a Ranking of DOOMs – I’m actually kind of tempted to rank it above DOOM II (those middle maps in DOOM II are such a slog, I know you had a lot on your plate Sandy but come on), but I’d need to really think about it before I said for sure one way or the other. More than I am thinking about it now, at any rate.

The moral of the story here is that if for some reason you haven’t played DOOM 64, I think it’s worth a look! You should play it! Experience the little delights of its levelution and rotten bastard traps, and come away feeling good about the experience. Just be sure to upgrade the Unmaker and you’ll have a good time – hell, you’ll have a mostly good time even if you don’t (although like I said, I had a miserable time with the final boss without it).

Anyway, maybe I will have to sit down and write a similarly wordy and rambling thing about the other DOOM games. Maybe even rank them? We’ll see! I’ll tell you this for free though: DOOM³ will be at the bottom of the list, even if I do actually… like it.

Shit, maybe DOOM³ will have to be the next one of these. I guess there is only one way to find out, and that is to wait the six months or whatever it will take me to get the itch to write about DOOM again!

Now here is a man who is definitely not planning any horrible crimes at all