I’ll be straight with you – I never played DOOM when it first came out in 1993. Hell, I barely knew what a computer was back then, let alone had money for one. I was 23, working construction in Wyoming, married young with a baby on the way, and video games weren’t even on my radar. Fast-forward to 2011, when I’m knee-deep in my retro gaming obsession and my daughter keeps telling me I absolutely have to play this old shooter called DOOM. “Dad, you can’t understand gaming history without playing DOOM,” she’d say. I kept putting it off because honestly, how good could some ancient computer game really be?
Man, was I wrong about that.
I finally downloaded a source port of DOOM onto my laptop – yeah, I know, not exactly authentic, but I wasn’t about to hunt down a 486 just to play one game. Booted it up on a Saturday morning while my coffee was still hot, figuring I’d mess around with it for twenty minutes and then get back to organizing my NES collection. Three hours later, I’m still sitting there, coffee stone cold, completely absorbed in blasting demons through the halls of some Mars research facility. My back was killing me from hunching over the laptop, but I couldn’t stop playing.
The thing that hit me immediately was the speed. I’d played plenty of modern shooters by that point – borrowed my neighbor’s Xbox to try some Call of Duty games, played around with Half-Life on Steam. Those games felt deliberate, tactical, cover-based. DOOM felt like being shot out of a cannon. Your character moves fast, enemies move fast, everything happens fast. No reloading, no cover system, no complicated weapon upgrades. Just you, a shotgun, and a hallway full of things that need shooting. It was pure in a way I hadn’t experienced in any other game.
The weapons in DOOM formed this perfect progression that made sense even to someone experiencing it eighteen years after release. Started with this wimpy pistol, found a shotgun that felt chunky and satisfying, worked my way up to a chaingun that made me feel unstoppable. Then I found the rocket launcher and accidentally killed myself with splash damage about six times before learning to aim it properly. Each weapon had weight and impact – when you fired the super shotgun, you could practically feel the kickback through your hands.
But the BFG9000… Jesus, that thing was something else. First time I picked it up, I had no idea what it did. The name suggested it was powerful, but nothing prepared me for that green ball of destruction that cleared out an entire room of enemies. I actually laughed out loud when it went off – this ridiculous, over-the-top display of digital violence that was so excessive it became funny. My upstairs neighbor probably thought I’d lost my mind, cackling at my laptop at noon on a Saturday.
What really got me was how DOOM handled exploration without holding your hand. No minimap, no objective markers, no glowing trail showing you where to go next. You had to actually pay attention to your surroundings, look for key cards, remember which doors you’d seen that needed them. I’m used to following instructions at work sites – blueprints tell you exactly what goes where. DOOM expected you to figure things out yourself, and somehow that made discovering each new area more satisfying.
The secret areas became my obsession pretty quickly. Wall textures that looked slightly different, sections that seemed too empty, suspicious dead ends – I started pushing against every wall, looking for hidden rooms. Found my first secret by accident, walked too close to what looked like a normal wall and it slid away to reveal a room full of ammo. Spent the next hour methodically checking every surface in that level. My construction background actually helped here – after twenty-plus years of looking at walls and knowing which ones are load-bearing versus decorative, I developed an eye for spotting the fake ones in DOOM.
Tried to get some of my buddies at work to understand why I was so excited about this old game. “It’s from 1993,” they’d say. “Graphics look like garbage. Why not play something modern?” Hard to explain that the graphics being simple didn’t matter when the gameplay was this tight. It’s like trying to explain why a perfectly balanced hammer from forty years ago works better than some over-engineered modern tool with unnecessary features. Good design is good design, regardless of when it was made.
The multiplayer aspect I missed entirely during DOOM’s heyday, obviously, but reading about it online made me understand how revolutionary it must have been. The idea of connecting computers over phone lines just to shoot at your friends… in 1993, that was basically science fiction to most people. I tried some modern DOOM multiplayer through those source ports, got absolutely destroyed by players who’d been perfecting their techniques for decades. Humbling experience, getting schooled by people who probably learned to play this game when I was working construction and had never heard of a “frag.”
My daughter was thrilled when I finally “got” DOOM. She’d been trying to explain its importance in gaming history, but experiencing it firsthand was different than hearing about it secondhand. We started having these conversations about game design, how DOOM influenced everything that came after it, why certain weapons felt so satisfying to use. She’d studied game design in college, could explain the technical aspects of why DOOM’s engine was impressive for its time. I just knew it felt right to play.
The modding community around DOOM was something I’d never encountered before. Thousands of people creating their own levels, sharing them freely, building on each other’s work. Coming from construction, where everyone protects their trade secrets and techniques, this collaborative approach was fascinating. Downloaded dozens of user-created levels, some professional quality, others clearly made by amateurs having fun. The variety was incredible – space stations, medieval castles, recreations of real buildings. People had been creating content for this game for nearly two decades, keeping it alive long past its commercial relevance.
Started trying to create my own levels using those editing tools. Holy hell, that was complicated. Trying to understand nodes and vertices and sector heights made my head hurt. Made a few simple rooms connected by hallways, populated them with enemies, called it a day. Nothing fancy, but seeing something I’d built running in the DOOM engine was pretty cool. Like the first time you wire up electrical in a house you’re building and flip the switch to see if it works.
The controversy around DOOM’s violence seemed overblown to me, experiencing it as an adult. Yeah, it’s violent, but it’s so cartoony and over-the-top that taking it seriously requires effort. The enemies are literal demons from hell – it’s not like you’re shooting realistic people. The blood and gore is so pixelated and abstract that calling it “realistic violence” is a stretch. But I could understand how parents in the 90s, seeing their kids absorbed in this digital carnage, might have been concerned. Context matters, and most adults weren’t gamers then.
Playing through all of DOOM’s episodes took me several weeks of evening sessions. Each episode had its own personality – the first felt like a military facility overrun by monsters, the second got weirder and more hellish, the third went completely off the rails with bizarre architecture and impossible geometry. The difficulty ramped up appropriately too. Started feeling confident and powerful, ended up getting my ass kicked by Cyberdemons and having to actually think strategically about encounters.
The sound design in DOOM was something I didn’t appreciate until I played with good headphones instead of laptop speakers. Those monster roars echoing through corridors, the mechanical chunks of doors opening, the satisfying boom of the shotgun – it created this atmosphere that simple graphics couldn’t achieve alone. You could hear enemies around corners before seeing them, use audio cues to navigate. Playing late at night with headphones made it genuinely creepy at times.
DOOM’s influence on every shooter that followed became obvious once I started exploring more retro FPS games. Played Duke Nukem 3D next, could see the DNA directly descended from DOOM but with more personality and humor. Then Quake, which felt like DOOM’s technical evolution. Even modern games owe something to DOOM’s fundamental approach – fast movement, powerful weapons, aggressive enemies that come right at you instead of hiding behind cover.
The fact that DOOM’s source code was released and people are still updating it, porting it to new platforms, adding features the original developers never imagined – that’s remarkable longevity for any piece of software. I’ve seen DOOM running on everything from calculators to digital thermostats. Someone even got it running on an old construction site surveying tool, though I’m not sure why you’d want to play DOOM on a theodolite.
Looking back, DOOM was probably the game that made me understand why people get obsessed with gaming history. It wasn’t just nostalgia or collector mentality driving the retro scene – some of these old games were genuinely better designed than modern equivalents. DOOM did more with limited technology than most current games do with unlimited resources. No cutscenes, no complex story, no tutorial levels – just perfect gameplay mechanics refined to their essence.
I keep DOOM installed on my laptop now, fire it up occasionally when I need a quick gaming fix. Twenty minutes of blasting demons through familiar corridors never gets old. It’s become my go-to example when people ask why I bother with retro games instead of just playing new stuff. DOOM proves that great game design is timeless – doesn’t matter if it’s from 1993 or 2023, fun is fun. Sometimes the old ways are still the best ways, whether you’re talking about building houses or building video games.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
