Readers reminisce about what it was like to play Doom back in 1993
Ultra Nightmare
This week, Patrick Lee gave us his thoughts on the new Doom, a reboot that managed to modernize much of what made the original so astounding. A big part of that is the game’s speed, which is more than a few hairs above most contemporary shooters. But Cowtools wondered whether everyone’s appreciation of the first Doom’s speediness was a bit of apocryphal:
Am I missing something? I never thought of the original Doom as a fast game with non-stop monster shooting. This is the second review that has emphasised that aspect. The reason I loved it so and re-played it so much, was the creepy atmosphere, exploring the occult symbols on the walls, and the sense of dread as you crept about, daring to look around a corner, and hearing the hiss of monsters in the distance.
Commenters saw this both ways. Plenty pointed out that the action itself was very fast, but many, like Iceland, agreed that, especially for the time, the atmosphere of the game was just as engrossing:
I think it might depend on when you played Doom. Maybe in 1993 Doom had a level of relative realism that didn’t exist for me just a few years later. Doom’s revolutionary advances were completely lost on me, and I more or less took for granted that it was a cartoony first-person version of Robotron.
Now to be clear: I loved Doom. But even disregarding the limitations of the era, it was always very gamey. Consider the intentional predictability of the enemies. Revenants or imps were specific memorable enemy types in the same way as Mario’s Hammer Bros. or Koopa Troopas or those little helmet beetles in Mega Man. They all represent repeatable patterns and tendencies to master, much more so than the AI some soldier in a modern shooter.
I would expect that for most people who found Doom immersive and scary, that was possibly a product of how mind blowing the technology was when it came out. It’s got scary art, but it’s such a video game—which is actually one of its greatest unique strengths that’s been neglected until this reboot.
And D. corroborated that theory:
When it came out and you were playing it for the first time, Doom was like nothing that had come before. It was tense the way a horror movie is tense. It’s not exactly that you’re genuinely scared. It’s more that you’re on edge in a particular way that mimics fear. Other games of the era were tense, too, but more like watching a sport where it’s down to the wire and you’re hoping your team wins.
If you came to first-person shooters in the mid-to-late ’90s, then you were just getting into it when Doom was merely the originator in a wide field of clones. You had Duke Nukem 3D, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Hexen, Strife, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Rise Of The Triad, etc. Put simply, the FPS landscape only had a couple of games before Doom was released, and after Doom, the floodgates were opened. So I’d say there was a window during which you had to play Doom for it to truly impress you. After that, it was the best of a wide bunch, but not the singular experience for those of us who had a buddy at school give them a shareware 3.5” floppy with Doom’s first episode on it.