I’ll give you the truth – I never played DOOM when it first came out in 1993. To be honest, I didn’t even know much about computers at that time — and certainly I didn’t have the funds to purchase one. I was 23 years-old, working as a construction worker in Wyoming; I was married and pregnant, and video games were nowhere on my radar. Fast forward to 2011, I’m well into my retro gaming addiction and my daughter tells me “You have to play this old shooter called DOOM.” “Dad,” she’d say, “you can’t possibly understand gaming history without playing DOOM.” I was hesitant to play it at first simply because I wondered how good an “old” computer game could really be?
Boy was I wrong about that.
I finally loaded a source port version of DOOM onto my laptop (yeah, I know that’s not the same as playing the actual game on a vintage PC) and decided to boot it up on a Saturday morning while my coffee was still hot and figured I would fiddle around with it for about 20 minutes and then get back to organizing my NES collection. Three hours later I’m still sitting there, coffee is stone cold, and I am completely engrossed in mowing down demons throughout the hallways of a Martian research facility. My back hurts from leaning over my laptop, but I cannot stop playing.
What struck me first about DOOM was the speed of the gameplay. I had played numerous modern shooters by that time — I had borrowed my neighbors Xbox to play some Call of Duty and played around with Half-Life on Steam. Those games were all very deliberate and tactical; cover-based. DOOM felt like being shot out of a cannon. Your character moves fast, the enemies move fast, everything happens fast. There was no reloading, no cover system, and no complex weapon upgrade trees. Just you, a shotgun, and a hallway full of things that need shooting. That purity was something I had not experienced in another game.
The progression of the weapons in DOOM was a perfect arc that made sense, even to someone who was experiencing it 18 years after it was originally released. Started with this weak little pistol, found a shotgun that felt chunky and satisfying, worked my way up to a chaingun that made me feel invincible. Then I found the rocket launcher and proceeded to kill myself with splash damage about six times before I learned how to aim it properly. Each weapon felt weighted and impactful — when you fired the super shotgun, you could almost feel the kickback through your hands.
But the BFG9000… Holy cow, that thing was something else. When I picked it up the first time, I had no idea what it did. The name suggested that it was going to be powerful, but nothing prepared me for that green ball of destruction that cleared an entire room of enemies. I literally laughed out loud when it went off — this utterly absurd and over the top display of digital violence that was so extreme that it was funny. I’m sure my upstairs neighbor thought I had gone crazy laughing at my laptop at noon on a Saturday.
What I realized was how DOOM approached exploration without holding your hand. There was no minimap, no objective marker, and no glowing path that showed you where to go next. You had to actually pay attention to your surroundings, find keycards, and remember which doors you had seen that needed them. I’m used to following instruction manuals on construction projects — blueprints tell you exactly where each part of the project goes. DOOM required you to figure things out for yourself, and that made finding each new area more rewarding.
The secret areas quickly became my obsession. Any wall texture that looked slightly different, any section that appeared too empty, or any suspicious dead end — I began pushing against every single wall looking for hidden rooms. I found my first secret by accident, walked too close to what looked like a regular wall and it slid open to reveal a room full of ammo. I spent the next hour carefully examining every surface in that level. My background in construction actually helped me with this — after 25+ years of looking at walls and knowing which ones are load bearing vs. decorative, I developed an eye for identifying the fake walls in DOOM.
I tried to get some of my coworkers to understand why I was so excited about this old game. “It’s from 1993,” they said. “The graphics look like garbage. Why don’t you just play something modern?” I knew that the graphics were simple, but that didn’t matter since the gameplay was that tight. It was like explaining why a perfectly balanced hammer from 40 years ago works better than some over-engineered modern tool with unnecessary bells and whistles. Good design is good design, regardless of when it was made.
I missed the multiplayer aspect of DOOM entirely during its heyday, of course, but reading about it online gave me a glimpse of how groundbreaking it must have been. The concept of linking multiple computers together via phone lines just to blast your friends… in 1993, that was essentially science fiction to most people. I attempted to engage in some modern DOOM multiplayer through those source ports and got totally annihilated by players who had perfected their techniques for decades. It was humbling to get schooled by people who probably learned to play this game when I was working construction and had never even heard of a “frag.”
My daughter was extremely happy that I “got” DOOM. She had been attempting to describe the significance of DOOM in gaming history, but experiencing it for herself was a far cry from hearing about it secondhand. We began discussing game design, how DOOM influenced everything that came after it, and why certain weapons felt so good to use. She had studied game design in college and could explain the technical aspects of how DOOM’s engine was impressive for its time. I simply understood it felt right to play.
The modding community surrounding DOOM was something I had never experienced before. Tens of thousands of people creating their own custom levels, sharing them openly, and building upon each other’s work. Coming from construction, where everyone guards their trade secrets and methods, the communal nature of this group was intriguing. I downloaded hundreds of user-created levels, ranging from professionally produced levels to amateur levels that clearly demonstrated people were simply having fun. The variety was astounding — space stations, medieval castles, recreated versions of real-world structures. People had been creating content for DOOM for nearly 2 decades, keeping it relevant long after its commercial lifespan.
I began attempting to create my own levels using those editing tools. Lord have mercy, that was complicated. Attempting to learn the nuances of nodes, vertices, and sector heights made my brain ache. Created a few basic rooms connected by hallways, populated them with enemies, and called it a day. Not a lot of complexity, but seeing something I created run within the DOOM engine was kind of neat. Similar to the first time you hook up electrical wiring in a house you’re building and flip the switch to test if it works.
The controversy surrounding DOOM’s violence struck me as exaggerated when I played it as an adult. Yes, it’s violent, but it’s cartoonishly violent and over the top — to take it seriously requires an extra level of commitment. The enemies are literally demons from hell — you’re not killing realistic people. The blood and gore is depicted in such low-resolution, abstract fashion that calling it “realistic violence” is a reach. I can see how worried parents might have been in the 90s when they saw their children immersed in this virtual bloodshed. Context is important, and most adults were not gamers back then.
Playing through each of DOOM’s episodes took me several weeks of playing in the evenings. Each episode had a distinct identity — the first felt like a military base that had been overrun by monsters, the second got stranger and more hellish, the third became completely insane with bizarre architecture and impossible geometry. The difficulty also increased appropriately as I progressed through the episodes. At first, I felt confident and powerful, eventually getting destroyed by Cyberdemons and having to actually think strategically about how I approached encounters.
The sound design in DOOM was something I didn’t realize was significant until I played with decent headphones as opposed to laptop speakers. Those monster roars echoing through corridors, the mechanical slams of doors opening, the satisfying BOOM of the shotgun — it created an atmosphere that the simple graphics couldn’t achieve on their own. I could hear enemies before I saw them around corners, and I used auditory cues to navigate. Playing late at night with headphones made it downright spooky at times.
As I explored more retro FPS games, DOOM’s influence on virtually every shooter that followed became apparent. Next I played Duke Nukem 3D — I could see DOOM’s DNA in that game, but it had a ton more personality and humor. Then Quake — that felt like the technical evolution of DOOM. Even modern games owe a debt to DOOM’s fundamental approach to design — fast movement, powerful weapons, aggressive enemies that charge towards you rather than hiding behind cover.
The fact that DOOM’s source code has been released, and people are still modifying it, porting it to new platforms, and adding features that the original developers never dreamed of is truly remarkable longevity for any piece of software. I’ve seen DOOM running on anything from calculators to digital thermostats. Someone even managed to get it running on an old construction site surveying tool, although I’m not sure why anyone would want to play DOOM on a theodolite.
In retrospect, I believe DOOM may have been the game that helped me understand why people obsess over gaming history. It wasn’t just nostalgia or collecting old games that drove the retro gaming community — many of the older games were actually better designed than their modern counterparts. DOOM did more with less technology than most modern games do with limitless resources. NO cutscenes, NO story, NO tutorials — just perfect gameplay mechanics honed to their simplest form.
I continue to have DOOM installed on my laptop, and will occasionally boot it up and spend some time blowing demons to kingdom come. Twenty minutes of shooting demons through familiar corridors never gets old. It has become my go-to example to demonstrate to people why I waste my time with retro games instead of playing new games. DOOM demonstrates that great game design transcends time — regardless of when it was made, fun is fun. Occasionally the old ways are still the best ways — whether we are talking about building homes or building video games.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
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