At this stage, hearing the words “someone got Doom running on…” should hold no power over us. Id software’s 1993 classic can run on basically anything with a screen. But we still collectively lose our minds when someone comes up with a novel method to deliver the Doom Marine to us.
This week, Jackson Clayton, a software developer, managed to get Doom running inside Fortnite. A game within a game.
But can #Fortnite run DOOM?
Obviously I can't publish this, but it was a great way to learn more about Materials and PostProcessing in #UEFN #FortniteCreative pic.twitter.com/POlf4obJlm
— Jackson Clayton (@JKClayton_FN) July 7, 2024
The way Doom has been incorporated into Fortnite is clever. It looks like the player character is in the iconic opening level in Doom, E1M1, until they hop out a window and start building Fortnite structures – no word on if they can stop the onslaught of hell.
Clayton talked about his ingenious methods with Kotaku. He started by opening E1M1 in the Ultimate Doom Builder level editor and exporting the entire level as a 3D model.
He then used the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, an Unreal Engine app that allows users to design, develop, and publish content into Fortnite, to bring the iconic first level of Doom into the modern battle royale game.
A lot of the work was in getting the look just right after importing the model: “It was mostly removing Unreal’s fancy effects to make everything unlit and unfiltered,” said Clayton. “I used Unreal’s material system to give the Doom Marine [sprite its] choppy spinning effect, and a PostProcess material to pixellate the screen and show the gun.”
Because Doom’s code was made open source by id Software in 1997, many of the ‘Doom on a blank’ stories involve getting the 31-year-old software running on whatever outlandish device the dev wants. However, Clayton states that UEFN is “too high-level” to simply run Doom in, leading to the creative result he shared on X.
As for what inspired him, Clayton had an age-old motivation: fooling his friends. “I wanted to put together a video to trick my friends, so I ported the map and created the post-process materials, and they really liked it,” he said. They then encouraged him to post it on X, where it quickly went viral. There’s nothing gaming social media likes more than a new and novel ‘you’ll never guess what they got Doom running on this time’ story.
People are still working on restoring decades-old Doom abandonware and new high-octane Doom action continues apace, with a new (medieval-themed) game in the franchise expected as soon as next year.
Featured image credit: Epic Games/id Software
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