3DO

Doom for the 3DO is an official port of Doom to the game console, published by Logicware and Art Data Interactive, and released in the US on April 26, 1996. The level set is similar to the Atari Jaguar version. This version is single player only.

Many fans consider this one of the worst, if not the worst, of the Doom console ports. It runs in a small screen at a low frame rate. The game offers six screen sizes, the largest two only being available via a cheat. The largest screen sizes suffer from a frame rate so poor as to render the player sometimes uncontrollable.

Its soundtrack, considered the port's one redeeming feature, consists of arrangements of the original music performed by a live band, recorded in high-fidelity CD-quality audio.

Development
According to Rebecca Ann Heineman, the game's sole developer, the blame for the port's quality rests mostly on the highly constrained schedule of ten weeks given for its development. This led to a lack of time to fully optimize the game for the 3DO hardware, which was challenging to program both from an essential standpoint and in particular for a demanding application like Doom.

Publisher Art Data Interactive was under false impressions with regard to the ease of porting a game like Doom from the Atari Jaguar to another console, believing that simply recompiling the game would be sufficient, and that features such as new weapons could be added simply by providing new assets for the game engine to consume.

While game code is largely shared with the Jaguar version, the rendering engine is completely customized to draw walls through the 3DO's hardware "cell engine." Floors and ceilings are drawn in software, however, due to difficulties in drawing perspective-projected graphics through the cell engine. Heineman states work on piping that drawing through the hardware was in-progress but had to be abandoned due to unresolved bugs at launch time.

The decision to replace the MIDI-based PC soundtrack with live recorded music was made by Heineman on a whim due to lack of time to write a music driver for the 3DO. A band hired by ADI was used to do the recordings. With digitized music, it was possible to use simple streaming playback with minimal coding effort. Heineman states this was the best decision made in the process, as the music is the one aspect of the port almost universally praised.

The game was at one time scheduled to be published by, but the deal fell through.

Music
The complete soundtrack is as follows:

Screen sizes
Available screen sizes: