A Doomguy Looks at 30: The Timelessness of DOOM

By Marc Normandin | December 11, 2023 | 2:15pm

Video Games Features DOOM

A Doomguy Looks at 30: The Timelessness of DOOM

Often, when the phrase “one of the greatest games of all time” is deployed, it’s to say that a particular videogame was vital to the industry and its growth in some way. It could be a landmark achievement that changed the landscape and the idea of what was possible with the technology of the day, or a game that dominated the charts and spawned a wave of imitators (with good reason). Think Super Marios Bros., or Space Invaders, or Dragon Quest. Decades later, titles like these remain among the greats due more to their legacy and historical importance than how they actually hold up today in comparison to what they spawned. Super Mario Bros. is still obviously great, but Nintendo surpassed it themselves just a few years later with Super Mario Bros. 3, and now we live in a world with Celeste in it. Space Invaders is arguably the most important videogame ever, but it was just a starting point for both the industry and the genre it popularized. Dragon Quest is still a tight, enjoyable role-playing game, but there have been a few more RPGs released since 1986—many of them because of Dragon Quest, but that’s the thing, isn’t it?

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This isn’t always the case, however. Sometimes a game is immediately recognized as one of the greatest games of all time for all of the kinds of achievements listed above, and then feels just as good, as relevant, as vital 10, 20, or 30 years later as it did the day it was first booted up by someone who was about to have their mind blown in a way they weren’t yet aware was possible. id Software’s DOOM, released on December 10, 1993, comfortably fits within this subcategory of the all-time greats. Wolfenstein 3D, released one year prior by id and publisher Apogee Software, might have set forth some ideas about what a first-person shooter even was, but DOOM was a treatise on what a first-person shooter could be. The gap between these two games, released about a year-and-a-half apart, is frankly unbelievable, but that gap is also what makes Wolfenstein 3D one of the Super Marios Bros. and Space Invaders of videogame history, whereas DOOM gets to just be DOOM: pure greatness, then and now, without qualification.

There are many differences between Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM. There’s the engines that power them and what they allowed: Wolfenstein couldn’t have curved walls, all ceilings were the same height, and there were no stairs, leading to quite a few grid-like mazes and what was more obviously a 2D, overhead game shown from a first-person perspective that gave the impression of 3D. There are the differences in sound and how they enhanced the respective environments of each game: Wolfenstein 3D, released in an era when having a soundcard didn’t necessarily mean the sound you’d hear was any good, was limited to just one digital sound sample at a time. Meaning, in the words of Karen Collins in Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, sounds “had to be prioritized.” Just one year later, DOOM utilized the nascent “three-dimensional” surround sound technology of videogames to blend music, ambient sounds, and more active ones like death cries or attack sounds together into a tension-inducing mixture. And, of course, there were the kinds of enemies you could face in these respective games: Nazis might be demons, but they’re demons in human form, which limits the possible variations.

What best explains the difference between how the two games play, though, is in the non-firearm weapons options. In Wolfenstein 3D, you have a knife, but you never want to have to use the knife. Its range is obviously short, it’s considerably weaker than even the basic, slow-firing pistol, and if you ever find yourself armed with it, it’s only because you have no other option: unless you’re celebrating your 100th playthrough of Wolfenstein with a knife-only challenge run, you’re probably desperate and close to death if it’s in hand. In DOOM, you have your fist. It’s weaker than your guns, but it’s also capable of punching demons so hard that they explode, gibbing foes as well as anything else in your arsenal. There’s a timed power-up that lets you punch through even the game’s most powerful foes in short order, with the idea being that you’re getting up close and personal with these enemies this way because you want to be, because you want to feel the bones of these hellspawn crunch, because you want them to feel that, too. Wolfenstein asks you to covertly walk around with your knife, avoiding attention, while DOOM invites you to loudly greet hell with your fists.

And then there’s the chainsaw. DOOM’s chainsaw is for ripping and tearing, for meeting the chaos of hell where it’s at, and showing that you are capable of delivering even more of it. Wielding the knife of Wolfenstein is terrifying, and so is DOOM’s chainsaw, but who it is a terrifying experience for is flipped.

DOOM is 30 years old, but it still feels as fast, as dangerous, as exhilarating now as it did three decades ago, and in ways that plenty of younger first-person shooters did and do not. The simple act of dodging fireballs and interfering with an enemy’s shots with your own feels incredible, and grants DOOM a level of interactivity and environmental manipulation that keeps the game feeling fresh, and you on the edge of your seat, all this time later. DOOM’s BFG9000 is famous for its ridiculousness and vulgar (though apt) name, but nothing so ostentatious is needed to experience what DOOM is about: the basic shotgun was and is wondrous, capable of taking down everything in the game while letting you perform the violent ballet that makes up so much of DOOM’s rhythm and movement.

There are moments to ponder, but the music of DOOM, the growls of its demons, the shrieks of the unseen foe, the unlocking of secret rooms full of demons that occurs when you cross some hidden threshold or acquire some item you’re briefly excited about picking up until the roars of waves of foes hits your eardrums… it all keeps you tense, coiled, ready to strike. The videogame industry has had 30 years to figure it out, but to this day there is little out there that captures this essence of DOOM and the feelings it elicits within its players, feelings that have kept it vital and playable throughout the decades—that is, besides other Doom games, and whether any of those have actually managed to surpass the original is, at the least, up for debate.

DOOM’s corridors should be frightening, as there’s less room to maneuver, less room to dodge, less room to hide. With practice, though, you will learn to flip that fear around, and make it that of your foes. They are the ones trapped within this hallway with you, not the other way around. The demons of hell—via Mars’ moons—will bite and scratch and claw at you, but, armed with your myriad guns, your fists, your chainsaw, you will learn to do the same back. When you finish the first episode of DOOM, you die and are sent to hell, which just so happens to be orbiting Mars at the moment, like you were when you were alive. What’s left to fear, when you’re already dead? That chainsaw still feels right in your hands even after your demise, so you might as well rev it once more.

The demons do not seem desperate at first, but as their ranks swell in later levels their desperation becomes plain to see. They are terrified of you, of this unconsidered and unaccounted for deviation from the plan to expand hell’s borders, and this terror results in panicked infighting amongst them in their desperation to put an end to you. This need to kill you—this time, presumably, for good—and put an end to the threat you represent drives their irrational behavior. They’ll destroy whatever is in their path to defeat you, including each other. You should not have survived after being torn apart in the dark of Knee-Deep In The Dead’s conclusion, and yet, you’re thriving, and have become the thing nightmares have nightmares about.

DOOM is tense and full of terrors, but as you hone your skills, as you learn to turn your surroundings to your advantage, you are no longer terrified, but instead inspiring it in your foes, the literal demons of hell. As you progress through the outskirts of hell, the world begins to change shape, to lose form, to replace its rigid, familiar structures with open spaces filled with foes, as swarming you from all sides, with nowhere to hide, might give the demons their only chance to take you down. The world changing its shape and its meaning, just for you? Now that’s a goddamn power fantasy.

And this isn’t just some bit of narrative about what DOOM is supposed to be about, some hyperbole of what DOOM imagines itself to be representing. It’s how the game plays, how it feels when everything clicks. On higher difficulties of DOOM, there are more enemies than there is ammunition to kill them with. If you’re going to stand a chance on Ultra-Violence or Nightmare, you need to learn to be strategic, to pit these demons against each other, to move with such grace and speed that you can send them into a desperate fury that thins their ranks through their own lust for violence and blood. To be able to lean on your own ability for ferocity to cleave through them with a chainsaw or punch right through their heads in order to further conserve the ammo you’re going to need to take down the biggest and baddest demons of hell. This isn’t just something you can do out of the gate, but is learned over time—something you can spend 30 years doing and not get tired of, because the feeling of accomplishment—and the feeling of the adrenaline pumping through your system—remains as intoxicating now as when DOOM first let the world know games could make you feel like this.

On occasion, an anniversary for something that was released within your own lifetime can make you feel old. For myself, I find that if, say, a band is still releasing high-quality music 20 or 25 years after an album that was formative for me as a teen came out, those anniversaries don’t make me feel even a little bit old: the most recent Deftones and Cave In releases, for instance, are simply a reminder that these bands have incredible bodies of work behind them spanning decades, not that White Pony and Until Your Heart Stops came out a long-ass time ago. There are videogames that, even if they’re still fun decades after the fact, can make you feel old, as they’re often representations of specific points in time that can’t quite be separated from that time in the same way: to go back to Dragon Quest, it’s still fun, but its extremely 1986 systems and design can’t be separated from its era, which has been left behind even by most homebrew and retro devs for the more robust 16- and 32-bit homages.

DOOM, though, is something of a rarity, in that it’s not just that it still feels fresh 30 years later like the classic releases from the bands mentioned above, and it’s not just that id Software is still out here releasing bangers, keeping themselves relevant in more ways than just name recognition. DOOM itself remains supported to this day, by its publisher, by its dedicated community of fans at sites like DoomWorld, and by more professional developers. DOOM hasn’t just been out for 30 years, but has been available that whole time, too. Originally a shareware title, it received a boxed retail release in 1995, The Ultimate DOOM, that added a fourth episode. It was ported again and again, even to platforms that couldn’t quite handle it like the SNES and Sega 32X, and was included for free as a part of later games in the series like DOOM 3. DOOM remained available on home computers throughout the years, and the advent of digital distribution on consoles meant that optimized for controllers HD ports of the game could be played on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3—those releases have been continually updated and touched up, too, so that the Xbox One has a slightly different DOOM experience than that of its predecessor console, so that you can now play portable DOOM—at 60 frames per second, up from the original’s cap of 35—on the Switch. Portable DOOM used to mean a compromised port to the Game Boy Advance, but we, and DOOM, have progressed beyond that moment in time.

DOOM is still being added to and improved upon, as well. As there have been from the start, when the creator of DOOM’s engine, John Carmack, released the tools out into the wild, there are still user-created levels being made—and those levels are even available for free for console owners of DOOM (though, these are vetted by id and publisher Bethesda, and approved for release rather than just being a WAD you can load up because you found it online somewhere). MyHouse.WAD, released in 2023, received so much attention for its surreal, trippy horror built with DOOM’s tools that even John Romero, one of the creators of the original DOOM, played and positively commented on it. Romero himself left id Software behind nearly as many decades ago as his masterpiece is old, but he’s still out there creating his own DOOM episodes and megawads, Sigil and Sigil II, too. The former is also available as a free add-on for owners of last- and current-gen DOOM console releases after receiving id and Bethesda’s stamp of approval, and the latter released in December to celebrate DOOM’s 30th.

That there is still a hunger for more DOOM, using only the tools available to Romero and Carmack and the rest of the id Software team 30 years ago, speaks to its lasting greatness and timeless design. Hell is eternal, but so too is the feeling you get from ripping and tearing it open, demon by demon.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.