On Playing Doom 30 Years Later

Published on Aug 5, 2023

In my senior year of college, I took a horror film class. At some point during the semester, while exploring the evolutionary stages of genre (primitive, classical, revisionist, and parodic), we watched John Carpenter's Halloween, a massively influential film in its time.

By the 2010s though, the horror genre specifically, and the media landscape more broadly, had already undergone several evolutionary stages having felt its influence. I distinctly remember a number of people (myself included) laughing and/or rolling their eyes at the film's ending because, while it clearly wanted the audience to feel unnerved, it felt obvious and overdone to us.

Having grown up absorbing a culture influenced in myriad ways by Carpenter's Halloween, when it came time to finally watch the thing that did the influencing, it felt like nothing special. I've never forgotten that experience, because it taught me a very important lesson about considering the context in which a piece of media was made. But I've also never forgotten what it felt like to think so little of something with such an outsized influence.

It was with this memory in mind that I started playing Doom — iD Software's seminal first-person shooter, released in 1993 for MS-DOS — for the first time in my life, just a few months prior to its 30th birthday, and a few months after mine.

Such is the weight of this lesson on my mind, that I let it shape my entire experience. It wasn't so much a worry that Doom might not hold up, and more a useful tactic to get me to open my mind a little bit more, and come at this experience from a slightly different angle than I otherwise might. After all, I was cracking open a history book, not booting up Mario Kart.

It seems to me now, though, that it's only natural to worry that an older game, especially one running on DOS, might not appeal to modern sensibilities. Games of a certain age naturally, visually telegraph their oldness in a way that is comparable to old black-and-white movies, but perhaps even more extreme. In any generation of film, a guy still looks like a guy onscreen. In various generations of video games, a guy can either look like a guy, a single square, or a cleverly arranged pattern of squares, based on the technical limitations of the time.

The farther back in time you go, the chunkier the graphics get, the greater the opportunity for a game to feel mechanically dated. Games have evolved, just like any other media, along with their enjoyers' sensibilities. Sure, graphics have changed, but also, control schemes have standardized, levels of friction and abstraction have ebbed and flowed, and we no longer have to throw in a handful of quarters every time we lose. Put plainly, we used to put up with a lot of bullshit that we don't anymore (and, frankly, vice versa, though that's neither here nor there).

So when firing up Doom for the first time (or System Shock, or Deus Ex, or Another World, or SimCity 2000), it's pertinent that I take the time to remind myself that I might have to put up with some bullshit. It's then my job to determine if that bullshit is worth it or not, separate the bullshit from what the game is trying to do, and in some cases, determine if the bullshit is good, actually.

In the case of Doom, the bullshit stems from the fact that it was not built for what we now call mouselook, a feature present in most modern 3D PC games, which allows the player to adjust their view (look around) by moving the mouse. Mouselook.

Instead, Doom is played with a keyboard-only control scheme, which takes some getting used to for someone who did not grow up interacting with games this way. The up and down arrow keys move the player forward and backward, while the left and right arrow keys turn your point of view to the left and right. Strafing is accomplished by pressing left and right while holding down the Alt key (or, as I later learned, by pressing the comma and period keys). Spacebar interacts. Ctrl shoots.

To quote Tim Rogers's Action Button review of Doom, "Playing Doom with just a keyboard sucks, until suddenly, it totally owns."

Opening myself to experiencing Doom on its own terms, meeting it halfway, allowed me to cast off any rose-tinted glasses I might have otherwise donned, and evaluate it honestly. Had I instead found a version of Doom with mouselook enabled, it would have felt like speedwalking around a museum's entryway exclaiming loudly, "So this is Doom! How quaint," rather than actually playing the game. I probably wouldn't have played for very long, either.

It helps, of course, that Doom's opening episode is quite elegantly designed. Playing on this antiquated control scheme never felt like a hindrance or barrier to a higher level of skill. In fact, the restricted nature of its controls was a boon to my getting up to speed with using them.

It's this idea of restriction and/or restraint that gets at part of why I think Doom has had such a lasting impression on the world of games. Because here's the thing about Doom: it is not interested in wasting your time. It may be constrained to simplicity by the technology of its generation, to some degree, but in hindsight, Doom feels like any number of modern games with all their extra bullshit sanded off.

Where does Doom keep all of its items for the player to pick up? Strewn all over the fucking floor. How do you pick up and use these items? By simply running over them.

Is this choice the result of a technical constraint? Probably. But it feels just as much like Doom doesn't want you looking at every little trinket on the ground and pressing the interact button to pick them up. It doesn't want you digging through crates and drawers for upgrades and health. Doom wants you either killing demons, or looking for more demons to kill. Or opening doors. Or looking for keycards to open doors. But mostly killing demons.

Doom gets so much right with so relatively little, and still feels good today, because it was frugal with its friction, and generous with its speed. It gets as far out of your way as it possibly can, so you can spend your time whipping around hell and wasting demons. And again, this may all be born out of necessity, but it really feels like its creators clearly understood what types and amounts of friction feel good, and which ones are cruft.

What Doom doesn't get quite as right is most of the game after E1. That is, everything after the levels that John Romero worked on. E1 is such a tight introduction to the game, and makes such a solid first impression, that everything after it feels kind of mid. I did not enjoy any of the (thankfully few) boss battles. And it sort of felt like the game had overstayed its welcome by the time E3 rolled around. Luckily, the game feels so good to play that, on the whole, I still feel positively about my time with it.

I didn't exactly set out to review Doom in this post, though I may have inadvertently stumbled into doing just that. It's a 30-year-old game widely considered to be a masterpiece and more-or-less the urtext of modern first-person shooters. What more could I possibly add to the conversation by playing it once, 30 years late? I moreso wanted to look back and analyze my personal experience with the game to see if there were any insights to be gleaned.

In doing so, I realized that what I really learned from my time with Doom has less to do with the game itself, and more to do with that lesson I learned back in my horror film class in college.

In using that lesson to put myself in a mindset of "cracking a history book," as I described it, and opening myself to meet Doom halfway, on its own terms, and looking for what it was trying to do and say, and what I can try and make of that, I was just describing media literacy.

That's not just a great way to get into an older game, it's a great frame of mind in which to experience any piece of media — even Mario Kart.

This mindset doesn't require an emotionless detachment, and neither precludes nor automatically implies enjoyment. It's just a great way to put a piece of media in context, and remember that art is made by people trying to say something, under a specific set of material conditions. From there, you just listen to your gut and try not to give in to astonishment.

I've spent the better part of the last decade wishing I was better at media criticism. I think I just gave myself a new tool to help exercise those muscles. All it took was trying to get myself in the right frame of mind to finally play Doom.