1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF DECEMBER 17 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART FOUR

The Essential 100, No. 9: Doom

Cover Story: id's masterpiece taught us that doing it first isn't as important as doing it best.

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sually when you talk about a game being influential, the game in question somehow did something that no game had done before, inspiring the developers of the future and forever altering our gamer lives in the process. After all, new ideas expand our minds to new possibilities and excite our sensibilities.

But a game doesn't have to be the first to do something to inspire people to make an impact. Sometimes using existing innovative ideas and forming them into a thrilling, cohesive whole does the trick. id Software's Doom became an icon because it gave us an imaginative glimpse into the future of games by piecing together the good ideas of the past. Though Doom can't claim to have invented these these ideas, it thoroughly owned them, pointing the way towards the future of games.

Hunting down evil monsters was nothing new to games. Castlevania saw players killing a bevy of horror movie creatures, and even Nintendo's Japan-only Devil World tasked the protagonist with collecting crosses and bibles in a Pac-Man-like maze in order to defeat Satan and his devil kin. Science fiction in games was even more common, with games like Contra and Metroid borrowing heavily from classics like Alien. Seen purely from this angle, you could write off Doom as an extremely derivative work even for its time. An unsubtle mix of science fiction and the occult, Doom let you explore both space bases on Mars and the depths of Hell itself.

Yet while each of these two facets of the game treads familiar ground on its own, the resulting mash-up of themes feels simultaneously fresh and ridiculous, never taking itself too seriously. Running around a space base blowing holes in corrupted marines and twisted muscular beasts proved to be silly fun, and it set the tone for future first-person shooters to take certain liberties with their source material. The playable main character, who borrowed heavily from archetypes created by Alien and Warhammer, popularized the idea of the gruff male space marine as a video game protagonist.

In an era where games were considered toys for kids, Doom dared to include concepts that were more appropriate for an older audience.

Doom also came into the world during a time when a greater dialogue about violence in video games was taking place. Any hint of blood or gore came under fire from parents and lawmakers, putting pressure on publishers to censor their products. Doom was targeted for being a murder simulator that rewarded killing with wanton exploding flesh and corpses strewn everywhere, but it was hardly the first game to do so. In 1976, arcade game Death Race featured enemies that looked like stick men ("gremlins") that you were supposed to run over, prompting a flood of criticism over the implication that your goal was to mow down actual people. Mortal Kombat, which came out a year earlier than Doom, utilized an ample amount of blood. True, Doom reveled in gore, but it was also far more thematically appropriate than Mortal Kombat's deliberately provocative violence. Tortured human corpses litter the game, but that's exactly what you'd expect to see in Hell. In an era where games were considered toys for kids, Doom dared to include concepts that were more appropriate for an older audience. This paved the way for games to eventually explore more violent mechanics and mature themes without fear.

Part of the outrage over Doom's violent killing sprees came from the fact that you were viewing the action from a first-person perspective, theoretically training you to go off and kill in real life. This notion has no merit, of course, but the immersive power of literally looking at the game world through the eyes of the protagonist cannot be denied. Doom's predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D, may have created the template for the FPS, but Doom truly gave us a vision of what the genre could do with both the perspective and the third dimension. Though you couldn't aim vertically, you automatically shot at any creature in your horizontally-scrolling sights, encouraging id to use the full field of vision in each of its levels. Enemies perch on top of high ledges sniping at you with fireballs as evil marines and horrible beasts swarm you on the ground. This greater attention to verticality allowed the player to see areas they could eventually reach, including secret areas. It also freed the level designers to make more creative use of a given space, with deep pits of lava, elevators, and even a warehouse of storage crates that form a maze. Demons aren't the only thing that stand in players' way. They also must contend with the hellish levels, a tradition that continues in modern shooters.

This was obviously very appealing to not only our maturing generation, but also to a great many age groups who used PCs regularly. But it was the shareware model that id used to market Doom that truly pushed it to its current iconic status. Pioneered by Apogee Software, the shareware model of game distribution split games up into "episodes," distributing the first one for free and providing additional ones if gamers paid for the game in full. Id took this method and used it to sell many of its games, but Doom truly owed its iconic status to being widely available to everyone with a PC for no money up front. Its reputation grew to the point where it was purported at one point to be installed on more computers than Windows 95. Doom didn't invent the shareware model, but it saw arguably the format's greatest success as it wormed its way into our lives and networks.

Removing barriers of entry proved effective in spreading the game to just about every computer in existence at the time, but id didn't stop at shareware. Doom's friendliness toward user-created content also attracted players. Wolfenstein 3D didn't officially support mod creation, but a sizable enough community dedicated to it emerged that id built level editors into Doom for players to mess around with and share their creations with the world at large. The result was the first large-scale community formed around user-driven content, pushing the PC game industry towards embracing player creativity and encouraging mod creation. Many game designers even emerged from the crucible of Doom's mod community, like id's own Tim Willits, who eventually became lead designer on Doom 3.

Though id found ingenious ways to recycle old ideas, the few trademarks that do solely belong to Doom ties everything together. Though Wolfenstein 3D created the FPS template, Doom injected it with a breathless pace. Your character seems to sprint around the levels as he is swarmed by hellspawn and strafes around shooting the hordes with a rocket launcher. Doom brought an action movie feel to the genre, one which gets copied again and again even today as developers try to mimic blockbusters. It also brought a surprising attention to detail to the levels themselves, especially the ones that take place in hell. You see pentagrams and runes mingling with flayed bodies of space marines, but then you'll also notice odd details like a moving wall of faces or a bloody altar that serves no practical purpose for you the player. The amount of extraneous stimuli happening in Doom actually served to sell the setting, encouraging developers to bring more world-building and artistry to their game environments.

In reality, Doom brought little truly new to the table in terms of its individual design elements. The FPS already had its template in Wolfenstein 3D; Apogee lays claim to popularizing the shareware model for distributing video games; and games in general were slowly pushing the boundaries of violence in video games further and further. But none of that matters, because Doom took everything PC development learned up until that point and refined it all into an awesome game that became iconic precisely because of how refined its visions of Hell and demon slaughtering was. The current industry often hears cries for true innovation and creativity instead of just the same thing made slightly better each time, but people underestimate the power of refining familiar concepts and the freedom it allows developers. Doom absolutely felt somewhat familiar, but Id used what came before in new and exciting ways to create something truly memorable that would in turn lay the groundwork for games yet to see the light of day.

Jeremy Signor

Jeremy Signor doesn't know if he has huge guts, but he hopes not. That sounds like something you'd need to go to get checked out at the hospital.