Developer: Rebecca Heineman
Release Date: October 1996
Source Code Release Date: November 30, 2014

Although DOOM is famous today for running on everything, this wasn't always the case, both because it wasn't until the source came out that it became a meme and also because, hard as it is to believe today, not everything in the early 90's was powerful enough to run DOOM, and often the results were very lackluster.

Rebecca Heineman was a legendary old school video game programmer, and one of the most famous and interesting ports she ever did was the 3DO version of DOOM. Except if you know anything about the ports of DOOM that came out in proximity to the original game, you know that the 3DO port is notorious for being of poor quality. So then why is it so well known? Because of the wild story behind it.

After having done the 3DO port of Wolfenstein 3-D (for which she also did th Macintosh port) she was contracted to polish up the DOOM port from a previous developer, but she soon learned that the publisher misled her, that no work had been done on the 3DO port, and she spent ten solid weeks getting the game to work, including having to address several shortcomings in th 3DO's SDK itself. When viewed through that lens, it's impressive the game runs at all.

In 2014 she released the source code to the 3DO version and the BurgerDoom source port (a nod to her nickname "Burger Becky") is the closest you can get to running the original 3DO version of the game. And I thought initially this was a deal where someone had just taken an existing DOOM source port and just emulated the experience but no, you actually need the 3DO disc image of the original game to run it. The result is a fascinating glimpse into the compromises necessary for console ports in the 90's. The levels are cut down (they're apparently mostly the same as the Atari Jaguar version) with a number of modifications to fit in RAM and decrease polygon count. The game has no multiplayer and no save progress other than remembering what level you were on. A series of video cutscenes did not make the final product. The one thing that's improved upon is the soundtrack since it was re-recorded by a live band in order to take advantage of CD audio tracks.

This is absolutely not the best way to play DOOM, we have source ports for the PC version elsewhere on this site. But as a retro gaming artifact it's an interesting experience. It's the E.T. of DOOM ports in that it's impressive not for its quality but for the fact that it worked at all.