Dissecting Doom
John Romero, Tom Hall, Aubrey Hodges and more on the creation and legacy of the influential first-person shooter
Today’s gaming landscape would be very different without the influence of id Software’s Doom. While it certainly wasn’t the first game to adopt a first-person viewpoint, let you run rampant around mazelike arenas or go head-to-head against like-minded players with a thirst for destruction, it’s arguably the game that laid the groundwork for everything that followed. There are numerous reasons why virtually every single shooting game that followed in its gory wake was referred to as a ‘Doom clone’ and not a ‘Wolfenstein 3D clone’ – id’s hellish blaster did everything right, from its meticulously designed levels, to its satisfying weapons and imaginative enemies. Doom felt like a perfect storm, a culmination of all the techniques that John Carmack and the rest of id’s talented development team had created whilst working on games like Hovertank 3D and Wolfenstein 3D. For many, Doom felt like the second coming and it proved that brutally fast-paced action wasn’t just found in arcades, it could be enjoyed on the very systems typically used to create spreadsheets and other mundane tasks. Doom helped make PCS exciting, and even Bill Gates realised the game’s appeal and starred in a video to help promote the release of Doom95 on Windows 95 as Microsoft helped pushed Windows as a serious options for gamers.
Doom’s gargantuan success, along with the continued interest in 3D gaming, saw plenty of other developers racing to market with their own takes on the popular game. Chief among them was id itself, which continued to push the first-person template with Doom’s very own sequel in 1994 and later with Quake, which ushered in proper 3D graphics, but there were plenty of other contenders to Doom’s throne, including Heretic, Hexen, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D and countless others. Some games shamelessly copied Doom, while others went out of their way to improve on id Software’s formula, whether it was by adding ever more over-the-top weaponry, or using a completely different setting, from dark fantasy/horror to familiar Earth-based adventures to separate their games from the Martian carnage of id’s shooter. Some of these games were converted from Doom’s own engine, while others were built from the ground up in order to best fulfil the visions of the teams behind them.
Even today, the love and respect developers and gamers have for Doom within the industry runs deep, with even co-creator, John Romero recently returning to the game in order to create a brand-new set of levels for his expansion, Sigil. Doom was like a lit match to tinder and it ignited a passion in gamers that is only shared with the very greatest videogames today. We’re delighted, then, to be able to look at id Software’s game in a little more detail with both John Romero and Tom Hall and examine both its design and the aspects – from modding to the many bizarre systems that can run it – that have made Doom so memorable.