Doom (video game)

Doom is a first-person shooter (FPS) computer game released in 1993. With its innovative use of 3D graphics and visceral gameplay, Doom changed standards for interactive entertainment and came to define the emerging FPS genre for years after its release. Distributed as shareware at a time when the number of people with access to the Internet was growing explosively, it changed social aspects of computer gaming by popularizing multiplayer deathmatch and by enabling players to create and share custom-built modifications to the game.

Gameplay

Doom can be played in either single-player or multiplayer mode. The single-player mission is set on the moons of Mars which, due to a catastrophic teleportation experiment, have been invaded by demons from Hell. The player takes takes the role of the only surviving human, a nameless space marine — "one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action", who must fight his way out of the infested moon bases.

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Development and technology

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Impact

Numerous publications have ranked Doom among the most influential games of all time. Doom received Game of the Year awards by both PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World in 1994. It also received the Award for Technical Excellence from PC Magazine, and the Best Action Adventure Game award by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. PC Gamer named it the most influential game of the decade in 2004, and second greatest PC game of all time in 2005. In 2001, Doom was voted the greatest game of all time in a poll among over 100 game developers and journalists conducted by GameSpy.

There is a spectrum of opinions regarding what should be considered the primary the cause for Doom's success. Certainly, the following factors all contributed to some extent:

• Widespread distribution by shareware
• Simultaneous emergence of the Internet
• Advanced 3D graphics and immersive gameplay
• Support for multiplayer gaming
• Support for user-made content

According to John Romero, Doom was successful because it arrived at the right time and synthesized many emerging technologies, which id Software "just capitalized on".

Critics have argued that Doom primarily owed its success to its graphics technology or its explicit graphical violence. Others have praised the game's design. Chris Crawford characterizes the design as "pedestrian ... there's nothing brilliant or innovative ... In design terms, Doom offers nothing that we didn't have in 1981. It is a collection of old and well-established ideas with really snazzy graphics. But the ideas are assembled with great skill. The designers of Doom implemented the basic precepts of good game design with impressive thoroughness." Greg Kasavin holds that Doom "achieved its blockbuster success solely through its incredibly high quality".

Distribution

A common estimate is that 15 million people have played the shareware version of Doom.

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Doom became notorious for its popularity in workplaces and university computer labs. Id Software had hyped Doom as about to become "the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world". Indeed, Intel "banned the game after it found its systems swamped", as did many universities in the United States. At the University of Louisville, where "people [sprinted into the computer lab] falling all over each other to play the game", a lab supervisor created a program that would go through the system and delete all copies of Doom. Dennis Chao of the University of New Mexico exploited the game's known "appeal to the target audience of system administrators" when he in 1999 modified Doom into a system administration tool. At Lotus Development, players of the "fiercely fought Lotus League of Doom" were granted access to the network after 6 pm, although installing the game at all was officially disallowed. According to one employee, the game was like a "religious phenomenon" at the Microsoft campus.

Industry and genre influence

Doom immediately became the standard by which similar games were judged. The term "first-person shooter" did not gain popularity until the late 1990s; the years after Doom's release, first-person action games were generally known as "Doom clones".

Id Software themselves capitalized on the success by developing a sequel, Doom II: Hell on Earth, as well as several commercial add-ons.

In 1995, a rumor spread that Doom was more widely distributed than Microsoft's extensively advertised new operating system Windows 95. Bill Gates, seemingly aware of this, asked in an internal e-mail whether he should buy out id Software. Though the plan was never realized, Microsoft did respond to the popularity of Doom by increasing their focus on gaming, particularly by developing the DirectX technology and a Doom port for DirectX as a flagship. To promote Windows 95, Gates made a presentation at a game developers' conference while digitally superimposed into Doom to blast zombies.

Graphics, realism and violence

In the words of Lev Grossman, Doom presented a "three-dimensional virtual world so powerful, compelling and disturbing that it would change the real world around it", whose "fluid, hyperkinetic rhythms [became] part of the visual language of movies and TV". As many players were unfamiliar with the type of interactive 3D graphics, Doom was sometimes half-jokingly said to be the source of "Doom-induced motion sickness" or DIMS.

Doom was and remains notorious for its high levels of violence, gore, and satanic imagery, which have generated much controversy from a broad range of groups. It has been criticized numerous times by religious organizations for its diabolic undertones and was dubbed a "mass murder simulator" by critic and Killology Research Group founder David Grossman. Doom prompted fears that the then-emerging virtual reality technology could be used to simulate extremely realistic killing, and in 1994 led to unsuccessful attempts by Washington state senator Phil Talmadge to introduce compulsory licensing of VR use.

The game again sparked controversy throughout a period of school shootings in the United States when it was found that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, were avid players of the game. A rumor spread afterwards that Harris had designed Doom levels that looked like the halls of the high school, populated with representations of Harris's classmates and teachers, and that Harris practiced for his role in the shootings by playing these levels over and over. However, although Harris did design Doom levels, they were not simulations of Columbine High School.

Mods and Internet communities

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Doom is the subject of several still-active websites. Its longevity can be attributed to the multitude of available WADs and editing tools. In early 2007, the idgames archive contained 15,000 modifications and received some dozen new submissions each week. Since the engine source code was released in 1997, over 50 source ports have been developed that allow Doom to be played on modern operating systems, provide extended editing features, and add new multiplayer game modes. The Compet-N archive contains 6072 speedruns for Doom and its sequels, which makes it the second most popular game for speedrunning after Quake.

Further reading

• David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, Random House, 2003