How lost classic Doom 64 was revived for modern platforms

As if there weren’t enough doom in the world right now, this week sees the release of not one but two new Doom games. Doom Eternal is the flashy AAA sequel with incredible graphics and accurately modeled viscera, of course, but you shouldn’t sleep on the other: the first rerelease of Doom 64, an underappreciated entry in the series’s history. Doom 64, as the name suggests, was originally designed for the Nintendo 64. It came out in 1997 and, unlike id Software’s previous two Doom titles, it was developed by Midway Games.

It was the first Doom game to offer any sort of significant graphical upgrade on the original, had all-new levels, and — depending on your perspective — could easily have been considered a “Doom 3” had id not released its own game with that name in 2004. Given its original platform, Doom 64 is also a pretty unusual game. Nintendo strongly promoted “real” 3D titles on its 64-bit console, and Doom 64 is only kind of-sort of one of those. The environments are constructed of polygons, and the textures are filtered.

But just like the original Doom, you’re still limited to movement on a flat plane without the ability to look around you. Next to something like GoldenEye 007, you could have been forgiven for considering Doom 64 a little archaic at the time. Today, though, I think Doom 64 has aged far better than GoldenEye, and that’s even more the case with this new version that’s out today on several platforms. It’s the work of Nightdive Studios, a team that specializes in reviving ’90s games.

If you’ve recently played a rereleased PC first-person shooter that’s more than 20 years old, it was probably from Nightdive. The studio has put out excellent remasters of games like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Blood, and Forsaken, with new versions of SiN and System Shock on the horizon. Nightdive’s releases tend to fall on the side of providing a best-case scenario on modern hardware for older games, as opposed to completely overhauling the assets or art. “In general, we try to retain a game’s artistic vision and essence,” says senior developer James Haley.

“Though we are looking at doing some projects in the future that provide features such as high-resolution textures, probably as an option to toggle at the user’s discretion. ” With Doom 64, this means rendering the game at modern resolutions, with support for widescreen aspect ratios as well as a higher frame rate. Like many games of its day, Doom 64’s logic was originally programmed to run at 30Hz, forcing Nightdive’s developers to find alternative solutions.