The creators of that Doom series have presented plenty of official and unofficial historical flashbacks, but these often leave out the strangest officials Doom games ever made: Doom RPG.
Even though Id Software’s official “Year of Doom” museum at E3 2019 left this 2005 game unscathed. It’s a shame, because it was a phenomenal example of Id once again proving itself as a champion in technically impressive games on a power-limited platform. And platforms are no more limited in terms of power or compatibility than the pre-iPhone wave of candy bar handsets that Doom RPG has been locked in since its original launch in the mid – 00s. You might think that “turn-based DoomSounds weird, but Doom RPG stood out as a smart and fun series twist to the first-person-shooter formula.
Its abandonment of old phones has changed thanks to GEC.inc’s reverse engineering efforts, a Costa Rica-based collective of at least three developers. On June 29, the group released a Windows port of the game based on their work on the original game’s BREW version (a Qualcomm-developed API intended for its wave of mobile phones from 2001 onwards).
Time for T9
GEC.inc’s free downloadable Windows port has no copyrighted assets and does not function without the game’s original files. (The same typically applies to other major societal initiatives that revolve around the reverse engineering of classic games.) This is where it all becomes difficult, as legitimate access to the game in 2022 is incredibly unlikely. Access requires owning a compatible mid-00’s phone on which the game was purchased, probably through an old game marketplace that no longer exists, and then extracting the game’s original files from that phone – and this presupposes that its original hardware works and has not been damaged by e.g. a slowly expanding lithium-ion battery. Id Software has never re-released the game outside of its original platforms (BREW, J2ME), presumably because EA Mobile gained a stake in the game after acquiring original publisher Jamdat Mobile.
Whether you’re among the very few who have a well-preserved, working phone with a purchased copy of the game’s BREW port, or you’ll find another way to access Doom RPG, you can dump the original game data into GEC.inc’s custom asset translation executable. Ars Technica can confirm that this process is painless and leads to almost instantaneous gameplay on Windows.
Admittedly, the port’s interface is barebones, consisting of menus that require a keyboard to select, and its incompatibility with mice and touchpads is surprising at first. It’s a hard crash back in the early 00’s to remember that, yes, this game is designed for T9 button arrays by default. Fortunately, the port plays nicely enough with Windows to make it easy to bind a Xinput gamepad via its default menus, if you prefer a gamepad (or something like Steam Deck) over the usual WASD options.
Doom RPG was certainly not the first turn-based 3D dungeon crawler, and it follows in the footsteps of 80s RPG series such as MagicInstead of swords and sorcery, this game fills your adventurous backpack with axes and shotguns. Enemy encounters take place one “action” at a time, and after you either take a single step or use a single weapon or object, each enemy in space does the same. (Turning another cardinal direction or switching weapons counts as a free action.)