I was very young when Doom came out but it’s the first video game I ever played. I have many a fond memory of playing co-op with my uncles or just loading up maps with all the monsters removed and exploring every corner, trying to see the entirety of the game.
In like '94, my uncle bought a cd that advertised ONE THOUSAND WADS including a bunch that swapped out the monster sprites with all kinds of goofy junk (I remember that barney the dinosaur was on the sleeve the cd came in, I guess BarneyDoom was a big deal in 94)
So, for me, doom became a game where anything was possible only a couple years after it came out. And that hasn’t really changed since. Doom is linked to things like D&D for me, where the very best work people put out is unofficial, unsanctioned, and far weirder than the source material, but it is in essence its own creative medium. Doom is a game that invited people to become artists themselves.
Katamari Damacy is wonderful (and I voted for it the first time around) but it doesn’t (couldn’t) foster a creative community in that way. Seeing so much Doom dislike has only encouraged me to vote for Doom this time.
Anyway, I loved the idea I had of what mortal kombat was like in my head, but when I finally played it as a kid I thought it was garbage. Don’t see the connection at all to Doom
Doom came out for MS-DOS on December 10, 1993 which just also happened to be my birthday. I turned 9 that year. I didn’t have a Doom themed party or anything. I wasn’t hype for it or even aware that it was in development. My dad was into computers and we’d played Keen and Wolf3D and other PC games (along with the NES) so he was at least plugged in enough to know about Doom and pick it up in early 1994.
Seeing id software’s previous output I was aware that I was witnessing huge technological advances in real time. There was kind of an element of future shock and with its sequel and Quake and the rest of polygonal 3D gaming it set huge expectations in our generations for what to expect in terms of improvements to graphics rendering tech.
And it all worked because the game was actually fun in itself in addition to being all fancy and new and mind boggling to amateur programmers and such. It is literally alive and immortal because it was purposely designed to outlive it’s creators and continue growing and improving itself. The closest comparison these days for what Doom was like at the time is something like Roblox but I don’t recall anyone nominating that one. Besides Roblox is only possible because Doom literally invented online multiplayer and was such a big piece of the confluence of events that came together to make Roblox possible in the first place.
Katamari Damacy came out in North America September 21, 2004. Couple months shy of my 20th birthday. I heard about it on insert credit and was hype and played it when it came out. I love it. It’s a great game with a killer soundtrack. Like Doom it also embodies it’s own kind of outsider ethos in that it’s creator designed playgrounds instead of video games and the people making most of the objects you pick up were game design students learning their trade and craft, all financed by an international corporation that understood the value of experimentation despite the risks.
But next to Doom it’s a flash in the pan. Doom is the fire under the pan.
I don’t think I ever played through all of Doom or Doom II. I definitely had the shareware ep of Doom 1 and the full version of Doom II, but I think after beating the first set of levels in Doom II I messed around with level skip codes or something to check out the last level. I recall it just being an absolutely absurd number of high level demons and such that I could barely even tackle with god mode and it basically having the same effect as seeing the final boss in a Cave shooter “I don’t believe this is possible for an actual human to complete” deal and sorta lost interest in it as what’s the point if it isn’t actually possible?
That was well over twenty years ago and aside from the demo for the new Doom I don’t think I’ve played a Doom game since. People here all these years later seem to really like it which legit surprised me and I still have the cd for Doom II… but I hit the same point of “why bother starting it if I can’t finish it”.
I generally have no interest in FPS games that came after Doom, other than an occasional outlier such as Metroid Prime or Portal, but in recent months I’ve been playing Doom again occasionally on the PS4 and I still like it.
When Doom was brand new and I didn’t have a computer that could run it, I discovered that someone had installed it on a showcase computer in the electronics section at the store where my mother shopped. I played it quite a bit there and I remember how transgressive the chainsaw felt at the time.
I remember we played the shareware episode of Doom. Probably why it’s my favorite episode or at least the one I’m the most familiar with.
But then I also loved how Doom II was basically the same game but now the shotgun had two barrels. A super shotgun. It was disappointing that Doom 3 didn’t have a super super shotgun that was basically a triple barrel shotgun that had the barrels mounted in a tripod configuration like the super nailgun in Quake and instead of shot they fired big heavy slugs or bolts (and also shot depending on some kind of pickup or control setting).
i remember tweaking every setting the ports will let you touch (starting with disabling headbob) but doom is still a challenge for me to look at let alone play. i can’t remember having that problem with anything else so obviously it reflects more on the game than me
was thinking about the posts here and it made me realize i don’t care about the legacy of a thing at all. like, i think it’s interesting but i don’t necessarily care about it in relation to the thing itself.
so like, when someone (rightfully) says that doom is still being used as a tool for creative expression today, and that this is important in judging doom, it’s hard for me to understand. i think my attitude is that “people will do cool shit with whatever tools are available to them, which doesn’t necessarily say anything about the tools.”
anyway just an interesting thing! i actually value Katamari partially because its legacy is mostly stupid. it adds more to the original object to me because nothing has been able to match up to it in a meaningful way. i don’t think it’s wrong to value doom because its legacy is so important, i just don’t.
my post contradicts itself i just realized. I do care about legacy: if there is a long legacy of improvements to something, it devalues the original to me somehow. Halo 1 is less interesting because every FPS stole its best mechanics - it was cooler when there was not much like it out there. Doom has some of that as well, although it’s still a pretty singular object and much of its true legacy (the stuff that wasn’t stolen by every other FPS) is still trapped within the Doom ecosystem.
Anyway now i’m just rambling because I don’t want to work.
Getting past the first episode in Doom made me rly appreciate the game. The Romero levels r so precise & elegantly constructed that the offhandedness with which the second episode rapidly shifts aesthetic and style is almost a shock. Especially when u get to E2M2 and u have this level that sort of spools out from the E1 aesthetic into this mishmash warehouse dungeon. I love the way in which each episode feels like you are encountering a new voice that has it’s own way of interpreting the base elements of the Doom engine.
The fact that there was overlapping work and it’s not totally segmented makes the tone feel consistent but the strength of individual styles is so good at disorienting or throwing you off any assumed rhythm. The mostly Sandy Peterson levels at the end (ignoring E4) r such a perfect fit for the tone of descending into hell, u get the most egregious Looney Tunes style traps & turns that feel distinctly mean & miles away from the fair puzzleboxes of the start.
I feel like, at least for me, the continued culture around making Doom levels makes so much sense and seems so appealing because it’s almost impossible not to read authorial voices into the structure of Doom. To see personalities emerge from the way the episodes r structured around different creators & to think how your own voice would differ with easy access to the same tools. I truly appreciate that it feels human and social
yeah like prob 80% of my Doom obsession began with that second episode of Doom 1 in particular (and a handful of levels in E3… E3M3, E3M6, E3M7 etc) so it’s kinda sad most people only know the shareware episode. there’s a reason E2M2 got voted as the best Doom level on Doomworld a handful of years back. also Tom Hall is and will always be one of my favorite game designers. some of his other work (esp in like Rise of the Triad) has finally got more credit in recent years, which is fun to see.
and of course i like Doom 2 as well but i find it more spotty in terms of level design. it is more of the action/combat first game that Doom 1’s sprawly surrealness doesn’t have as much of.
