Doom 64

Doom 64, released March 31, 1997 for the Nintendo 64, is a sequel to Doom II. The game has all new graphics and runs on a modified Doom engine, based on the Sony PlayStation port. Doom 64 was released by Midway, in cooperation with id Software. GT Interactive Software distributed the European PAL version of the game, which was released on December 2, 1997.

The plot focuses on events following the original games in the series. An evil entity known as the Mother Demon has survived and brought back the decaying dead creatures the player once killed. It is up to him, the lone space marine, to stop the legions once again.

A Nintendo Switch port (originally intended to ship alongside Doom Eternal on ) was announced on September 4, 2019. This was later announced on October 8 as having been delayed until, along with Doom Eternal, and was added to that game's pre-order bonuses. In addition, it was announced that the port will also be released for PC, Microsoft Xbox One, and Sony PlayStation 4 at that time.

Additionally, a faithful fan-made engine port exists in the form of Doom64 EX.

Story
Quoted from the Doom 64 manual: 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 code named "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.

Gameplay developments
Changes were carried across from the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation ports of the Doom engine, along with additional tweaks made specifically for Doom 64, and many gameplay elements were altered. Doom's core gameplay, however remained the same: the exploration of demon-infested corridors, looking for key cards, switches and ultimately the map's exit while surviving deadly traps and ambushes.

Key differences from the computer games in the series include:
 * 32 exclusive new levels. Later 7 more are added in the 2020 re-released ports of the game.
 * New, larger sprites for all enemies, items, weapons and projectiles, created from high-poly rendered models.
 * Three-sample applied to textures and sprites courtesy of the Nintendo 64's hardware.
 * All-new textures, scrolling skies, limited room-over-room architecture, and more advanced line triggers.
 * More advanced atmospheric colored lighting and effects, such as parallaxing skies, fog and lightning.
 * A new dark ambient soundtrack composed by Aubrey Hodges.
 * High-quality sound effects (the same as used in the PlayStation version).
 * No status bar. Instead, only the numbers for health, armor and ammo are shown on the HUD, and even these can be turned off.
 * Scripted events through macros, similar to Hexen's ACS. Uses include sequences which dramatically transform areas, tripwire booby traps such as darts and homing fireball launchers, and enemies that appear out of thin air.
 * Camera effects.
 * Dramatic usage of dark light levels, ambient music, and Satanic imagery (s, inverted, and gory depictions of human sacrifice) to create an atmosphere which invokes a sense of horror.
 * No commandos, arch-viles, spiderdemons or revenants (cut due to the limited storage capacity of Nintendo 64 cartridges).
 * A new demonic laser weapon, called by fans "the Unmaker", which can increase in power throughout the game through the collection of secret items.
 * The nightmare imp and Mother Demon are introduced as new monsters.
 * The super shotgun reloads much faster, with nearly the same speed as the regular shotgun. This makes it one of the most essential weapons in the game.
 * Like the Playstation and Saturn ports, the Hell knight and baron of Hell can hurt each other with their projectiles, and infight as a result, unlike the PC version where there is a hard-coded exception for them.
 * Certain monsters are rebalanced with new behaviors or attack properties. For example, arachnotrons have a weaker twin plasma gun instead of a stronger single-barrel one; lost souls are weaker with less health, but attack viciously, making them one of the most dangerous enemies; pain elementals spawn two souls at a time when attacking, and the souls will cause massive splash damage to anything in the vicinity if they are blocked from spawning.
 * Some monster corpses disappear shortly after being killed.
 * Recoil effects when firing the weapons, e.g., being knocked back a few inches from firing a rocket.

Weapons
All weapons from Doom II are present (albeit redrawn), along with a new weapon known as the Unmaker or the LaserGun (referenced in-game as "What the !@#%* is this!"). It was first mentioned in the Doom Bible and was planned to be featured in the computer Doom games but never appeared. Its appearance in Doom 64 is its only official appearance, and with the power of three ancient artifacts (known as "Demon Keys") found in the game, it becomes more powerful by additional beams with each key found.

The Demon Keys are also a means to clear MAP28: The Absolution quicker: Each teleporter in the map has a symbol representing each key behind them and if the player has the right key, the corresponding teleporter is disabled.

Levels
Doom 64 originally featured 32 original levels: One additional special map, MAP33: Title, is used in the introductory cinematic and is not accessible for normal play.

The 2020 re-release adds a new episode, the Lost Levels, adding 7 more levels which hints the backstory of the doom marine between this game and the 2016 Doom:
 * MAP34: Plant Ops
 * MAP35: Evil Sacrifice
 * MAP36: Cold Grounds
 * MAP37: Wretched Vats
 * MAP38: Thy Glory
 * MAP39: Final Judgement
 * MAP40: Panic

Enemies


Doom 64 includes the following monsters from Doom and Doom II: Doom 64 also has new monsters, which are:
 * Arachnotron
 * Baron of Hell
 * Cacodemon
 * Cyberdemon
 * Demon
 * Hell knight
 * Imp
 * Lost soul
 * Mancubus
 * Pain elemental
 * Shotgun guy
 * Spectre
 * Zombieman
 * Mother Demon
 * Nightmare imp
 * Marine bots, which only appear in the title map.

Development
Doom 64 was developed with close cooperation between Midway Games and id Software, with the latter studio providing some creative oversight and technical assistance. Programmer Aaron Seeler in particular worked closely with John Carmack on the game's 3D rendering engine.

Due to the heavy changes made to the map format in order to support colored lighting and macro scripting, Seeler created an entirely new editor program for the project called DEX.

Gregor Punchatz was brought back in from his work on Doom and Doom II in order to create physical reference models for the game's sprites, which were then used by Midway's team to create three-dimensional computer models. These computer models were then rendered in the eight rotations for each of their poses as with the other games' sprites, then down-sampled and manually cleaned up. Punchatz-created models are known to exist for the cyberdemon (though for an earlier version which went unused), demon, the player, and the zombieman and sergeant. Several models went unused, including one for a hellhound enemy and another that resembles a female figure (sometimes thought to be an arch-vile concept).

Regional variants
Doom 64 was released in Europe for consoles and in Japan. Both of the localized versions alter the default brightness setting of the game to the middle of its range rather than the North American release's default, which was the lowest setting. This was likely due to recognition that the game's lighting was too dark out of the box on most television sets (this continues to pose a problem for streaming events such as, where even the brightest available setting still requires significant gamma correction).

The Japanese version is additionally censored, with blood splatter having been made green, as was the case with many Nintendo 64 titles such as . Unlike the Game Boy Advance ports, however, blood remains red on monster death sprites and gib objects.

2020 re-release
After remaining exclusive to the Nintendo 64 for 22 years, Doom 64 will be officially re-released on PC, Microsoft Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch on March 20, 2020, coinciding with the release of Doom Eternal. The game is being developed in cooperation with Nightdive Studios, and will use a new version of the Doom64 EX codebase, re-developed using the studio's KEX 3 engine.

Unofficial ports
Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal, the lead developer of the Absolution total conversion, created Doom64 EX, an actual source port for the original game data as extracted from the ROM, based on reverse engineering of the program's code. It aims to be a 100% accurate recreation, while offering extensions such as widescreen high-resolution graphics, gamma correction, mouse look, and other more minor improvements.

Mods

 * A group of Doom 64 fans led by Samuel Villarreal decided to work to convert the game's exclusive content to the computer using the Doomsday engine. This stand-alone mod, built on the 1.7.14 release of Doomsday, titled Doom 64: Absolution, was released in 2003. It includes faithful albeit limited recreations of the original Doom 64 levels and monsters along with several unique new maps. It appealed to many fans as a way to play through the game on a computer without using emulation.
 * Doom 64: Retribution recreates Doom 64 as mod for GZDoom. It is not intended to be a 100% faithful re-implementation. It works within the confines of the GZDoom engine and updates several graphics. In addition to the original levels it contains new episodes made up of levels from Doom 64 Absolution.
 * Brutal Doom 64 is similar to Retribution but diverges even more from the original. It features updates to the maps themselves, added graphical effects, more aggressive enemy behaviour, and additional weapons and monsters.
 * Doom 64 for Doom II is a vanilla-compatible recreation using mainly vanilla Doom II assets. Unlike the original game, the "fun levels" have been integrated into the game's progression.

Physical media
The Doom 64 for  and  regions consists of a standard gray Nintendo 64 cartridge with a black label emblazoned with the game's logo at the top. The NTSC and PAL carts differ in the logos and ratings included below. The Japanese version has a gray stone texture and a much larger logo, with the text "ドゥーム 64" beneath. Distributor GameBank's logo is at the bottom in a black bar.

Trivia

 * The name of the final level, "The Absolution," was originally the working title for the Doom 64 project during its prototype phase. According to programmer Aaron Seeler, the game started out as a much more ambitious project which was meant to deviate significantly from the vanilla Doom formula. The final game inherits many of its texture themes, with hints of Egyptian, Mayan, and Aztec styles, from this early prototype development phase. These were originally intended to represent various Earthly cultures' concepts of Hell, inside which the game would be entirely based.
 * The title of Absolution was to again be recycled for the short-lived sequel project, Doom Absolution, which was canceled.
 * Many early magazine review screenshots display a much more conservative use of colored lighting, with the feature being used more often to simply create contrast and shadowing, or to highlight important objects. This is in contrast to the final release, which applies some type of palette, even if subtle, to virtually every surface and space in the game.
 * Most likely due to the technical limitations that came with the advancement of subsequent Doom titles (so far including Doom 3, Doom (2016), and Doom Eternal; not including any spinoffs or ports), Doom 64 is the last mainline Doom game to have demons leave behind lasting corpses after being killed, with the exception of scripted events in certain levels.