Digital Foundry engineers compare every Doom console port

Digital Foundry engineers compared all ten ports of the original Doom for the latest installment of DF Retro, ranking them based on how playable each version is compared to the original.

Doom’s various ports, especially the older ones, had to be modified in several ways to be playable. For example, the resolution and format of the textures were often tinkered with or the entire engine had to be overhauled. The controls also had to be adapted to the controllers of the different platforms. Because developers had to squeeze in so many twists and turns in the days of relatively limited computing power, the ports can differ greatly from each other. This leads to good, bad or simply interesting results.

The worst playable version, for example, is the one for the 3DO console from 1996. In fullscreen mode, the port often runs at less than 10fps and the game suffers from massive input lag. In part this is forgivable as this port apparently had to be put together in ten weeks by a single developer, which was an impossible task.

The version for the super Super Nintendo is better to play than the 3DO. However, to achieve that result, the game had to be cut considerably. For example, there is no longer a spread of bullets in weapons, which makes the shotgun more like a sniper rifle. Also, the enemies’ sprites no longer have a back, so they always face the player and there is no longer any possibility to sneak up on them.

The Doom ports were released across the 1990s and 2000s for the Sega 32X, Atari Jaguar, SNES, PlayStation 1, 3DO, Sega Saturn, Acorn Archimedes, Game Boy Advance, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.