I feel like I’ve put this off for far too long, but hey, the series is hitting the big 3-0 pretty soon, which is a good excuse to jump into this thing and talk about why DOOM might be the only franchise out there that’s somehow still able to hold my interest across all of its iterations (yes, even Doom³).

Now part of this is pure nostalgia. I grew up playing Wolfenstein 3D on my buddy’s PC, because he was the only person I knew with a copy of the shareware. We liked killing Mecha Hitler, as one quite naturally would. There was also the one guy with the chaingun who would yell GUTEN TAG and open fire. We did a lot of cheating in those days to get by the hard parts, which to my memory were “all of them.” I think I probably haven’t run through the game again in… ever, actually. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve touched the game at all for at least like… 20 years?

Damn, maybe I should play Wolfenstein 3D again one of these days. I liked those new ones Machine Games did a lot, to be honest! Killing Nazis never gets old!

This isn’t the point, of course. The point is that unlike Wolfenstein 3D, my first encounter with a FPS ever, I don’t remember where exactly I was when I first sat down and played DOOM, although I think it was at my uncle’s house, at around 9 or 10 years old? The place isn’t particularly important – mostly because playing the game kind of turned my mind to dust upon seeing it. True, the concept of a FPS was not unknown to me (I just wasted a paragraph talking about Wolfenstein 3D, after all) but the jump in visuals – particularly the environment, to say nothing of the monster design – was something I wasn’t expecting. I mean you shoot Nazis in Wolfenstein, and sometimes dogs, and sometimes ghost Hitler or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be, but DOOM had Cacodemons, and Pinkies, and Imps, and also zombie soldiers, some of whom had shotguns. Plus instead of endless grey brick hallways broken up with endless wood hallways, you could go outside in DOOM and also the lighting effects like, existed at all and on top of that were impressive as hell. Look at them now! You’ll think to yourself “goddamn, they were doing shit with shadows and lights in 1993! That’s amazing!”

I mean these are not thoughts I had when I was a kid, the thoughts I had as a kid ran along the lines of “holy shit look at that guy’s blood going everywhere” and “does playing this game condemn me to hell” (I was able to rationalize this fear away because you know, you were killing demons, and that’s a good thing! God would surely let the whole “playing a violent video game” thing slide since it was killing demons (what it says about me that I had zero of these issues with killing Nazis is… a little weird, now that I think of it. Probably because DOOM was more overtly santanic? I’m not gonna delve too deeply in to young me’s mind here) and absolutely “oh fuck what are those big pink guys oh fuck oh fuck.”

At some point I learned the most important keystrokes a kid could learn, which were IDDQD and IDKFA and the game got less scary, but let’s be honest most of my first experience with the game was running around in a panic and dying. I don’t think I got out of E1M1 before I either had to cede the computer to someone else, got scared of my parents finding out what I was doing and telling me I was going to hell or whatever, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I kept thinking about it and I have continued to think about it to this day.

By the time Duke Nukem 3D came out I was more interested in that (did you know you can give the strippers money in that game and they will show their boobs because I knew, and back in 1996 we took our boobs where we could get them, pixelated or not. The internet wasn’t quite what it was today, you had to have a ton of patience to download a single 400x300 jpg of tits). Now look, Duke 3D has a better engine (the Build engine is fantastic, I love it) and arguably the graphics look better too (I was so impressed by the pistol in that game, the way the spent casings fly out the side and the reload animations alone were mind-blowing to a 12 year old) – and also it was the first game I ever deathmatched online with. I don’t think I did DOOM deathmatches until much later, when the game was already around ten years old and we couldn’t get Quake running on all of the computers in the high school computer lab for a bit (as soon as we solved that problem, we just played Quake deathmatch). I guess it is possible I did a little DOOM deathmatching before then, but I don’t remember it. Someone can correct me, assuming anyone reading this knew me when I was a wee lad.

Unsurprisingly high school was when I managed to get back to DOOM again, mostly because a buddy of mine had it (I do not think I owned my own copy of DOOM – like, the whole game – for years, although I definitely had a box copy of Final DOOM somehow at some point, and the fact that I do not have it any more is honestly a giant shame).

The point I am making here, in my extremely meandering way, is that DOOM – the first one in particular – is not a game I played like a million times as a kid, mostly because there were other games to play and I always died to the fucking Barons at the end of the shareware episode unless I was cheating because I didn’t play DOOM with mouselook for an extremely long time so circle-strafing was a mystery to me.

In fact, that was a giant part of why I preferred Duke Nukem 3D – you could just look around with the mouse! Way easier! At some point my buddy (the same one who showed me Wolfenstein 3D) either rented or owned a copy of DOOM 64 and I played some of that but you know what is not a fun way to play DOOM 64 is on a Nintendo 64 controller, and the music wasn’t DOOM music to me. I’ve softened on this stance considerably now, I think DOOM 64 actually kinda rules, and I might even like it more than DOOM II at this point.

You’ll notice I haven’t really mentioned DOOM II and that is because I never got into it that much beyond getting the Super Shotgun and thinking “oh my god this fucking rules” but the game turns into a slog in the middle so I never finished it. I mean, those fucking city levels are awful, there’s just no way around it, and Chaingunners are maybe the worst enemy in the series in terms of sheer frustration (I don’t mind Archviles or Revenants or even Pain Elementals (fuck Pain Elementals though)), so I never felt bad about never actually finishing DOOM II like, ever until back during the early days of the pandemic. I mean I’d watched people play DOOM II (either in person or on the internet) for years, but I never had the patience.

Quake will probably get its own essay at some point – suffice it to say that there are noises in Quake that trigger deep sense memories of sitting in the attic at 4am trying to get just one more match in with my cousins as we swapped out who was in the driver’s seat until, I think, either my uncle or my dad came upstairs and was like “you are being too loud turn this off and go to bed” and then the next night we did it again. Quake was great, it had shambling horrors and it looked fucking awesome and that main title theme ripped and Quake II also came out and my older brother brought a bootleg copy of it back from Russia that I played the hell out of and was like “wait where’s the death knights? What the fuck are the Strogg? What is this bullshit? Where the fuck are the Shamblers?” but also, you know, it still ruled in its own way.

Then DOOM 3 came out and I was fucking hooked. It was terrifying to me, it had the Devil in it chortling at you as he spawned in imps to kick your ass, and it made me go back to take another look at DOOM and oh baby, that was where it really started to click with me. Finally, I understood that reloading was for chumps, and also really solidified the understanding on some level that the shotgun in DOOM 3 is a fucking criminal act and someone should be put on trial for making it so shitty. I mean come on. I cheated my way to the end of DOOM 3 and was like “fuck yeah, this is great, I hope id makes another one of these DOOM games because I bet it will rule” and then I waited for so long that I forgot, for the most part, the way that DOOM had made me feel (and anyway there was Half Life 2 to play now, where the heads did not end in points the way everyone’s head in DOOM 3 do). Resurrection of Evil came out at some point but I never really played it (still haven’t, I keep meaning to go back and correct that error but mostly when I think about doing that I just end up playing DOOM 3’s campaign again).

When DOOM 2016 came out, however, that was where I really got lost in the sauce. Playing DOOM 2016 made all the memories of playing DOOM come flooding back and suddenly I needed to play the series, all of it, as much as possible. Except for DOOM 64 because that didn’t have a proper PC release at the time and I am pretty lazy about hunting down fan-made ports. So I actually bought DOOM for the first time (I know I mentioned the box copy of Final DOOM but that was definitely a gift and not something I would’ve spent my own money on at the time) and even picked up DOOM II because why not, but mostly I was playing DOOM 2016 and having a great time.

By the time DOOM Eternal got announced I was playing various DOOM games on a pretty regular basis, getting to the point where a lot of those early levels in 1, 2, and 2016 are basically memorized. Doom 3 I don’t play as much, but I have done the intro like a million times because I cannot get enough of “THE DEVIL… IS REAL! I SHOULD KNOW…I BUILT HIS CAGE!” It also suffered from me not having a copy of it that wasn’t the BFG edition for a long time, but I recently picked the original up on Steam and, well, guess I’ll be spending some time swapping between a flashlight and a gun as god intended (yeah, yeah, it was a technological thing, but the lighting in the BFG edition sucks ass compared to the original lighting and great art is often produced under constraints). If I actually admitted how many times I have seen the Doom Slayer punch the elevator controls in 2016 I think the police might actually show up. Then of course Romero put out SIGIL and I had to check that out too, and SIGIL is…

Look, I am not joking when I say that if I had actually sat down and played through SIGIL when it came out in 2019 it might have been a contender for my favorite game that year. As it was I didn’t get around to it until late in 2020, when I went back to it and then bought a signed collector’s box because it is just that fucking good that I was like “you know who should take some of my money is John Romero” and I was right to do so because the box rules and it turns out that the Buckethead soundtrack whips ass in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. I mean I’ve always had sweet MIDI tunes with my DOOM playing, and having like actual guitars and shit was weird, but hey, it worked for DOOM 3’s theme (an all-time banger) and the soundtracks for DOOM and DOOM Eternal are legitimately some of my favorite things to listen to, but of course they are (I will say here I am one of the probably two people who thinks the soundtracks Andrew Hulshult did for The Ancient Gods are good, actually, even if all the Mick Gordon stuff feels more iconic and all the stuff that happened between him and Bethesda bums me the fuck out). Anyway it was jarring at first but once I got used to it I was like “oh damn you know what this whips ass” and here we are.

When DOOM Eternal actually came out, we were all in lockdown and I was already playing through all the old DOOM games on my lunch breaks. This is where DOOM went from being a series I was fond of and enjoyed going back to from time to time to my go-to “I just wanna run around in a game for a bit” series of games. DOOM Eternal in particular might be a game that I go back to a ridiculous amount of times and that has a lot to do with the way its colors remind me of the original DOOM. It became, somehow, my ultimate de-stress game as well – you could probably track how stressed I’ve been at work based on how many hours of DOOM I have played lately (this is already autobiographical enough for me to comfortably say that I am dealing with some residence permit stuff at the moment and buddy, I have played through SIGIL twice this month, to say nothing of what I am currently doing in DOOM Eternal (the answer is “another run through the complete campaign on ultraviolence, because while Nightmare is a fun challenge, Ultraviolence (and its equivalent in DOOM 3 (Veteran) and DOOM 64 (Watch Me Die, I think? I’ve only run through that once)) is the platonic ideal for me vis a vis difficulty in all of these games. Challenging enough that I am barely making it out of tougher encounters but not so punishing that I spend like two hours trying to do a single Slayer Gate (I don’t remember which one it was, I think the one on Taras Nabad, but sweet jesus I was stuck on it for a long time on Nightmare – and I was fully kitted out! It just beat my ass into the dirt for that long!). I can pick it up and put it down and feel like I had a good time, and that goes for basically every game (except for some levels of DOOM II which are just a chore on any difficulty, and more or less the entirety of Thy Flesh Consumed which I do not know I will ever play again, that thing is hateful).

There’s just something about it – the speed, certainly, and not having to reload – but mostly I think it is the exhilaration of coming out of a combat encounter bloody and low on ammo but alive, something which for whatever reason other games don’t quite match, at least not for me. Again, DOOM Eternal is a big one for this – its whole “combat chess” concept makes some fights feel like puzzles – you figure out the best order in which to deal with the different demons (rule 1 for me at least is “hunt down and kill those dumb fucking carcasses as quickly as possible, those pieces of shit, I hope whoever designed the carcasses stubs their toe), you manage your resources and save your blood punches for when they’ll do the most damage, and when all else fails you pull out the BFG and hope for the best.

It’s pure power fantasy, and best of all it never gets too self-serious. DOOM isn’t really trying to say anything, what the first game is mostly saying is “we think the Devil is pretty cool, especially when you are shoving a chainsaw in its face” and while you can certainly look at the psychotic corporate-speak of DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal as being its own commentary on corporate culture, you can also ignore it (I myself adore the extremely overwrought lore in DOOM Eternal, it is the sort of shit you read in old metal album liner notes. A pity Christopher Lee wasn’t around to narrate it, that would have kicked ass). It’s just “here are some cool fucking weapons. Here are some demons. Sort it out,” and that’s it! Rip and tear until it is done!

It helps that (again, apart from some notoriously bad maps (aka probably like 30-40% of the maps in DOOM II, let’s be honest) which are just dogshit awful, to me (Romero I know you designed Perfect Hatred in like eight hours or whatever which is impressive but come on), just some real fucking slogs) the level design is fantastic – especially when it’s Romero, even more especially when it is Romero taking his time, which is what SIGIL is, which is why I am seriously debating calling in sick on the 11^th of December, because SIGIL II is supposed to release on the 10^th and I, at least, intend to play the absolute shit out of it (did I pre-order one of the fancy-ass boxes? Reader, of course I fucking did). I think the game wouldn’t stick in my mind the way it does if the levels were not extremely cool, and if they did not reward exploration with

1. More demons trying to kill you
2. Cool weapons and (in the case of 2016 and Eternal) collectable gubbins which are either stupid (little toy demons!) or useful (upgrade materials, cheat codes for when you just wanna go back and pick up the secret you missed on the first run)

I would not obsess over the level design as much as I do. It is not just running along a set path – there is always a secret to find, or some challenge thing to investigate. 2016 and Eternal might be the most linear of the lot, but even those are sprawling in a way that does not feel like every other post-Half Life game where you cannot get lost. DOOM 2016 still lets you get lost (so does Eternal in a few bits, I think I ran around the Super Gore Nest for way longer than I needed to if I’d been paying attention the first time I played through it). You feel less constrained, even the bits where you’re in corridors. DOOM 3 might be the only real exception to this, except even that lets you backtrack and hunt down cabinet codes and whatnot (I also managed to get lost in the Delta Labs and the dig site at the end, so they are still open in spite of DOOM 3 being the most linear of the games in terms of level design).

DOOM as a whole is one of the few series that I am willing to go meet on its own terms – that is to say, generally I am a proponent of “just play the game on easy if you’re having trouble, who cares” but I have become physically incapable of going below Ultraviolence, because it just feels wrong. That isn’t meant to be a boast, it is just saying that the game has altered my brain chemistry to the point where if I boot up E1M1 and there are not two shotgunners hiding behind pillars and two up top my brain recoils instinctively. Likewise if an Imp cannot absolutely wreck my entire shit with like 2-3 swipes in 2016 or Eternal I feel like I have gotten away with something illicit (although in Eternal I will 100% cop to activating the IDDQD cheat if I get through a level, realize I’ve missed one of the collectables, and have to go back in to satisfy my heinous completionist urges which only apply to DOOM Eternal and no other game).

I don’t really have anything revolutionary to say, here. I think the DOOM games are all stupid good in their own ways – yes, even DOOM 3, even if I think the Cacodemon in DOOM 3 looks like dogshit, just a fucking criminal redesign made worse by the fact that you can blow up its projectiles as it spits them and kill it with the splash damage alone, even with how much the shotgun sucks and the sound on the machine gun is one of the worst things I have heard in my life – and it seems weird to me that they’ve been around for 30 fucking years and I have played them, on and off, for more or less 30 years (more accurately for 28 years, I was only a wee lad of eight years old when it came out – but also it is not out of the question, since I absolutely played Wolfenstein 3D when I was like, 6 or 7). They’re just fucking good! If you have somehow never played them, you can even get them for extremely cheap! GoG sells the originals for like €2, and if you download gzdoom and toss the .wads in there, you get some nice graphical options and such. You can also get the Bethesda re-releases, they’re fine too, but for whatever reason something feels off about them to me? I think it’s something about the lighting; I can’t quite put my finger on it, I would have to really sit down and do some side-by-side testing and I don’t have time for that. Shit, I barely had time to sit down and write this.

Seriously though, if you haven’t played the original DOOM I think you probably should. Whack it on Ultraviolence if you’re up for it, don’t forget to hump the walls to find some secrets, and remember that you can always stunlock a cacodemon with the chainsaw if you get in quick enough to save ammunition. You don’t have to play DOOM II, although I’ve been playing it again (shocking, I know) and I think I might be more into it this time than I was last time around. Chaingunners can still get fucked though, I would rather fight Pain Elementals if I had to choose, and nobody wants to fight Pain Elementals, those fuckers spawn Lost Souls like it’s going out of style.

Anyway, happy 30^th birthday, DOOM! I will celebrate by playing SIGIL II like it is going out of style and foolishly hoping that id announces another DOOM soon (maybe on the 10^th, when the actual 30^th birthday is).

Although if I’m being honest, I kinda want them to announce a new Quake that is an actual follow-up to Quake 1. Give me more Shamblers! I want more Shamblers!