My first experience with the game DOOM was in 2011 when my daughter told me I had to “play this old shooter.” She said, “Dad you can’t possibly understand gaming history without playing DOOM.” I was somewhat hesitant to play it initially due to wondering how well an “old” computer game could be.
Boy was I mistaken.
After loading a source port version of DOOM onto my laptop (yes, I know that’s not the same as playing the original game on an old computer), I decided to fire it up on a Saturday afternoon while my coffee was still warm and figure I’d mess with it for twenty minutes and then get back to organising my NES collection. Three hours later, my coffee is now stone cold and I’m still sitting here, completely enthralled by the act of mowing down demons as I make my way through the hallways of a Martian research facility. My back hurts from leaning over my laptop but I cannot stop playing.
One of the first things that caught my attention about DOOM was the speed of the gameplay. I’ve played a number of modern shooters prior to playing DOOM (my neighbours Xbox with some Call of Duty, Half Life on Steam etc.) and those games were all very deliberate and tactical — they relied heavily on the use of cover systems, reload timers, and complex upgrade trees for your weapons. DOOM, on the other hand, felt like being launched out of a cannon. Your character moves fast, the enemies move fast, everything moves fast. There is no reloading, no cover system, and no complex weapon upgrade trees. Only you, a shotgun, and a hallway full of things that need to be shot. That pure simplicity was something I hadn’t experienced in another game.
DOOM’s progression from pistol to shotgun to chaingun to rocket launcher to BFG9000 was a perfect arc that made sense, even to someone who was experiencing it 18 years after it was originally released. I started with a weak pistol, found a shotgun that felt heavy and satisfying, moved on to a chaingun that made me feel unstoppable. Then I discovered the rocket launcher and killed myself with splash damage about six times before I figured out how to shoot it straight. Every single weapon in DOOM felt weighty and impactful — when I fired the super shotgun, I could almost feel the kickback through my fingers.
And the BFG9000… Oh boy. When I picked it up the first time, I had no idea what it did. The name implied that it was going to be powerful, but I had no idea what a green ball of destruction was going to do to clear an entire room of enemies. I literally laughed out loud when it blew — this utter absurdity and over-the-top display of digital violence that was so extreme it was funny. I’m sure my upstairs neighbour thought I had lost my mind laughing at my laptop at noon on a Saturday.
What I realised was how DOOM approached exploration without guiding you by the hand. There was no mini-map, no objective marker, and no glowing path showing you where to go next. You had to actually pay attention to your surroundings, find key cards, and remember which doors you had previously seen that required keys. As a construction worker, I’m used to following manual instructions — blue prints tell you exactly where each piece of a project goes. DOOM forced you to figure things out on your own and that made discovering each new area all the more rewarding.
The secret areas quickly became my obsession. Any wall texture that seemed slightly different, any area that seemed underpopulated or any dead-end that looked suspicious — I began pushing against every single wall trying to find hidden rooms. I accidentally stumbled upon my first secret area by walking too close to a wall and it slid open to reveal a room full of ammunition. I spent the next hour meticulously searching every surface in that level. My background in construction actually aided me in this endeavor — after 25+ years of looking at walls and figuring out which ones were load bearing vs. decorative, I developed an eye for spotting the fake walls in DOOM.
When I tried to get my coworkers to understand why I was so excited about this old game, they kept saying, “It’s from 1993.” “The graphics look terrible.” “Why don’t you just play something new?” I knew the graphics were simple, but that didn’t matter since the gameplay was that good. It was similar to explaining why a perfectly built hammer from 40 years ago functions better than some overly engineered modern hammer with excessive bells and whistles. Great design is great design, regardless of when it was made.
I was unable to participate in the multi-player aspect of DOOM during its prime, of course, but reading about it online provided me a glimpse of how revolutionary it was. The idea 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 participate in some modern DOOM multi-player via those source ports and got completely slaughtered by players who had mastered their skills for decades. It was humbling to get schooled by people who likely learned to play DOOM when I was working construction and had never even heard of the term “frag.”
My daughter was ecstatic that I “understood” DOOM. She had been attempting to describe the significance of DOOM in gaming history, but experiencing it for herself was a far cry from learning about it secondhand. We began to discuss game design and how DOOM inspired everything that followed 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 appreciated that it felt right to play.
I had never experienced a modding community like the one surrounding DOOM. Thousands of users creating their own custom levels, sharing them freely, and building upon each other’s creations. As a construction worker, I have always been accustomed to protecting trade secrets and methods, the collaborative nature of this group was fascinating. I downloaded hundreds of user created levels, ranging from highly polished professional creations to obviously amateur creations that clearly indicated the creators were just having fun. The variety was incredible — space stations, medieval castles, recreated versions of real world structures. Users had been producing content for DOOM for nearly two decades, keeping it relevant long after it’s commercial lifespan.
I began experimenting with creating my own levels using those level editors. Lord help me, that was confusing. Learning the intricacies of nodes, vertices, and sector heights was giving me headaches. I ended up creating a few basic rooms connected by hallways, added some enemies, and called it a day. There wasn’t much complexity to it, but it was cool to see something I created run inside the DOOM engine. Much like the first time you wire electricity to a home you’re building and flip the switch to see if it works.
The controversy surrounding DOOM’s violence struck me as an exaggeration when I played it as an adult. Yes, it is violent, but it’s cartoonishly violent and over the top — to take it seriously requires an additional layer of dedication. The enemies are literal demons from hell — you are not killing realistic people. The blood and gore are represented in such low resolution and abstraction that calling it “realistic violence” is a stretch. I can see how worried parents were in the 90’s when they saw their kids immersed in this virtual carnage. Context matters and most adults weren’t gamers back then.
Playing through each of DOOM’s episodes took me several weeks of playing in the evenings. Each episode had a unique identity — the first episode felt like a military base that was overrun by monsters, the second episode was stranger and more hellish, the third episode became completely insane with bizarre architecture and impossible geometry. The difficulty also gradually increased as I progressed through the episodes. Initially, I felt confident and powerful, but soon I was getting destroyed by Cyberdemons and had to begin thinking strategically about how I approached encounters.
The sound design in DOOM was something that I didn’t realise was significant until I played with quality headphones as opposed to my laptop speakers. Those monster roars reverberating through the corridors, the mechanical slams of doors opening, the satisfying BOOM of the shotgun — it created an atmosphere that the simple graphics couldn’t create on their own. I could hear enemies before I saw them around corners and I used auditory clues to navigate. Playing late at night with headphones made it downright eerie at times.
As I continued to explore more retro FPS games, the influence of DOOM on almost every shooter that followed became evident. First I played Duke Nukem 3D — I could see DOOM’s DNA in that game, but it had a ton more personality and humor. Then I played Quake — that felt like the technological advancement of DOOM. Even modern games owe a debt to DOOM’s fundamental approach to design — fast character movement, powerful weapons, and enemies that charge toward you rather than hiding behind cover.
That DOOM’s source code has been released and people are still modifying it, porting it to new platforms, and adding functionality that the original developers never envisioned is truly remarkable longevity for any piece of software. I’ve seen DOOM running on anything from calculators to digital thermostats. Some genius 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 hindsight, I believe DOOM may have been the game that assisted me in understanding why people become obsessed with gaming history. It wasn’t merely nostalgia or collecting old games that fueled 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 accomplish with limitless resources. NO cutscenes, NO story, NO tutorials — just perfect gameplay mechanics streamlined to their simplest form.
I still have DOOM installed on my laptop and will periodically launch it and spend some time blasting demons through familiar corridors. Twenty minutes of shooting demons in familiar corridors never gets old. DOOM has become my go-to example to explain to people why I waste my time with retro games instead of playing modern games. DOOM illustrates that great game design will transcend 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 houses 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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