Gaming Hacks

Put Your Face in DOOM

Increase the immersiveness of id’s classic FPS by replacing the space marine’s pictures with your own.

id Software’s groundbreaking DOOM almost singlehandedly created the modern FPS genre. With style oozing from every crevice, a near-infinite amount of customizability, and an open source codebase, it’s no wonder that people still play variants such as PrBoom (http://prboom.sourceforge.net/).

As any dedicated modder will tell you, half the fun is in making your own fun. Earlier games were also hackable, but DOOM was unique in encouraging gamers to add their own maps, weapons, and graphics. Since it was a pre-Windows pioneer, the tools aren’t very user-friendly, but they exist and work with a little prodding.

Creating your own maps is a lot of work, but it’s much easier to replace individual graphics. One good way to start is to change the picture of your character in the game’s status bar.

Finding DOOM

Start by downloading PrBoom or an equivalent. PrBoom is nice in that it supports Windows and Linux equally well. Windows installation is as easy as downloading the latest Windows ZIP archive (2.2.4 at the time of writing) and unzipping it into an appropriate directory.

If you have the registered version of DOOM somewhere,^[17] copy its .wad files into the PrBoom directory. Otherwise, look for a file called doom1.wad online. This is the shareware version.

How WADs Work

DOOM stores all its maps, images, and sounds in WAD files. There are two types. IWADs are the original ...