A multitude of consoles and PCs reside in my gaming den, each cherished in its own way. But there is one that I hold in higher esteem, one that I see as a pioneer, that I keep on a bit of a pedestal: Doom. No, not the 2005 movie that some people insist is underrated (it isn’t). I’m talking about the 1993 PC game that essentially birthed the first-person shooter, the one that let the demons of Mars loose on your space-marine ass. You know the one. Countless titles have, for better or worse, followed its influential lead. Reflecting on my own experience with the game, in particular, I can see this.
Gaming’s New Wave: The Oncoming Revolution
The first time I came into contact with Doom is still fresh in my memory. It was the mid-’90s, and I was hanging out with my buddy Mike. Of all my friends, Mike has always been the one most up-to-date with tech and the one who always had the newest, most mind-bending games just as they were hitting the market. On this day, he led me into a room and set me down in front of a state-of-the-art computer and said, “Get ready. This is really going to change the way you look at stuff.”
We moved down to the basement, where his computer was. There, in the corner, was where it all went down. The basement smelled like a real one—damp, opportunity for mold but with a lot less of it than if we were in a real old house somewhere. Which, considering when “tomorrow” was, was a well-founded thought. Mike, being a man of action, called tomorrow. That would mean today but, of course, in this instance, when we’re looking back at it, tomorrow. Mike was also a man of vast impatience. He turned on the computer. He half-bathed in the glow of the screen (more on the side of the screen, since he was in the corner, with the eaves partaking of bat droppings). On the screen was the very dramatic, very red, very iconic word: Doom.
When Mike got the lead character through the first stage of the 3D adventure, my heart pounded with the kind of excitement that almost made me dizzy. This game, obviously, was going to rock. Its forward-moving action felt lightning fast compared to what I was used to. The right kind of beats in the constantly playing soundtrack amplified my speed-reading of its story. But what really felt intense was the shiny art of grating up bad guys—shiny even with their gore—and that almost around-the-clock gory detail popping up in the story. This game was definitely as “in your face” as FaceBreaker’s Facebook.
The subsequent weeks turned into a frenzy of desperate savings and intricate plotting to secure my personal copy of Doom. Once I had taken the plunge, the pay-off was huge. This was no ordinary first-person shooter. It was a technical marvel that gave me an experience I found far more compelling than the top-down or side-scrolling games I had known before. The creepy detail of each level was matched by the speed and smoothness with which the hero (myself!) moved through them. Doom was this unbelievably intense, near-constant thrill ride. And I could play it on my aging, inherited Mac!
Gameplay That Envelops the Player, Design That Shatters Conventions
The real trailblazer for Doom was not its story or its characters. They served as window dressing in the confusing, corridors-of-hell stage play. Doom became genuinely memorable because of its gameplay, which I’d say was divided into three parts, and because no one had done those three things together quite so well in a first-person shooter up to that point.
You had your run-and-gun: for much of the Doom levels, you charged around, going wherever you needed to go, living in Mom’s basement-a-go-go.
Finding secret rooms in Doom was one of the high points of playing the game for me. They were there; they just weren’t flagged as secret areas like they were in “Wolfenstein 3D.” And they were exciting. Inside a secret room, you might find ammo, health, or “armor bonuses” in the form of the harmless spheres of energy found in the game. Or you might find a powerful weapon, such as the perfectly named BFG 9000. Once secrets were found, they begged to be found again. And they gave huge boosts to finishing a level with a big smile on your face. In my case, the secret areas in Doom were a secret I shared with my favorite toy’s level of surprises.
The weapon system in Doom was another facet that made the game stand out. Every blast from the shotgun was deeply satisfying, and using the chain gun felt like shredding guitar on a speed metal record. The Super Shotgun from Doom II is still my favorite two-trigger pull in gaming. But the thing that made the arsenal in Doom feel truly transcendent was the BFG 9000, so named because it was a “Big, Bleeping Gun” of room-clearing power. This is the stuff legends are made of.
Doom has enemies that are now seen as being just as classic and influential as the game itself. The title is known for its impressively large bestiary of fearsome opponents, but when one thinks of the most impressive, three come to mind: the Imp, the Baron of Hell, and the Cyberdemon. To Doom players old and new, these hellspawn are the most iconic enemies in the game, and they’re also the most fun to fight and defeat.
Yet, it was not only the quality of play that rendered Doom a masterwork but also its astonishing textures of mood and atmosphere. The dark environments of the game were indeed foreboding, and they were filled with an extraordinarily fine level of detail. The game seemed to relish the space and depth of these lightless places, giving a full three-dimensionality to its fiendish level design and then filling that space with demonic enemies. Meanwhile, the limited palette of moody colors, such as the reds, blues, and grays seen here, gave the whole experience a kind of visual edge that pushed the game even further into a zone of pure terror.
The Birth of a Movement: Community and Modding
The way “Doom” affected the gaming community was a distinctly positive development in terms of the overall health of that community. The move “Doom” made into the open-source space in 1993 was revolutionary in the game industry, and so, by logical extension, was the release of a community of modders with the tools needed to alter the game in fundamental ways.
The thrill of downloading custom levels from the internet is still fresh in my memory. Each level felt like it was a new, totally unique experience. Some of them were just straight-up levels with really intense combat and enemy placements that really made you think. Other levels were more experimental. These were the kinds of levels that tested the limits of what was possible in DOOM’s engine. Both the core levels and the custom levels gave the game a virtually infinite playable lifespan. Not only could you play the game for hours on end, but you could also have a different experience each time you played it.
“Aliens TC” remains unforgettable for me. It was a top-to-bottom reimagining of Doom that introduced an astonishing number of new assets, from the tunes played to the kinds of enemies faced. It could completely convince you that you were leading some sort of security force in an “Aliens” movie. Even though Doom guy had no lines, the character was very obviously trapped in the sort of labyrinthine emergency that broke out in the sort of films these games emulated.
The modding scene helped popularize the “WAD” file, a custom level or modification for the game that had endless possibilities for those creating them. Not long after the game’s release, WADs were everywhere. Dedicated websites served as hosts for these fan-made projects. Lead programmer John Carmack may be remembered years from now as much for what people were able to do with his tools and the Doom engine as for his own games. Carmack and Enemy Territory director Paul Wedgwood understand this phenomenon, and it’s what they chase when they talk about mod tools in Rage.
Doom has an enormous effect on the modding scene. Much can be said about how, looking back now, it was the game that laid the groundwork for what being a modder means today. Id Software’s first-person shooter has inspired game developers ever since to include modding tools and support within their games. With a few exceptions, these include most of the top games that you could say there are: Half-Life, The Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft spring immediately to mind. The mods made for Doom are still famous; was there even a modding scene before Doom? Modding for games is almost as old as games themselves. Countless fans have made countless mods; not only has the game inspired reams of custom content, but also, a game can potentially be much more than the sum of its parts.
The Impact and Enduring Presence in the FPS Genre
The effect of Doom on the first-person shooter genre is deep and widespread. The first-person shooter wasn’t popular before Doom, with games like Wolfenstein 3D doing some early trail-blazing but not gaining much general recognition. Doom changed that; after id Software’s 1993 lightning strike, the genre achieved a rapid induction into the video game hall of fame and has now settled into the medium’s general consciousness.
The multiplayer mode of Doom holds its place in history as the first to introduce “deathmatch,” a competitive mode in which players fight each other in speedy and frenzied combat. This was a big deal. Previous games, like “MIDI Maze” (1987) and “Faceball 2000” (1991), had experimented with the concept; but Doom was the first to offer such a mode within the context of a first-person shooter. Doom redefined the formal elements of the first-person shooter, and it built upon the medium in such a way that it effectively carved Doom and its descendants into an all-new sub-genre of gaming.
Designers of future first-person shooter games were surely influenced by Doom but what they took from it was more than just the basic engine. What they also took was a way of designing levels that made them much more than simple mazes or linear paths to an endpoint. What they took was the way they managed pack behavior and made it possible to underestimate, fear, and—unless played skillfully—die at their hands.
The potential of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre as a narrative, storytelling medium found itself proven in the spectacular success of Doom. It was a really primitive model of narrative, but it is one of the seminal games in a genre that has metastasized and is now trying everywhere to tell you a story one way or another. At the time, the appeal of the game was two things: that it was fun and that it had sucked the player in. Making the protagonist of the story the one to whom bad-ass things were always happening and the amazing world that was being built around you.
When one looks back on the legacy of Doom, it is evident that the game marked a turning point in video game history. This was no ordinary game; it was a happening, a cultural phenomenon that used a digital medium to tell a story that could be told in no other way. (And what better way to immerse the audience in your story than to let it be inhabited by the very tellers of that story: 2.5D sprites of the game’s designers, animators, and sound artists?) For many of the now-grownups who led the charge into the next millennium in service of the gaming medium (some of whom will read these very lines), the hugely influential Doom was the first game you could almost literally smell the sweat of the designers emanating from.
When I think back on my time with Doom, I get a really deep feeling of nostalgia and thankfulness. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve played a lot of video games across practically every genre, but “Doom” holds a very special place in my heart. It was a game I was obsessed with in the best possible way. It was a game I could not—and did not want to—put down for a very long time. It was also the game that showed me what video games could be.
Doom was not just a game; it completely changed the game. In 1993, developer id Software was light years ahead of the first-person shooter (FPS) competition when it came to understanding the possibilities of the genre. The creators of Doom made it something far more vibrant and vital than anything seen before, and in doing so, they became the first digital architects of a legacy that got passed down through the two and a half decades since the Doom era started.
To me, Doom signifies a time in my youth when each new day promised thrilling opportunities waiting to be explored. Its arrival in 1993 and 1994 was like appending the next frontier in the history of a pastime that, to today’s agile minds accustomed to the ingenious narrative-mechanical puzzles of Portal, might be impossible to understand as far as just how much it meant to us in its blood-sprayed, MIDI-backed, endlessly-engineered-creativity day. To winter break, the early days of 1994 were a deep Depression-era time. Doom belonged to us like the most free and capable automobile belonged to those of past eras.
Here’s a toast to Doom, the game that launched the first-generation experience. It was wild and jam-packed with nonstop action, thrilling its players by challenging them in ways that were unheard of at that time. And to those of us who reveled in those better, brighter, more frantic moments: Let’s keep celebrating the powerful spells that games of all sorts can cast on their players.
