Top 5 Innovations of DOOM (1993) - #4: Ambient Lighting

When DOOM first arrived in 1993, it was unlike anything gamers had played before – so much so that for a considerable period after its release, first-person shooters were simply known as “DOOM clones.”

Picking just five of its most significant contributions to gaming is tough, but we’re going to do our best.

4. Ambient Lighting

So much of what DOOM did in 1993 is taken for granted today. Take, for example, dynamic lighting: the practice of changing lighting levels, colors, and coverage over time or across locations. If a game came out today without dynamic lighting it would look positively bizarre; even most retro-themed, pixel-art indie games use varied light sources extensively.

This wasn’t the case before DOOM. Sure, some adventure and role-playing games might simulate light sources in static scenes, but for the few games with the freedom of movement DOOM provided, dynamic lighting was generally seen as laughably unattainable. Even DOOM’s predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D, could only manage uniformly lit rooms at the time.

But of course, you can’t have a game built around the idea of slaughtering demons without adding a bit of mood lighting. Part of the achievement of the DOOM engine was the way it simulated dynamic lighting. This was done via the relatively simple method of assigning lighting characteristics to each sector (that is, each individual block of a level) which then allowed designers to cleverly alter lighting as the player moved through the level. Once this technique was seen in motion, games would never look the same.