DOOM is Perfection

AKA Ranking of DOOMs Part Six

All Caps When You Spell the Game's Name

I think the title kind of gives the game away, here – sorry about that, but if we’re going to talk about DOOM – and unlike with DOOM 2016 I refuse to put (1993) next to its name all the time because fuck you, it was first and you know what the hell I am talking about – we are going to state the truth up front in the headline instead of burying the lead. The amount of ink both digital and physical that has been spilled talking about DOOM is probably more than damn near anything in the world, and the game itself was running on more computers than fucking Windows at one point. I know popularity is not, nor has it ever been, a guarantee of quality, but like… come on. That shit is historic. DOOM is historic. I wrote a whole fucking essay about my first and subsequent encounters with DOOM for its 30^th anniversary last year, and really I could just copy and paste it here and call it a day but I’m not going to do that because I have standards.

Swing for the Fences

id had just had an enormous hit with Wolfenstein 3D, and in true id fashion had decided they needed to go bigger and better next time. If you’ve played Wolfenstein 3D, you’ve noticed that its engine – while fast and smooth in ways that games of that era generally are not – is nevertheless a little restrictive. Wall textures can vary, but floors and the ceiling are featureless greys, meaning you can’t go outside, and also everything is right angles. It makes it way easy to get lost, and the secrets in each level are basically invisible – you more or less have to just hump walls and hope for the best.

Oh, and there’s zero verticality. You never go up or downstairs, the elevators are just the end of the level and do not actually go anywhere, and all your enemies are on the same plane as you are. Again, placed in the context of the time none of this is particularly surprising and the game is still a technical triumph, but id wanted more. They knew the engine was not going to be sufficient to get their next game where they wanted it to go – even if they didn’t really even have an idea of where the next game was going just yet.

It's tempting to write the whole development history down here, but you probably have heard the story already (and if you haven’t I guarantee there are better places to find it than a dude ranking the DOOM games – Masters of DOOM is a good place to start, and Romero’s autobiography is also good): While most of id worked on a new Wolfenstein 3D campaign (Spear of Destiny), John Carmack locked himself in a room and built a new engine. This engine had support for more textures (including ceilings and floors, meaning you could go outside and have a skybox), and it could do verticality as well – oh, and it ran more efficiently too. The only question was: what to do with it?

Well, after kicking around some ideas – they did kick around the idea of getting the Aliens license at one point but the lack of creative control and the general idea that Space Marines vs Aliens was kind of cliché scrapped that – someone, inspired in part by one of Carmack’s D&D campaigns that had ended with the world being overrun by demons (it was Romero’s fault), suggested “well what if the Space Marines fought demons instead” and that took care of the basic concept: Technology versus Demons. At some point, Carmack suggested the title of the game should be DOOM, based on a line delivered by Tom Cruise in The Color of Money, and that was that. Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud designed the demons and environments (along with Don Ivan Punchatz and his son Gregor who were brought on as guns for hire), John Romero, Sandy Peterson, and (before he was asked to resign over differences about where the game (and id as a whole) should go creatively) Tom Hall made the levels*, and John Romero, John Carmack, and David D. Taylor covered the programming duties – with Carmack doing most of the heavy lifting on the engine. Oh, and also they created network-linked multiplayer. You know, as one does. It was a random idea that Carmack ran with almost on a whim, and when the dust cleared the game created modern-day multiplayer gaming as we know it. No big deal.

The game released December 10^th, 1993, and the rest is history.

Speaking of Demons

The visuals of DOOM have a style that continues to hold up. You have a pretty simple roster of enemies to deal with here, which I kind of went over in the DOOM II ranking but we’re going to run through them again real quick:

Zombieman: Your basic soldier with a little rifle (which functions like your pistol). He’s got green hair, which is great, but there’s not much more to say about him. You know that the green hair was a good call because they brought it back in DOOM Eternal. They knew what was up! Blowing these dudes apart with the shotgun is immensely satisfying.

Shotgun Guy: Not as fun to look at as the Zombieman, mostly because he’s bald. Maybe one of the most dangerous enemies in the game, on account of he has a shotgun and it will fuck you up if you let him get close. Or far. There’s some RNG involved. Definitely don’t let him get too close though, unless you had 60 health just laying around you weren’t really using.

Imp: A monster that asks the question, “what if demons were totally fucking shredded?” Look at those goddamn abs, man! Abs for days! Imps throw fireballs, and you can dodge those fireballs, and this is the way to tell if you are playing a proper DOOM game: is there an imp? Does he throw fireballs? Can you dodge the fireballs? If you said yes to all of these, you are playing a DOOM game. If not, then you are playing something else. I don’t know what you’re playing, but it doesn’t matter. Imps throw fireballs and you can dodge them, it is Law.

Pinky Demon (or just “Demon” if you wanna get pedantic about it): The grunty lad himself. He’s big and friendly and wants to bite you. He’s got big ox-like horns and is, as a result, Jeff Minter’s favorite demon (again, this is true). They are in the game to block you and also to keep you from being able to blow through everything with a chaingun and a dream – mostly because he will tank most of that chaingun ammo before keeling over. He’s a powerful lad and he really does make some delightful snorts. They also come in Invisible Flavor, in which case they are called Specters. Those bastards are real hard to see in the dark.

Baron of Hell: Big and also pink with some goat legs and frankly a goat face if we’re being honest. Also makes a weird, elephantine noise when he spots you that is frankly incredible. He throws big fuck-off green fireballs that basically do as much damage as a rocket – and he’ll also happily just claw your face off if you get too close, just like the imps. It’s not good to get hit by one of those damn things, I’m gonna be honest with you. He’s the boss of episode one, but that just makes it intimidating when you run into like four of them at once in the other episodes. Generally take about six rockets to take down in my experience, although I dunno that might vary depending on RNG. I have shotgunned too many of these fuckers down to count in SIGIL and SIGIL II.

Lost Souls: These guys fucking suck shit. They do look metal as hell though, everyone loves a flaming horned skull.

Cacodemon: My favorite boy, which is a pretty vanilla response to the question “what’s your favorite DOOM demon” but you know what fuck you he’s the best for a reason! A big red meatball with spikes, a single eye, a big ol’ mouth to shoot fireballs at you, and (of course) two buttholes. Are they both buttholes? John Romero knows, but he’s not telling. They announce themselves with a sort of rattling, snake-like hiss which is really fucking cool. Makes a sad little “wurururble” when you kill him. I am sorry, cacodemon! You are a cutie but your insistence on eating me means we can never be friends. Takes a long time to show up too if you aren’t playing on Ultraviolence, I think he isn’t around until like the back half of episode two. Episode three starts out by making you pistol down a shitload of them, and that is absolutely evil behavior. I have a stuffed cacodemon I got in the early days of lockdown, and I talk to it the same way that Hamlet talks to Yorick’s skull sometimes.

Cyberdemon: You shoot it until it dies. It’s fucking enormous! It has a rocket launcher! Once you learn how to circle-strafe around to dodge his weapons and blast his ass with a plasma rifle (or BFG for the ones in episode four) he’s kind of a chump. Still, the dude’s notorious for a reason, and the reason is he looks and sounds extremely fucking cool. Special shout out to his angry moo when he first sees you.

Spider Mastermind: Cool design – a big Krang brain with cyberlegs and a chaingun that I think actually behaves more like an autoshotgun but I don’t 100% remember – but goes down to a couple direct hits from a BFG. The first in a line of underwhelming final bosses in DOOM games that would persist until DOOM 2016.

That’s the whole roster of DOOM demons. You will see them all by episode 2 – the only thing the game keeps back for episode 3 is the Spider Mastermind, for obvious reasons. By the time you get to the end of the game, you will have killed hundreds of these guys, and it is to the game’s immense credit that it never stops feeling great. The weapons, of course, help that.

Big Fucking Guns Etc.

I won’t go through all of the weapons one by one – but there are a couple which deserve highlighting, not the least of which is the Shotgun itself.

DOOM’s shotgun would not be topped until DOOM II’s Super Shotgun, and even then it’s kind of a close thing. The shotgun is an absolute workhorse of a gun, something which you can use from the first map to the last map. You can kill the Spider Mastermind with one, as long as you have the patience for it, but I don’t know why you would bother with that nonsense. It makes a nice big boom, it drops Pinky demons in 2-3 shots, and with enough patience even Barons of Hell can be brought down. I very recently confirmed this by shotgunning down the final Baron at the end of episode one because my brother and I killed ourselves with rockets while playing co-op and had to pistol-start the level. It was the start of id’s reputation for really good shotguns, and much like the Super Shotgun, I fucking love it.

The chaingun and rocket launcher are also fine weapons. The rocket launcher in particular is a real good rocket launcher, mostly because the splash damage can really help you clear a room (it also makes the Lost Souls dangerous as hell, because they will rush you and get in your way and then the rocket you meant to fire at a distant Baron will instead blow up right on your face because one of those little fuckers rushed in).

You can also have a good time with a plasma rifle – a delightful prize that you find in episode 2 and really wastes dudes quick. Also when you let go of the trigger the Doomguy kinda raises it up as if to cool the barrel off and I think that is great. I was really glad they went back to its boxy design in DOOM Eternal, even if I do kind of like the DOOM³ design quite a bit as well.

Then, of course, there is the BFG 9000. It is, as advertised, a big fucking gun. It also absolutely murders most things you point it at, along with anything else that happens to be nearby. Technologically, it is a weird little hacked together thing, and it is kind of amazing that it works at all. They make you wait for it too – it doesn’t show up (unless you do a little IDFA (or IDKFA if you want keys too)) until the third map of episode 3! In a secret! If you don’t get it there, you don’t get it until E3M6! That’s basically at the end of the game! That makes sense though, it’s overpowered as hell. If you want an idea of how much harder Thy Flesh Consumed is than the other three episodes of DOOM, consider that you can pick up a BFG in E4M2.

Run for It

DOOM’s gameplay loop is simple: find keys, open doors, kill everything in sight. Sometimes finding keys will involve flipping switches (including some switch/teleporter puzzles). If you’re like me, you’ll probably get a little frustrated sometime around episode 3, which is where the bad maps are hiding (not a lot of them, but enough that you notice). That said, the game simply never slows down. It has its roster of enemies, and the level and encounter design uses that relatively small roster to keep you on your toes.

The game just keeps throwing enemies at you, never stopping, never ceasing in its quest to test your mettle. It never stops coming up with new ways to deploy its enemies in ways that will take you by surprise, starve you of resources, and demand your absolute attention. If you want to find the secrets, you have to keep an eye on the wall textures – if something looks misaligned, it’s probably because it’s a secret. Along the way you’ll get legitimate scares as a room is suddenly plunged into darkness and the sound of a hundred hungry demons fills your years. It can still startle me now. It scared the shit out of me when I first played it.

I am sure you could argue that the low level of enemy variety is a weakness, but I… I admire its purity. Its clarity of vision. It is scary, dark, and fast. You can rip through levels in a matter of seconds if you want, or you can take your time hunting secrets and making absolutely sure every single demon is dead as hell by the time you’re done.

A lot of people point to world 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. as one of the perfect levels. They’re right, because it introduces you to how the game works and what to expect from it. E1M1 does the exact same thing – the game starts, you have your pistol, there are ex-marines with guns, get to it. E1M1 also does a great job of showing you things you can’t get to. It shows you outside the base immediately, and drops a blue mega-armor into a pool of toxic goo. Can you get outside to it? The game sure thinks you can, although it does not tell you this directly. If you look to your left – putting your back to the open window into the courtyard and its sweet, sweet mega-armor, your first foes are waiting up the stairs for you. At the top of those steps (look out for the other two hiding behind the pillars!) there’s a platform with glowing green armor. You can pick that up easily, and now you know that green armor is worth 100 – so hey, what’s that blue armor worth?

At this point, you might notice a big red button on one of the pillars the shotgun guys were hiding behind. You might not. If you press it, you’ll hear a door open, and if you happen to look towards the courtyard, you’ll see part of the wall is open and you can go outside. If you didn’t notice that button, don’t worry – maybe you’ll notice one of the sections of hallway near the exit has a different color than the rest of the wall and get into the secret that way. What you probably won’t do, at least not on your first playthrough, is find all of the secrets at once – but when you get out of the exit, you’ll be told the percentage of secrets you found, and that will incentivize your going back in.

There’s so much good shit like that in the game, and its complemented by some truly bloody visuals as your enemies blow apart or collapse into bloody heaps of limbs and gore. The demons are huge, and they have huge guts, and you are gonna rip and tear until it’s done!

The first two episodes are tremendous front to back – the third episode is almost perfect barring a couple of levels (looking at you, Slough of Despair), but even these levels are never quite as bad as they might be. Episode 4, Thy Flesh Consumed, is way more of a motherfucker – it’s mean, and the first time I played through it some levels damn near brought me to tears of frustration, but once I got through it all I felt great. The satisfaction was immense. Thy Flesh Consumed is a great showpiece for just how good a level can be (or a showpiece for just how big of an asshole Romero can be – looking at you, Perfect Hatred). Even so, there’s no level in DOOM that I outright hate the way I hate levels in other games. It just never stops throwing challenges at you, not until the last demon is dead and you finally get to go back home to Earth (or do you, asked John Romero with a twinkle in his eye, putting together SIGIL) and find your bunny dead.

Your trek to hell and back is scored by Bobby Prince, who brings the finest midi covers of metal songs you have ever heard in your life, along with some more original compositions that are not so blatantly lifting riffs from Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, AC/DC, Alice and Chains, and probably some other ones I am forgetting. You will forgive Prince his thievery because the soundtrack is fucking iconic, and when that riff from E1M1’s At Doom’s Gate starts playing you will not care (although my personal favorite track is E1M3’s Dark Halls). The music is so good that when they set out to breathe new life into the DOOM franchise in DOOM 2016, they made damn sure that you got some At Doom’s Gate riffs in Mick Gordon’s soundtrack (and when they did DOOM Eternal, they went even harder with it). It is a soundtrack with roughly a billion different covers of people going wild on guitars and drums and whatever else – not the least of which is Andrew Hulshult’s IDKFA, which was so good that it helped him get the gig to do some of the music for The Ancient Gods and also id stuck it into DOOM I+II (and gave him the chance to remaster it and give the same treatment to DOOM II’s soundtrack. This move, along with giving SIGIL a place in the official campaign list and the id Vault, are basically enough of a reason for the latest remaster to exist on its own). It’s iconic in the way that Mario’s soundtrack is iconic.

When I Said Perfect I Meant Perfect

It is difficult to articulate just how big of a fucking deal DOOM was at its release. I can tell you all about how many people installed it (I mentioned it was on more computers than Windows for a while, right?) or how much money it made everyone at id (both John Carmack and John Romero bought Ferraris) or how it is the reason we have online deathmatching or how the first crop of FPSes weren’t called FPSes, they were called DOOM Clones because that was the only thing to describe what it was, but we’re in the cold light of 30 (31 in a few more months) years’ worth of video games since then. It would be unsurprising to fire up DOOM and go “oh yeah, I appreciate what this is doing, but it’s not actually fun to play by modern standards.” I hate to say this here, but that’s more or less how I feel about Wolfenstein 3D these days – I can play it and get vivid flashbacks of being six years old at my friend’s house, but I can’t call it a great game. It’s just Fine, and as an historical artifact it’s interesting and also killing Nazis will never not be a good time on some level, but I wouldn’t go tell people to play it.

DOOM, on the other hand… It is still fast, still dark, still scary, even! Everything still works, and to play DOOM is to see a precision-engineered game that is Shotguns and Demons. It’s still capable of enormous highs and exhilaration that you rarely find anywhere else. It is bloody and joyous and absolutely fucking perfect.

I’ll tell you to go out and play DOOM right fucking now. I am, in fact, telling you to go play DOOM right now. It is so stupidly easy to buy and play – and look, you might not wanna play DOOM I+II, but pay id a little money and then go find the original .wads somewhere and throw ‘em into gzdoom or Chocolate Doom or whatever your source port of choice is because, and here’s the last bit of important historical information for you:

The source code’s free. id released it to the people, because John Carmack in particular but all of id in general wanted to see what other people could do with it. That’s why there are a million DOOM source ports out there and you can play them and nobody can say shit to you, because DOOM is open source. That’s why it’s still got so many people playing it and making levels for it and experimenting with it and making whole ass new games with it (okay technically a lot of them are built using gzdoom, which is not vanilla DOOM but without an open source DOOM engine there’s no gzdoom). You can go get Ultimate DOOM Builder (or whatever) and start making your own DOOM levels right now. I have messed around with this myself! My brain is not built for it, not really, but even I managed to make a little room and some doors and drop some demons in and run around. It’s fucking Mario Maker except you can do way more and at no point will Nintendo arbitrarily decide that no actually you aren’t allowed to share these levels anymore.

DOOM belongs to the people. It’s everybody’s. Microsoft may own id now but DOOM? They can say they own it, but that’s like saying you own the wind. Nobody owns DOOM. DOOM is for the people.

All hail DOOM.

The Probably Pretty Well-Explained at This Point Ranking of DOOMs

If all that praise and waxing poetic did not get the message across, here’s the Definitive Ranking of DOOMs by me, your humble author who somehow managed to keep this one under 5000 words this time:

1. DOOM

2. DOOM Eternal

3. DOOM 2016

4. DOOM 64

5. DOOM II

6. DOOM³

All things told, I think that’s a pretty fucking good ranking. Lest you think I’m letting nostalgia blind me here by putting DOOM up in the top slot, let me remind you that I did not really play much DOOM as a kid (I talked about this all in the thing I wrote for DOOM’s 30^th anniversary, but a combination of being worried my parents would find out and not having a copy of my own for a very long time meant I did not play a ton of it growing up, and I didn’t fall deep into it until DOOM 2016, and deeper still after the release of DOOM Eternal which got me to check out SIGIL, which at this point is going to have to get its own blog because the more I look at it the more I love it. I was looking at the SIGIL box as I wrote that. I came dangerously close the other night to dropping damn near €400 on one of the few remaining SIGIL Beast Boxes from Romero’s shop. If anyone wants to give me an extremely expensive gift, let me know. You can keep the shirt that comes with it, I haven’t fit into an XL shirt since I was like, 15 years old.

That won’t be a Ranking of DOOMs, though: we finished that! I’m done ranking these DOOMs! These are the canon DOOMs, to me. I actually do think what I’ll end up doing next is just diving into some weird DOOM .wad history – I was messing around with getting the leaked press beta and alpha builds the other day, for example (although I couldn’t get the sound to work, mostly because I hadn’t tried particularly hard to get DOS Box’s settings right), and the release of DOOM I+II, for its faults (I mentioned I have some beef with it, I continue to have beef with it, and I will stop having beef with it if and when they patch the damn thing, but for now it is not my preferred way to play on PC even if it is a nice thing to have on my Steam Deck and Switch and Xbox), has exposed me to some bits of history which deserve a little write-up here and there. Probably not the AOL Girls Museum though, even if the midi cover of Ironic is… extremely good.

No promises on when any of that happens, but hopefully when I do get around to it you will read it and maybe even find some modicum of enjoyment. If you’ve followed along with this whole thing, thanks! I myself have found writing these to be a fun exercise and also a great way to spare my friends and family from having to hear me talk about DOOM all the fucking time.

Anyway, look forward to me doing a writeup on SIGIL (and maybe SIGIL II at the same time, they work well as a unit, I think) sometime – until then, why not play a little DOOM? I have heard it is a pretty good game.

*Thy Flesh Consumed added two new level designers: Shawn Green and American McGee