Email: The awesomeness that is Doom

Sean,

I have been reading your stuff for quite some time now, and I would like to thank you for demonstrating that business is not the dry, boring subject I once thought it was. Thanks to you I hope to start my own entertainment company one day.

If I ever do, rest assured that customers wants will come before my ego.

The reason I am writing to you was because I very much enjoyed your last post (The awesomeness that is Zangeki no Reginleiv) and I wanted to share my thoughts on an old favorite game of mine that I have been playing through again recently. DooM.

I hadn’t played DooM since the 90s but decided to break out my old disks again as I find I can’t stand modern FPS games anymore. I thought it would be good fun to play through the game again but I’ve been shocked at just how ridiculously fun it is. Not serious, not epic, not dark and moody, just plain silly fun.

DooM has a reputation as a extremely violent game, and it is, but like Zangeki it’s a kind of silly over the top violence. The game does not take itself seriously at all. The monsters in the game, while just low-res sprites with very basic animation, are very well designed and somehow manage to still look great today (plus it meant they could have huge amounts of enemies in huge areas on screen). The music is pure rock. The AI is simple yet that just manages to be a strength rather than a weakness and I still love the way the monster will attack each other. I find myself getting them to do that over and over again not because I need to, but because it’s just fun.

The level design is very much geared to fun as well. There is one level where you start looking down on a room full of monsters and barrels. All you do is shoot one barrel and a chain reaction kills almost everything in the room. There is no challenge and no point, it’s just a fun moment and the game is full of moments like that. And there is no attempt at realism eg the power station is nothing like a power station (a fictional one on the moon or otherwise), but who cares?

It has made me remember how pretty much all games used to be like this. Realism, story, technology all took a back seat to fun. And it was a kind of ‘big smile on your face fun’ not the ‘OMG how epic’ fun developers seem to try for these days. Supposedly serious games like Command & Conquer or Resident Evil had those cheesy cut scenes and dialogue that would make you laugh before you kept playing (and people DID keep playing), but if a game does that now game reviewers just get all grumpy about it. Sometimes I think that before you are allowed to accept a job as a game reviewer now days you have to have your fun surgically removed first.

I still remember the text that used to come up after you quit the shareware version of DooM (trying to get you to order the full game). “If you don’t like Doom then you are strange and different. All your friends think Doom is great.”

What big name developer would do something like that now? Not enough I say.

Can’t add on to anything you’ve said. I miss the wild west shareware days.

During the mid to end of the 16-bit generation, I transitioned (again) to PC gaming since video game consoles had become boring. The VIDEO GAME REVOLUTION was no longer occurring on the console side no matter how much console companies were showing off their 3d games. The revolution was now on the PC.

Those shareware games you mentioned are a part of it. Games were also being played network and being played over the Internet. There is no way to describe to younger people the experience of playing Kali over the Internet (which wasn’t Internet gaming at all, just tricked out network play). The 3d revolution was better realized on the home computers with the birth of new genres like the FPS. I was quite smitten with the new RTS genre myself.

One shareware game that will take you back is this one: Epic Pinball. This is the same Epic that made the Gears of War type games. This is how they got started making these small shareware games.

Attention indie gamers! If you want to break out, you need to make your quality as good as this! I was stunned at how fun something as simple pinball could be. The gameplay (for most of the earlier tables) was awesome. The music was fantastic. The game oozed passion. Yes, a pinball game did ooze passion.

This is just an example of back when games used to be fun and exciting, when games were actually good without feeling ‘machine made’ from the ‘Industry’.