Game:

Doom RPG (2005)

Duration: 36:54

3,191 views

70

This has been a long quest. And now the journey is over. The highly elusive Doom RPG (high end BREW version) has been found, preserved, and demonstrated on this channel.

Back in 2005, when Doom RPG found the way on Java2me phones there were screenshots of this game with textured floors, ceilings and animated walls nowhere to be found in the Java version of the games. As it later became known, that version was only released in the US on BREW phones on Verizon carrier.

This version remained elusive and highly sought after (by the people who cared). It was considered lost after the discontinuation by Verizon of its Get It Now and V Cast services in 2012.

There were two BREW versions released: the "low end" was very similar to J2ME, but had some additional enhancements like digital sounds effects and some enemies were rendered in special way. "High end" version is this one, which was recently found.

I first discovered the traces of Doom RPG in 2009 on a test server of a Romanian CDMA operator Zapp which was accessible publicly from supported CDMA phones for a short period of time. Yet due to some bug the game rolled back after the download. The server became inaccessible shortly after, in 2010.

Starting 2018 several users appeared on Twitter which discovered the game on their feature phones, mainly of Motorola brand (V3C and similar). However, due to Motorola's locking the reading from the file system it was impossible to retrieve the files from the phones.

A user Anarkavre from http://doomworld.com forums discovered the game on his old Motorola V325 and published a video in 2021. Shortly after, a user on the forum which I moderate suggested that thread to me, and I could advice on possible ways to retrieve the files. The retrieval was successful.

Yet, this was not all. When I tried to run the files on my devices a bug in texture mapping was discovered. First theory was that the data file was retrieved incorrectly. That theory was finally ruled out.

Next theory was device's incompatibility. As it was discovered in the developers' interviews, Motorola phones had some quirks in storing the textures in memory, which the game developers had to overcome. Probably, due to this reason, the textures became corrupted on the other devices, including the Zeebo.

The people at http://doomworld.com forums, knowledgeable in the structure of DoomRPG were able to find and fix the bug which caused the texture corruption.

I would like to thank the people thanks to whom this video became possible:

Anarkavre from Doomworld – who found his phone and archived the files;
Erick194 from Doomworld – who found the bug in the executable and created a patch;
UsernameAK and PROPHESSOR from Doomworld – who ruled out the version that the files were retrieved incorrectly by unpacking and verifying the textures;
forlorn from Doomworld – for researching and providing extensive information on history of development of Doom RPG and eventual reasons of the bug.

The game is demonstrated on the Zeebo console and upscaled to 960x720.

Download files: https://archive.org/details/doomrpg_brew

Finally, this video is an occasion to celebrate that thirty years ago, on 1 February 1991, Id Software LLC was founded.

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