Doom · Sybex · 1994 · Jonathan Mendoza
Jonathan Mendoza's 1994 guide to the original Doom, published by Sybex — one of several books that appeared that year as Doom turned from a shareware hit into a publishing category of its own.
Doom was released by id Software in December 1993, with its first episode distributed as shareware. Its maze-like levels were full of secret doors and hidden areas, and within months a small industry of printed guides appeared to map them. The guide to the original game was Official Doom Survivor's Strategies & Secrets, written by Jonathan Mendoza and published by Sybex in 1994. It sat alongside other guides from the same year: Prima Publishing released Rick Barba's Doom Battlebook, and when Doom II followed in 1994, Prima published Ed Dille's Doom II: The Official Strategy Guide. The number of competing books reflects how quickly Doom grew beyond its shareware origins. Printed maps and secret locations were the main way most players found everything in a level before the web made such information universal — and Doom's secrets, from hidden rooms to the cheat codes passed around by players, made it unusually well suited to the format.
One of the first printed guides to Doom, part of a wave of books that followed the game's shareware success in 1994.
Doom's levels rewarded exploration: secret walls, hidden switches and areas most players never found on their own. That made it a natural subject for printed guides, and within a year of release several publishers had competing books on shelves — a sign of how far a game distributed largely as free shareware had travelled.