Acorn Doom

Despite its age, the landmark 3D game Doom continues to generate a lot of interest with regard to its availabilty or otherwise for Acorn computers.

The truth is that an almost complete version does exist, but will almost certainly never be released due both to the cost of the licence required to release the game and (now) its age. Despite this, certain people have managed to illicitly get hold of copies of the unreleased Acorn version, and at one point this was illegally made available for public download from the internet.

This version stemmed some considerable interest a few months back, and a RISC OS Doom level editor was released, called DoomEd.

The most accurate explanation of the full story comes from the original Acorn author of the game, Eddie Edwards, who has previously programmed and published a full port of iD Software's preceding blockbuster game, Wolfenstein 3D.

The following text is reproduced as a public service from the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.acorn.games, and is copyright Eddie Edwards. You should be warned that it contains strong language which you may find offensive.

Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.games
Subject: Re: Acorn Doom. ID Software suing Eddie Edwards?
From: eddie@cranberry.co.uk
Date: Thu, 01 May 1997 10:34:45 -0600


Howdy.

Wolf3D cost me $10,000 for the license, but I published it myself under the name "Powerslave Software" which took costs up substantially. 2,000 copies of the game were made, of which approx. 300 were sold at AW95, ~100 mail-order and the rest through distributors (the last 300 were done as a job lot). Distributors don't pay much, though - RRP £30, Eddie Edwards gets £15; manufacturing is £3, income tax, etc. etc. etc. At the end of the day it was tight to break even. Then Greyhound went bust, owning me £6,000, at which point I thought maybe Powerslave Software should fold (I didn't bankrupt myself, thank God!)

DOOM was originally priced at $250,000, but as Jay Wilbur said (paraphrase) "That's the price we give to the Atari's of this world". We had worked a deal whereby the license would be $25,000. I was in negotiation with one of the faces of the Acorn scene to pay the license, but at the end of the day it was looking ropey profit-wise (i.e. very very risky) and then Greyhound folded and I decided to call it a day. "It's a day," I said.

During negotiations a *very* small number of people got copies, and I know *exactly* who they are ... and so do they. Id Software are, AFAIK, not even aware of the existence of a downloadable Acorn DOOM port - they will be when they read their email this morning. No legal action is (yet!) underway. Thank you to Mr Andrew Rollings for trying to drop me in it with them - for those who don't know, Andrew used to work for Cranberry Source (my current employers) but was fired for being incompetent and lazy, and still (a *year* later) hasn't quite got over it. Any potential employers are *strongly* advised to take up references.

So ... whatever happened to Eddie Edwards? Well, there's a new PC game coming out this month (see today's CGW) called QAD by Cranberry Source, for which I was the lead programmer. If you like it. Otherwise I was the teaboy ;-) This is my first effort at Intel assembler and, God, it's nasty but, God, it's f**king fast! The Pentium was shit-hot; the MMX is just soooooooooooo sexy it makes me ... OK, use your imagination. FLOATING POINT, guys, FLOATING POINT. The Pentium-120 does 120 MFLOPS peak. OTOH, the PC market is so up it's own arse that I can't bear it. Maybe I'll go and code on the Newton for a while ;-)

Anyone with problems with Wolf 3D or questions or anything like that can contact me at:

eddie@cranberry.co.uk

or write, or come round for a smoke:

Eddie Edwards
49 Witherington Road
Highbury
London N5 1PN

All opinions are my own, except the facts, which are facts.

Eddie xxx

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