Apocalypse #11: Doom (1993)
30 years of simulated murder
Initial release: December 10, 1993
Platform: DOS, many, many, *many* ports
Developer: id Software
Thirty years ago today, a group of guys who liked heavy metal and cats uploaded a game they made to the file server at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Within seconds, the university’s entire network crashed under the strain of trying to accommodate ten thousand people all trying to download the game at once. Doom had come to the world, and video games were never the same again.
In the annals of early to mid 90s PC gaming, id Software was king. Their early stuff — like the cute platformer Commander Keen or the early first person shooter Wolfenstein 3D — made them famous. But Doom would make them rich. Fast-paced and hyper-violent, Doom was an addictive, heady mix of heavy metal, science fiction horror and copious gore. It outraged moral guardians and enthralled even people who didn’t really play games. It was among the number of games effectively put on trial during the 1994 United States Senate hearings that would eventually result in the founding of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, a collection of the most deadpan people on Earth whose job it is to look at video game footage and tell you if it’s appropriate for children or not.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled over this game over the last 30 years, and no doubt we’ll see more in the mainstream gaming press. But for me, I can only really talk about my experience with it. My first time playing Doom was at a neighbor’s house. Mr. Closson was usually gone during the day but his wife would let me sneak over and play games on his computer in the basement. He had stuff like SimCity, Iron Helix, and eventually Wolfenstein 3D. This latter one he told me was not for kids, but he didn’t really protest when I played it. Nor did he do much more than shrug his shoulders when I came over one day and he had the shareware episode of Doom. I was immediately enthralled, but the (at the time) extreme violence and the demonic enemies meant I could never, ever let my religious fundamentalist mom see this. (We’re talking about a person who wouldn’t let me rent Marble Madness for the NES because she misheard the title as Marble Magic and decided it was devil worship.)
After acquiring a copy for myself, I played Doom’s shareware episode on my own computer off and on over the next few years, mixed in with Doom 64, Duke Nukem 3D (and its Nintendo 64 port), Half-Life, and the full version of Quake, which was a gift from a friend of my mom’s and to this day I’m confused as to why he did that, as it seemed to be a gift to my mother who subsequently passed it on to me. Not having heard of software piracy, my only experience with the second episode of Doom for most of the 1990s was the Super Nintendo port of the game; I never actually owned a legal copy of the PC version until I bought it off Steam about a decade ago. I did, however, own Doom II, my mom randomly — and inattentively — picking it up for me for $15 around the turn of the millennium when I found a budget release of the game at a department store. And while I played the shit out of that, of course, plus the zillion user-made addons that required it, Doom 1 remained tantalizingly out of reach for a little while longer.
I’ve played a lot of shooters over the years. While I find myself always eventually returning to Duke Nukem 3D, it was Doom that captured my heart first, and it’s Doom — and its extraordinary legacy — that most defines everything that came after it. From humble beginnings with a nascent fandom that lived on Usenet to the source port GZDoom taking its place as a viable option for commercial games like Selaco, Doom has always been a reflection of — and an influence on — the broader first person shooter universe. Doom deathmatch was a violent form of laser tag you could play at home, laying the groundwork for the likes of Quake. Early megawads reflected the influence of Quake and Quake II (especially apparent in the Gothic Deathmatch series and The Darkening 2, respectively.) Doom 3, the unfairly maligned middle child, showed the influence of Half-Life and System Shock 2. And the Doom 2016/Eternal reboot has been a love letter to not just its predecessors, but to the entire genre and id Software’s history.
In a way, Doom has become a sort of rite of passage for computer engineering over the years. We’ve all seen the memes about running Doom on everything from calculators to pregnancy tests. It’s seen a billion ports, official and otherwise; back in the wild and woolly days of console ports, Doom was ported to almost every contemporary console under the sun. The Super Nintendo version is a technical marvel even if the port itself isn’t very good; the Sega 32X version by comparison has no redeeming qualities. The Panasonic 3DO version — widely regarded as the worst port, and published by Art Data Interactive — is mostly interesting as a historical curiosity, developed in ten weeks almost entirely by industry legend Rebecca Heineman, who had to scramble to get it done because Randy Scott, CEO for Art Data Interactive and all-around piece of shit, made a lot of promises that simply couldn’t be kept. Not having the time to rewrite the music engine, Heineman simply hired Scott’s church band to play some covers of the music and wrote a simple engine that played back the audio stream from the disc, and most people agree that the live-band covers are the one thing the port has going for it. The Atari Jaguar version, meanwhile, is probably the most important console release of the 90s. While like most every other console port, it is markedly inferior to the original, even outright lacking music entirely, it was mostly developed by id Software’s coding wizard, John Carmack himself; it also serves as the basis for most of the following console ports, which is why so many of them use the Jaguar version’s simplified level geometry even on platforms that could theoretically handle more detail, such as the PlayStation version, which otherwise made up for it with colored lighting, re-done sound effects and a dark ambient score for a drastically different, scarier atmosphere.
(The Jaguar version also had the best commercial.)
Doom doesn’t really have much of a storyline, nor does it need one. What’s there is rudimentary and mostly told in the manual, a remnant of the expansive universe erstwhile id Software founder Tom Hall tried to build before most of his ideas were scrapped in favor of a lean-n’-mean arcade shooter. Doom is a story of the future, and it goes a little something like this: you’re a Marine, a real tough hombre, reassigned to Mars as punishment for assaulting a superior officer who ordered you to fire on civilians. Your posting on Mars is run by the Union Aerospace Corporation, a military contractor currently involved in teleportation experiments. One day the shit hits the fan and the distress signal from UAC’s base on the moon of Phobos is pretty concerning, while Deimos just vanishes right out of the sky. You and your team are dispatched to Phobos to investigate, with you establishing a perimeter while the others head inside. What you hear on the comms isn’t good, and when all goes silent, you realize it’s up to you, so you cock your pistol and head on in. The rest of the story is told at the end of each of the three episodes the game presents, the episodic structure an artifact of the shareware days of PC gaming, something that wouldn’t really go away until around 1997 or 1998 when the PC became a popular enough gaming platform to have its own space in the retail market.
Doom is scary. While most of the shareware episode, charmingly titled “Knee Deep in the Dead,” is straightforward, with its cloudy sky casting rheumy daylight on a gloomy complex of concrete and steel, I remember as a child being scared out of my mind on the last level, with the two bruisers waiting for me at the top of the elevator. I did eventually conquer my fear, and subsequently the bosses, but I was taken aback by the nihilistic ending, of stepping on a sinister pentagram and being teleported into a dark room where you’re immediately torn apart by monsters. The second episode, titled “The Shores of Hell,” ups the ante a bit by having you explore a laboratory complex, previously mysteriously disappeared into thin air, and which seems to be slowly converting into something more familiar to the hellish denizens who now occupy it: brick and stone and flame, with more dark rooms and twisty mazes being lurked in by the game’s mid-tier heavy hitters, including the bruisers’ relatives. The third episode, “Inferno,” takes things to their logical conclusion as you take the fight to Hell itself, stepping through fields of innards and wading through seas of blood as hordes of monsters hunt you down. The Cyberdemon, the hulking, lethal monstrosity that occupies the boss level of the second episode, makes a return in a select spot here for the express purpose of scaring you shitless. And over all of this is a MIDI soundtrack that bounces between the thump and grind of heavy metal and moody ambient pieces, each track striking its own tone for the level. The iconic theme for Doom’s first level is a sort of Metallica salad, bits and pieces of random riffs thrown together for a level that is short and quick — only for the next level to be a much larger outing, with the music slowing down appropriately. This frequent tonal contrast is a defining element of the game for me, the kind of thing that drew me to Duke Nukem 3D with its cartoon protagonist and parody porno vibe slathered in a moody, apocalyptic aesthetic, and it’s something that I dearly miss in the newer Doom games.
Compared to the later games in the Classic Doom canon (that is, Doom II, Final Doom and Doom 64,) Doom ’93 is a more sedate, slow-paced game. The followup would introduce an expanded bestiary, but Doom 1 is relatively lacking in mid-tier enemies. There’s plenty of gun-toting zombies and fireball-tossing leathery brown imps to soak up your ammunition; less common are the big pink musclebound bastards, melee-focused and who for some reason get the capital-D Demon moniker (as if the rest of the cast aren’t demonic themselves) but are more affectionately called pinkies, often appearing in groups to overwhelm the player, taking twice again as much punishment over the lower-tier trash, but finding the chainsaw will make short work of them and their half-invisible spectre brethren. These make up the entirety of the forces you fight in the first episode, the rest are shareware-gated. Episode two introduces us to the lost soul, a flying, flaming skull with a simple charge attack; more dangerous is the iconic cacodemon, a cyclopean floating ball of gas and red flesh that belches ball lightning at you. The upper end of the mid-tier is the monstrous satyr known as the Baron of Hell, first appearing as a twin pair of bosses at the end of the first episode only to return as a recurring threat in later episodes. The Barons are by far the greatest threat you’ll face for most of the game, as while they’re slow, they hit hard, and they go down even harder. It takes between five and six rockets to the face to put them down, which is more than double what’s needed for the rest, even the caco. At the upper tier are the two biggest bastards: the Cyberdemon and the Spiderdemon Mastermind. The former is a twenty-foot-tall hulking cyborg minotaur that can splatter you with just one rocket to the face; the latter is an angry alien brain of sorts piloting a four-legged mobile weapon platform that can turn you into Swiss cheese in an instant. What’s interesting to me is the biomechanical theme of these two enemies compared to the more naturalistic bent of the rest of the cast; it has implications for what Hell’s ultimate goals are, and is also an early indicator of a recurring theme of bloody cybernetics that id Software would return to repeatedly over the coming decades.
With such an array of terrifying enemies, your arsenal feels curiously low-key, even antique, in comparison. You start out with just your pistol and some brass knuckles; punching your enemies is a dicey proposition on all but the weakest fodder unless you get your hands on a chainsaw, which is useful on monsters that flinch easily, or a berserk pack, which dramatically boosts your melee damage. The pistol is a classic example of a great weapon to get a better one with, though it does have some very limited usefulness at extreme distances thanks to its high accuracy. The shotgun will be your workhorse for much of the game, pumping out a steady beat of high damage with plentiful ammo to keep it fed. The chaingun — basically a rotary cannon and a holdover from Wolfenstein 3D — is an improvement over the pistol, achieving accuracy through superior firepower, but it’s mostly useful as a backup to the shotgun. The rocket launcher will be perpetually underfed but it makes for a fantastic room clearer as well as helping delete those pesky barons, just mind you don’t blow yourself up in the process. The final two weapons, the first of which you only get in episode two and the latter being only available in the third episode, are reminders that this is, technically, a science fiction setting, with the plasma rifle spewing out a firehose of plasma balls to melt your enemies with, and the BFG 9000 (don’t ask what the acronym means) launching a single massive plasma ball that, through some complicated and slightly unreliable trickery, will do terrific damage to every enemy in sight.
In addition to the arsenal you’ll encounter a small array of powerups; the aforementioned berserk pack lasts until you exit the level despite a common misconception that the effect fades along with the red filter it places over your vision. Also laying around are light amplification goggles, which turn everything fullbright (some ports like GZDoom restore the green night-vision tint that was originally intended during development;) backpacks that permanently double your ammo limit (at least the first one you pick up, the rest just give you ammo;) radiation suits that last a short time and allow you to walk on most damaging surfaces; and a device that fills out your automap for the level. There are also more supernatural tools at your disposal, giving you temporary powers like invulnerability (which also turns everything inverse monochrome,) partial invisibility (basically rendering your weapon sprite that same fuzzy blob as spectres while making enemies randomly shoot to one side of you or another, which can actually be dangerous if you’re used to constantly bobbing and weaving;) and the supercharge, a strange glowing blue sphere with a ghostly face that gives you an instant 100% health on top of what you already have, up to a maximum of 200%. You’ll also find armor in green and blue flavors, offering up to 100% and 200% armor respectively, though the actual damage reduced is increased on the blue armor, which means that it’s sometimes more strategic, if your blue armor percentage is low, to leave green armor until your blue armor is further depleted. There’s also the mysterious health and armor bonus items, which each boost your percentages by 1, even over the soft cap of 100%, but the provenance of which is unclear.
Being a (pseudo) 3D game made in the early 90s, with a dedicated arcade focus, Doom’s level design is that same abstraction that pervades most shooters of the era. You won’t find much in the way of anything that looks like a realistic habitable space; regardless of which of the three designers were at the helm, there’s a liminal quality to the level design with its blocky rooms, vaguely “computer lab” setpieces, and the occasional very rare sense that a room was supposed to represent something in particular. Each of the mappers, John Romero, Tom Hall and Sandy Petersen, bring their own distinct styles, though on the levels on which they collaborated it’s not always easy to tell who contributed what. Romero’s level design, which makes up the bulk of the first episode, is defined by relatively open spaces, and frequent contrasts in lighting, height variation and texture use. There’s a sense of mystery to exterior areas (especially once you realize that you can go outside in some spots) and Romero’s maps frequently loop in on themselves or require backtracking in a survival horror fashion. Given that this is the shareware episode, you’ll be facing low-level trash throughout, mostly hordes of zombies whose hitscan weaponry can make them dangerous in groups. Episode two is largely Tom Hall, and it shows, as he tends to fall back on his ideas for making realistic military bases and other installations, resulting in levels that are by and large quite flat. Despite this quality, it’s under Tom Hall that the aesthetic approaches anything resembling realistic, with crate mazes and secret labs, setting the earliest precedent possible for what would become “Russian realism” (see the likes of B0S Clan’s Sacrament mod and especially the various incarnations of Lainos’ Doxylamine Moon) and Doomcute, using level geometry to recreate real-world furniture and other items. Episode three is Sandy Petersen’s show: Hell is ugly, confusing, divorced from anything realistic, full of tricks and traps. Various techbase elements speak to the somewhat disordered development, but in-universe might be suggested to be parts of the Deimos lab subsumed by Satan’s dimension.
You should play Doom. Whether you’re a newcomer to the series looking to explore the old classics that made the shooter genre what it is, or a veteran of the 2016 reboot duology looking to explore the franchise’s history, Doom is a fantastic game. While the abstract level geometry might be off-putting to some — and I won’t lie, I get tired of it myself — the superb use of lighting and the overall liminal atmosphere, combined with straightforward, small-scale but high-intensity combat scenarios, provide a powerful action horror experience years before the likes of Resident Evil 4, Left 4 Dead, or the many Aliens-themed shooters that are on the market. (And let’s be real here: Doom is Aliens meets Evil Dead, is it not? It even began development as a licensed Aliens game before id Software chose to go their own direction. The arrival of the famous Aliens TC mod in November 1994 brought things full circle. Funny how things work out like that.)
Honestly, looking back on it now with thirty years of hindsight, I think what makes Doom work isn’t so much what it is as a mapset, groundbreaking as it is, but more what it is as a whole. While Doom II is by far the more popular choice for modding, there’s nothing quite like the original’s atmosphere; it’s this atmosphere that Doom 3 tried to build on, and I think at least in that regard it succeeded. Doom feels like a mix of everything id Software was into at the time, from violent sci-fi horror to Dungeons and Dragons, and they wear those influences on their sleeves. It’s heavy metal and horror, blood and violence and enough frenetic action to get the heart pumping. It is revolution, a flipping of tables, the great big bloody beast that terrified the shit out of busybody conservatives and bleeding-heart liberals and changed a generation of millennial kids who grew up on softer fare like Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog.
There’s a lot to look forward to in the Doom sphere. Obviously the reboot duology has been a smash hit, with a likely sequel on the way. The GZDoom engine, once a fork of Marisa Heit’s venerable ZDoom source port that greatly expanded what was possible for modders, has matured into a commercial-quality engine with games like Selaco and Supplice to look forward to — to say nothing of outright 2D sidescrollers like The Forestale and Operation Echo. Even Sergeant Mark IV, the man behind the controversial Brutal Doom, is getting in on the commercial game action. The community, always hardy and now almost unstoppable, continues to crank out banger mod after banger mod — when they’re not making commercial games like Supplice! If you like old shooters, or even if you like new shooters, the Doom community will almost certainly have something for you.
But sometimes, on days like today, it can be nice to just go back to where it all began.
Here’s to another thirty years. Rip and tear.
Doom is available (in its Ultimate incarnation) on Steam and gog.com.
-june❤
PS: If you’re looking for Ultimate Doom, look here.
PPS: A fuller version of this review that includes a level-by-level breakdown is available here.
