Final Doom was released by id Software on June 26, 1996. this was released a few days after Quake, probably for people like me rocking lesser Pentium 75 hardware that would struggle with the true 3D power of Quake. but in reality, it could be said it was another shot at making money with Doom II and using up another game with their distribution deal with GT Interactive. nevertheless, the game comprised of two new 32 level episodes (megawads): TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment.
Evilution was intended to be released the previous November as a freeware megawad and cancelled at the last minute, resulting in something of a meltdown on forums (you could hear the “you sold out!” chants). TeamTNT were given a crazy offer from John Romero to give it a retail release instead. id Software requested that members of TeamTNT, brothers Dario and Milo Casali, make a megawad of their own to complement Evilution. titled The Plutonia Experiment, it was an ultra challenging map pack with design split 50/50 between them. by virtue of only having 2 map designers, it’s argued that the quality was more consistent compared to Evilution. it’s been a long contested subject of debate (which probably still persists today) which half of Final Doom was better, with critiques hurled at the amateurish nature of Evilution (it was supposed to be free, after all) and more praise directed at Plutonia. aesthetically, Evilution had larger maps with higher monster counts while Plutonia had monsters more concentrated to ambush the player mercilessly.
I had little to say about Quake the other day, because I was kind of saving it for Final Doom. I went with my grandma to Sam’s Club one night just before I was set to start 8th grade and in the computer section in the first corner of the store were displays for Quake and Final Doom. as I didn’t have internet access in 1996 I was wholly unaware of either game dropping that summer, but glancing at the box for Quake I saw this low poly creature I would learn a few months later was a Shambler. I was culturally unaware in my formative early teenage youth that the Doom engine wasn’t really 3D at all and the significance of Quake’s technical mastery was lost on me. glancing at the system requirements I knew I would be toast trying to run that game on a Pentium 75 with a mere 8 megabytes of RAM. so then I directed my attention to Final Doom, whereby I was completely mind=blown that it contained a sum total of 64 levels. I mistakenly interpreted the game as being a “Doom III” until I got it and installed Evilution first and saw doom2.exe ran it. as I mentioned before, hearing that new music definitely had me at peak sensory input.
I would wind up moving to another house early in the school year. my time playing Final Doom was thus very brief until I got something better than an IBM PC 5160. I’ll save those stories for when 1997 becomes 30 years ago though.
as of this writing, I learned last week that id Software composer Bobby Prince died. since Plutonia was a separate effort from the full TeamTNT Evilution it had no new music, recycling Prince’s Doom tracks. a Doom community effort called Plutonia MIDI Pack was released in 2013 to make it more like Evilution. if you like Sound Blaster 16 OPL3 music I encourage you listen to my Final Doom recordings and maybe peruse my other content.
