Doom: The Definitive Review
I talked to these creatures
With all the testimonials and celebrations of Doom’s thirtieth birthday (yes, from last year), I do somewhat worry that mine would add little to the chorus. Nonetheless, my ego insists that my personal experience is valuable enough to warrant an article. You see, I feel privileged to have known a time before Doom and equally as embarrassed by the riches of having seen so much come after it. Doom is one of vanishingly few games around which entire paradigms form, that shape the culture in a seismic fashion. A geological reconfiguring rather than merely geographical. It didn’t flatten the cities as a mere earthquake; it raised a new continent. We can see Doom as more than a totem for the wild leaps of the 1990s, and more of a figurehead, a benchmark for the idea of the modern videogame, leading to its evergreen, ever-present nature. Thus, it became that Doom had to run on any computer capable of containing it and thus, it was deemed that everyone must mention this when discussing Doom in any context. I am not here to do this. I am here to discuss that sense of privilege, to discuss its part in the lore of the VGA aesthetic, and to discuss how its less obvious technical progressions actually sealed its place in the pantheon.
I love blues, especially green-blues and turquoise. But I have a real soft spot for the ultramarine, for primary blues so rich they seem to swirl with the turbulence of hot air or boiling water despite being a flat tone. The VGA palette1 offers a lovely deep ultramarine, and I distinctly remember it calling out through the organically contaminated browns and sandy hues of Doom’s common architecture. The UAC carpeting in E1M1, of all things, is one such texture. What it signals is a particular vibrancy of colour that Doom celebrated, where it showed a real step beyond the proofs of concept in Wolfenstein 3D and its immediate predecessors. The aesthetic sensibility felt like a leap in tandem with Carmack’s technical bounds, and in a purely accidental sense, a celebration of its native platform. The VGA-enabled 32-bit PC finds its rise to primacy via Doom, which delivers such a confident coup-de-grace that no other machine could match it. It effectively kills the Amiga, using the brute force of megahertz supremacy to undercut any claim to be at the cutting edge of videogames. Lest we forget Corporation, Midwinter, Hunter et al, the new now was texture-mapped and running at 35 FPS. Almost by virtue of its palette alone, the grimdark decay of the Mars base in Doom’s shareware episode was a huge step up from Wolfenstein 3D’s brashness and flat luminance, which almost sang in rhyme with its orthogonal level geometries2.
It’s absolutely mind-boggling to think that the leap between Wolfenstein 3D and Doom took less than two years. And I believe it was that 1-2 punch that gave Doom its power. Wolfenstein 3D looked familiar enough, not too far away from the capabilities of the 16-bit consoles and home computers of the time. It moved in a simplistic fashion too, feeling like a joined-up version of the classic Dungeon Master flick-screen first-person view. That Wolfenstein 3D boiled its interactive design down to killing and door-opening was a refinement that focused the mind around the fluid navigation of a 3D space, where pressing forward had finally superseded the mouse-clicking of incremental steps for textured environments. The smoothness with those texture-mapped walls felt like a luxurious step along from the brave attempts of the likes of Incentive Software’s flat-shaded, single-digit-framerate 8-bit adventures like Driller, Castle Master or Total Eclipse and their far more effective 16-bit contemporaries like Damocles or Starglider 2. So many 3D worlds with first-person viewpoints had felt like brow-beaten compromises with platform capabilities or overambitious, glorious failures. Wolfenstein 3D didn’t feel like that at all. It had a sense of completeness in its smoothness, and a confidence in its own concept that commonly delighted newbies with the sheer thrill of its conveyance. But as with many of the PC’s exclusive showcases at the time, it felt only incrementally better than the rest of the competition. Like X-Wing, it would make people lust for a PC, but it still had a tether to those older platforms where they seemed within the same sphere. Wolfenstein 3D wasn’t unthinkable on an Amiga, and indeed got a SNES port, as did Doom in an extremely chunky, somewhat reduced form3. Doom, as presented on a reasonable PC, seemed wildly beyond that entire generation of hardware. If Wolfenstein 3D sung the virtues of the dying years of the Intel 386, Doom was bellowing the prowess of the 486 revolution to come. System-sellers like Wing Commander and its earth-based, contemporary air-war counterpart Strike Commander helped to highlight where only the most exotic (and hence very expensive) Amigas could hope to match an entry-level IBM PC of the time, and Strike Commander famously touted itself as a game worthy of Intel’s flagship 486 CPU, the much-admired 486 DX2-664. Offering an unheard-of clock speed of 66 megahertz, the Motorola 68040s of the most luxurious A4000 Amigas found themselves outpaced by a staggering 26 million cycles. And a 486DX2-66 could play a very, very fluid game of Doom5.
Doom defines its platform as much as its genre; the default DX2-66 gaming PC comes with a nice VGA card, a Soundblaster of some description and a nice glob of RAM, commonly 4-8 megabytes. Given that most Atari STs and Amiga 500s rarely got beyond a single megabyte and the recently-arrived Amiga 1200 coming with two, the specialised gaming PC of late 1993 was clearly superior, and the beauty is that Doom absolutely feels like it’s using that superiority as best it can, presumably helping to justify the £1000+ spend that a complete system could demand. But the key here lay in which Intel variants could still output a ‘good enough’ Doom. We had a cobbled-together PC from a mixture of new and second-hand parts, so we could focus on specific incremental upgrades rather than buying complete platforms. In the space of two years we’d been through a suite of 386 chips before swapping to 486 to coincide with Doom’s shareware release. The DX2-66 may have been a £400 chip new at retail in late 1993, but the lesser, cheaper SX-25 put up a decent fight, and the game was acceptably playable on the higher-end 386s. Having a resizable render area and a low-detail mode opened the game up to a wider spectrum of 1993 configs than you’d initially assume, but really it was 1994 that seemed to bring an explosion of new owners. Anecdotally, it’s certainly when more friends got 486 PCs in the home and Doom seemed to be almost ubiquitous. In the decade of the ‘Killer App’, Doom fulfils the definition and almost defines the very concept in a videogaming context. From Wikipedia’s page on the term, Steven Levy remarked in 1985 that:
“One mark of a good computer is the appearance of a piece of software specifically written for that machine that does something that, for a while at least, can only be done on that machine.”
Of course, Doom exemplifies this and goes some way to proving how it heralded the golden age of PC-exclusive games for the rest of the 1990s. Doom was the line in the sand from which an entirely new arc for the PC as the premium gaming platform began. While it undoubtedly stood on the shoulders of many giants (notably a lot from Origin Systems) Doom’s raw immediacy and explosive sensationalism gave it colossal popular appeal. In some form, it symbolises a critical mass, presaging 1994 and its relentless wave of landmark PC titles: UFO: Enemy Unknown / X-Com, Elder Scrolls: Arena, System Shock, Tie Fighter, Wing Commander 3, Warcraft, Quarantine, Jagged Alliance, Little Big Adventure, Beneath A Steel Sky6, Theme Park, Magic Carpet and, of course, Doom II. With the astonishing PlayStation launching in Japan 12 months after Doom’s debut, 1994 is the PC’s year of dominance, establishing a foothold that easily competes with the new-fangled, realtime polygonal revolution to come. Of course, the PC eventually leapfrogs ahead in this revolution thanks to 3DFX and OpenGL, lending more support to the evolutionary advantage of modular, open systems that Doom happily exploits.
What’s interesting about where Doom sits as a technical exercise is in its balancing of the old and the new. The environment is polygonal and fully texture-mapped, but the opponents and pickups are steadfastly traditional bitmaps, being wonderful exemplars of realtime sprite-scaling at its best. But there’s also the legacy of a letterboxed viewpoint that only has freedom of movement in the horizontal plane. Being the same as Wolfenstein 3D, this didn’t seem anomalous at the time but it does in retrospect. However, and this may be controversial, I think it’s a strength that not only gave Doom its signature intensity but also made it far more accessible. I don’t think it was until 1995’s Dark Forces that I played an FPS that allowed the player to look up and down. Of course, it was clumsily implemented as yet more keys to remember, as using the mouse to control viewpoint didn’t seem to arrive in the popular culture until Quake in 19967. And this is the issue I have with both the modern Dooms and boomer shooters in general. I quite enjoyed Prodeus until it wanted me to look around to shoot things. Like Doom Eternal, it’s not actually Doom at all. These games are Quake. I don’t find them as satisfying as a chunky Doom rampage because I have to use my right thumb to aim at stuff all over the place. There’s something so beautifully primal about Doom’s horizontalism that frees up neuronal capacity, lessens motor control demands and focuses visual acuity onto that single letterbox - looking dead ahead, as a predator fixed on its target would. Only simpering prey has to look around or, gasp, up and down to gauge its aggressors. And I have to say, I never really felt the same sense of raw intensity from later, mouselook FPSes as I did for some of Doom’s set pieces. Even cartoonish, bombastic tributes to raw slaughter like Serious Sam lost something or other from that edge of frying neurons. I distinctly remember emerging from a particularly fraught skirmish late in Doom’s shareware episode and catching myself panting. Either I’d gone into oxygen debt or simply stopped breathing in the heat of battle and this was entirely new to me. I’d never been so deeply absorbed in pure instinct, nor had it challenged to quite that degree. It felt similar to the orchestrated climax flashpoints of lightgun shooters like Operation Wolf and Thunderbolt, or its superbly camp sci-fi counterpart Space Gun. Or its sonic homology with SNK’s deliriously fun zombie-killing 3-player, Beast Busters. Yet Doom had that critical addition - the freedom to move, to corral the space in your favour, or to run away to hide or seek healing and ammo. In a far more impactful and satisfying manner than its predecessor, Doom had set the lightgun rails-shooter free.
The other (and perhaps undersung) aspect Doom successfully advanced was lighting. Doom had mooD. And it was surprisingly well-implemented. Some parts obviously recalled narrow reference base movies - the flashing stroboscopic firefights of Aliens being the most apparent. But lighting really did mark a huge step on from Wolfenstein 3D, where perhaps you can argue that the chiaroscuro and the flickering and the shadowing is as significant an improvement in realism and tangibility as the complexified world geometry and richer texturing. And let’s not forget the sound - I mentioned Beast Busters for its cacophony of gunshots and zombies - both roaring and moaning, but Doom showed its platform’s prowess in the seemingly unlimited channels of digital audio it was able to mix together. You’d hear an Amiga cutting out any noise after the fourth simultaneous one and you can forget the 16-bit consoles giving it a decent go, but in Doom it seemed everything had its own voice. Every shot heard appeared to ring out amongst every cry of pain and exploding barrel. Then there were those lurking murmurs from monster closets and arenas of combat a few metres of corridor away and, lest we forget, that beautifully soothing artificial boop when you pick up something small but nice. That’s more comforting and warmly familiar to me than the monster noises or the gunfire or the signature door sounds. Though I have to pay respect to the immediate chill of terror you get in deathmatch when you hear the teleporter noise just after you’ve teleported yourself.
Ahhhhh, deathmatch. For me, this came into its own with Doom II. By the time of its release, friends had their own PCs and it was common to bring two PCs together, joined in unholy union by a null modem cable. We spent entire nights notching our way up triple-figure kill counts in 1-on-1 deathmatches, playing our part in the revolution of multi-machine adversarial multiplayer. I seem to remember co-op was only available over IPX LAN, which seemed odd although we were perfectly happy to be hunting each other. It’s a shame that I can’t remember the long string of switches, addresses, ports and files that we could type, off by heart, as an addendum to sersetup, to the point where we’d race to see who could bash it in the fastest. But despite the highly technical launch command, getting deathmatch up and running was surprisingly frictionless. We loved a run around Doom II’s E1M1 as it was tight enough to be knowable, right down to knowing where the other person was from the relative volumes of door sounds. Thanks to either coverdisks8 or our trusty 14400 modem, I’d got hold of a Doom level editor and a .WAD editor, which meant we could inject our own sounds9 into the game as well as mash about with level geometry. I’d actually built an entire level from scratch, but it was a classic piece of bravado and experimentation so while it didn’t crash the game, it wasn’t exactly conducive to solid deathmatch play. Instead, I stitched an outdoor section onto our beloved D2_E1M1, making it circular and thus far more suited to mutual hunting. It was a joyous thing in the end, a custom stage tailored to our tastes, and that was something that seemed in step with the spirit in which Doom existed. Open hardware platforms of unique machines to each user, a shareware episode with the value of an entire game and free multiplayer with maps that could be tinkered and sculpted to suit its users as much as the hardware it ran on.
As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, I feel a sense of privilege about being a player before Doom arrived and getting to play it when it was the cutting edge. It’s hard to describe its full impact, but it’s all too easy to reminisce about how it felt, which was fucking brilliant. The legacy is obvious and has been comprehensively discussed over the last month, but the sense of arrival is harder to capture. Again, it’s a case of horizons being redrawn, of the explosion of possibility now this thing is real. I remember Shareware library adverts touting it as a ‘virtual reality’ shooter, as it seemed that much of a step forward. As with Half Life, the line of progress had seen Doom leap ahead with a single, colossal bound. It was monolithic in the 2001: A Space Odyssey sense - a singular, dominating presence which shaped the culture around it. And it was viscerally thrilling. The game’s velocity, its polyrhythms of violence, its ferocity and its calmness intoxicated with such fervour, such momentum that it was irresistible. I’d argue this applies really to just that first shareware level set. It gets a bit long and arduous in the full game, despite the operatic grandiosity of taking you through hell itself. Doom II is a far neater and wonderfully self-aware update, being sophisticated enough to understand it’s not some virtual reality adventure but an arcade FPS that can play with its own ideas of what the FPS challenge could and should be. I always felt Doom 3 was a depressing disappointment. It seemed to miss its own point - you were never going to be knee-deep in the dead in a game that wanted to be more Resident Evil than Operation Wolf. And sadly, that’s the path it seems to have stuck to, or at least Operation Wolf being what the modern Doom seems to be avoiding. And yet, especially being a fan of Koei’s Musou titles, I remain somewhat perplexed as to why no-one’s gone full 1-vs-1000 in the arcade FPS context. I’m happy to be shown what I’ve missed should such a thing actually exist, and I’m extremely pleased that Doom was able to lead to brilliant concepts like Superhot despite its heel-turn into high-asset flabbiness and rebirth as a generic Quake-a-like in Doom clothes (yes, including execution mechanics and all that). But still, I feel Doom’s real spiritual sequel remains to be made. When Lamborghini announced it was bringing back the Countach, a car of such daring styling that when the prototype rolled out of the workshop - as the legend goes - a factory worker uttered the name as a term for the jaw-droppingly beautiful and it stuck, it wasn’t clear what a comeback meant. It turned out to be an updated bodykit dropped onto an existing modern platform. So it was merely a thin, facile tribute. I personally thought a new Countach shouldn’t look anything like the ‘70s and ‘80s cars, but it should have the same impact as the original. It should make us all gasp and utter its name in the face of its arrival. I feel Doom’s true successor should do the same, and I’ll happily wait another 30 years to see it.
[21]
It was surprisingly recently that I learned that computer graphic palettes were actually designed rather than arising as a simple consequence of the necessary circuitry. It came from an oral history session tidbit to do with choosing the C64 palette. The idea that specific hues were chosen and tuned to suit human tastes blew my mind.
Fucking read the Wolfenstein 3D Black Book. The author has released it as a free PDF and it’s a brilliant inspection of the game’s internals.
SNES Doom is remarkable but its lack of textured floor and ceilings and generally low-fi look gives away its Wolfensteinian roots.
Yes, yes, Pentiums were around in 1993, but were ludicrously expensive, so who really cared at the time?
Fucking read the Doom Black Book. It’s by the same author as the Wolfenstein 3D one and is even better, and is also been made available as a free PDF.
Yes, yes, this had an Amiga version (as did UFO: Enemy Unknown), but who really cared at the time?
Yes, yes, Bungie did it first in 1994 with Marathon, but who really cared at the time?
Speaking of coverdisks, I can very well remember the surprise at discovering what was XXX about the XXXDOOM.WAD that made its way into a PC Zone CD of 'custom' Doom levels. OH LA LA! Plus the textures weren't that far off the resolution of what you were able to purloin off the newsgroups on a 14.4 connection.
Notably we swapped the shotgun’s cocking noise for Clarence’s chick-chick-”fuck you!” from Robocop and a judicious edit of Alan Partridge’s “Boooof, eat my goal” for the rocket launcher. The BFG got another Day Today sample: “like an abattoir in a power cut”.