doom

IGN plays through the first episode of the original Doom with its creator John Romero providing commentary. Romero shares stories, design secrets and behind-the-scenes details about the levels, including E1M1.

Tech Tangents sets up original Doom's three-screen multi-monitor mode, which required a separate networked computer for each monitor. The video covers the hardware and setup work and the result.

A documentary by Stuart Brown (XboxAhoy) on the history of first-person shooters on the Amiga and how Doom's arrival affected the platform.

A short first episode in Zaiste's Doom Emacs series, showing how to get started with Doom, an Emacs configuration aimed at Vim users. It presents Doom as a polished, fast, batteries-included distribution.

A short video of someone playing Doom on a TI-83+ graphing calculator, with a link to the version used.

A short clip from Microsoft's 1995 Judgement Day event in which Bill Gates is inserted into Doom as a promo for Windows 95 and DirectX gaming. It was never publicly released at the time.

A long video essay on MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod uploaded by an anonymous user that hides unsettling secrets in its walls. It tells the story of the map, its mystery and its liminal horror.

Bisqwit builds a Doom or Duke Nukem 3D style software-rendered 3D engine in C from scratch, supporting non-Euclidean geometry. It covers vector rotation and portal rendering with sped-up, tool-assisted coding.

Mick Gordon's GDC 2017 session on composing the Doom (2016) soundtrack. He details his compositional process, production techniques and the experimental instrument and synth design behind the music.

The Thought Emporium grows living rat neurons on an electrode array and tries to train them to play Doom. It is part of a series on biological computing.

The Michigan TypeScript group shows the Doom engine running entirely inside the TypeScript type system. It is open source, and two follow-up videos cover why and how they did it.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

The Doomsday Machine scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviet doomsday device is explained.

A short Kurzgesagt animation explaining the Great Filter, the idea that finding alien life might be bad news because it implies something usually destroys civilizations. It connects the concept to the Fermi paradox.

ElectroBOOM examines whether 5G and other electromagnetic waves can harm people, explaining the EM spectrum and the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. It includes experiments and measurements in his usual humorous style.

A short Atlantic documentary on Cleveland's 1986 Balloonfest, when 1.5 million balloons were released at once and the attempt went badly wrong.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2023 talk takes on AI doomerism, weighing the theoretical existential risks against the reality on the ground. He takes a skeptical but thoughtful view of how to balance AI's potential against its risks.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

John Romero's 2016 GDC Europe talk recounts the early days of id Software and the programming principles behind Doom and Quake, including fast iteration and keeping the game bootable.

A demo of Quake's E1M1 rendered as vector graphics on a Hitachi oscilloscope. A laptop generates the audio signal that the scope draws.

A Gamereactor interview at E3 2012 with John Carmack, who shows his lag-free head-mounted display running DOOM 3 BFG Edition. He discusses what the headset could mean for the games industry.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) shows 'reverse emulation', using a Raspberry Pi in an NES cartridge to give an unmodified NES new abilities such as playing SNES games. The video starts in a strange way and gets stranger.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

Internet Historian tells the story of No Man's Sky, from its over-hyped and badly received launch to years of updates by Hello Games that redeemed the game. It is a long, comedic mini-documentary.

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

David Brevik's GDC 2016 postmortem of Diablo covers how it went from a turn-based claymation DOS concept to a real-time action RPG, plus the story of Blizzard North and development anecdotes.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

A 2017 GDC postmortem in which Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell how Civilization came together from board game design and sim game experience. They cover its development history and design decisions, including fairness and luck.

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

MC Frontalot's nerdcore rap about the text adventure Zork, made for Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary and featuring a cameo by Steve Meretzky. It was filmed over an evening in a basement.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.

In an Ars Technica War Stories episode, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner describes how he made the game on the Apple II, fighting hardware memory limits and the platform's decline. It covers the rotoscoped animation and the engineering tricks involved.