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Aspyr Media this week released Doom 3 for the Mac, a game regarded by some as a major achievement in the industry, with highly realistic graphics, sound, characters and groundbreaking performance features.
Doom 3 employs a proprietary, 3-D game engine developed by id Software, which released the original Doom game in 1993. While it wasn't the original first-person shooter, in some ways it has come to define the genre. Aspyr released Doom 3 under a licensing arrangement with id, and the game requires a video card with 512 MB of RAM to realize its full potential. Such a product isn't yet available to Mac users, however, and was only recently announced on the Windows side.
Doom 3 pushes current hardware so far that it almost became the first title to require a G5 processor on the Mac. But Aspyr's internal development team was able to optimize gameplay thanks to OpenGL improvements that came with Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) release of Mac OS X v10.3.8, enabling G4 Mac owners to join the party too.
"Apple spent a lot of time and energy helping with Doom 3 development," Glenda Adams, Aspyr's director of development, told MacNewsWorld. "We had one engineer at Apple who worked with us on Altivec optimizations for a good portion of the project."
Dramatic Premise
A remake of the original rather than a sequel, Doom 3 places gamers in the role of a Marine who travels to a scientific base on Mars. When he's sent to look for a missing scientist, the nameless main character discovers a secret experiment in teleportation technology that goes hideously awry.
The gates of Hell open and demons overrun the research facility, killing the personnel or turning them into mindless zombies. The player must shoot his way out to survive. In the process, he hopes to discover the true purpose of the experiment.
Like the original, Doom 3 features an array of increasingly deadly weapons, from the basic shotgun and chainsaw to the high-tech plasma rifle and the one-shot-killer Soul Cube, which can be recharged only by killing demons. The game offers 26 levels of solo gameplay as well as four modes of multiplayer action over the Internet or a local area network (LAN).
Steep Requirements
The Mac version of Doom 3 was released approximately seven months after the Windows edition, which is par for the course when porting games to the platform. It has been highly anticipated by users of both operating systems, but many Mac gamers upset with the initial system requirements weren't appeased much by the last-minute inclusion of G4 processors: The chip still needs to run at 1.5 GHz or faster, and the game requires 512 MB of RAM as well as 64 MB of video RAM."Gamers are certainly welcome to try the game on a Mac that is slightly below specs," pointed out Adams, "especially in the cases where they have a good video card, such as the Radeon 9800 or better. The performance doesn't just hit a wall at 1.5 GHz, but Aspyr can't offer tech support for anyone running it below specs."
Peter Cohen, who writes the "Mac Game Room" column for Macworld magazine, said the important thing to remember is that id Software makes a great deal of revenue licensing its engine technology to other developers.
"Doom 3's core engine will be able to scale to new graphics hardware as it hits the market," he told MacNewsWorld. "So while it may seem extraordinary now, it'll still be running well a year or two down the road on nVidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) and ATI's (Nasdaq: ATYT) new high-end hardware."
Planting the Seeds
Aspyr's Adams added, "We definitely believe there will be several Doom 3 engine games over the next couple years, so having the original game on the Mac goes a long way to bringing other cool games to the platform." Those games will be easier to port to the Mac, she said, now that the initial work on the game engine has been completed.
The disparity between Macs and Windows machines has become glaring in recent years when comparing games on the two platforms, but Apple has a history of improving its hardware and software to catch up.
"I think Doom 3 coming out for the Mac is a great thing for the overall performance of the platform," said Adams. "It instantly establishes a new benchmark that Apple and its partners can strive to improve, and I think we'll see it affect the performance of both OS X and hopefully even what hardware Apple includes in future Macs."
