Jimmy Maher

“Doom, meanwhile, had a long-term impact on the world of gaming far exceeding even that of Myst. The latest of a series of experiments with interactive 3D graphics by id programmer John Carmack, Doom shares with Myst only its immersive first-person point of view; in all other respects, this fast-paced, ultraviolent shooter is the polar opposite of the cerebral Myst. Whereas the world of Myst is presented as a collection of static nodes that the player can move among, each represented by a relatively static picture of its own, the world of Doom is contiguous. As the player roams about, Doom must continually recalculate in real time the view of the world that it presents to her on the screen, in effect drawing for her a completely new picture with every frame using a vastly simplified version of the 3D-rendering techniques that Eric Graham began experimenting with on the Amiga back in 1986. First-person viewpoints had certainly existed in games previously, but mostly in the context of flight simulators, of puzzle-oriented adventures such as Myst, or of space-combat games such as Elite. Doom has a special quality that those earlier efforts lack in that the player embodies her avatar as she moves through 3D space in a way that feels shockingly, almost physically real. She does not view the world through a windscreen, is not separated from it by an adventure game’s point-and-click mechanics and static artificiality. Doom marks a revolutionary change in action gaming, the most significant to come about between the videogame’s inception and the present. If the player directs the action in a game such as Menace, Doom makes her feel as if she is in the action, in the game’s world. Given the Amiga platform’s importance as a tool for noninteractive 3D rendering, it is ironic that the Amiga is uniquely unsuited to Doom and the many iterations and clones of it that would follow. Most of the Amiga attributes that we employed in the Menace reconstruction—its scrolling playfields, its copper, its sprites—are of no use to a 3D-engine programmer. Indeed, the Intel-based machines on which Carmack created Doom possess none of these features. Even the Amiga’s bitplane-based playfields, the source of so many useful graphical tricks and hacks when programming a 2D game such as Menace, are an impediment and annoyance in a game such as Doom. Much preferable are the Intel-based machines’ straightforward chunky playfields because these layouts are much easier to work with when every frame of video must be drawn afresh from scratch. What is required most of all for a game such as Doom is sufficient raw processing power to perform the necessary thousands of calculations needed to render each frame quickly enough to support the frenetic action for which the game is known. By 1993, the plebian Intel-based computer, so long derided by Amiga owners for its inefficiencies and lack of design imagination, at last possessed this raw power. The Amiga simply had no answer to the Intel 80486s and Pentiums that powered this new, revolutionary genre of first-person shooters. Throughout”
― Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga

“Although earlier computers existed in isolation from the world, requiring their visuals and sound to be generated and live only within their memory, the Amiga was of the world, able to interface with it in all its rich analog glory. It was the first PC with a sufficient screen resolution and color palette as well as memory and processing power to practically store and display full-color photographic representations of the real world, whether they be scanned in from photographs, captured from film or video, or snapped live by a digitizer connected to the machine. It could be used to manipulate video, adding titles, special effects, or other postproduction tricks. And it was also among the first to make practical use of recordings of real-world sound. The seeds of the digital-media future, of digital cameras and Photoshop and MP3 players, are here. The Amiga was the first aesthetically satisfying PC. Although the generation of machines that preceded it were made to do many remarkable things, works produced on them always carried an implied asterisk; “Remarkable,” we say, “. . . for existing on such an absurdly limited platform.” Even the Macintosh, a dramatic leap forward in many ways, nevertheless remained sharply limited by its black-and-white display and its lack of fast animation capabilities. Visuals produced on the Amiga, however, were in full color and could often stand on their own terms, not as art produced under huge technological constraints, but simply as art. And in allowing game programmers to move beyond blocky, garish graphics and crude sound, the Amiga redefined the medium of interactive entertainment as being capable of adult sophistication and artistry. The seeds of the aesthetic future, of computers as everyday artistic tools, ever more attractive computer desktops, and audiovisually rich virtual worlds, are here. The Amiga empowered amateur creators by giving them access to tools heretofore available only to the professional. The platform’s most successful and sustained professional niche was as a video-production workstation, where an Amiga, accompanied by some relatively inexpensive software and hardware peripherals, could give the hobbyist amateur or the frugal professional editing and postproduction capabilities equivalent to equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands. And much of the graphical and musical creation software available for the machine was truly remarkable. The seeds of the participatory-culture future, of YouTube and Flickr and even the blogosphere, are here. The”
― Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga