Caws Radio

Doom: thoughts and meditations.

I'm going to talk a little about video games. The Doom series to be precise. If you don't know Doom, you just won't know what I'm talking about. So go home.

Doom 3 is coming out soon. If y'all remember, Doom I and II pretty much defined the first-person shooter genre as well as the PC gaming scene when they were released back in the mid-90s. So now the long awaited 3rd is about to be dropped, and some information and screenshots have been released. The new game is apparently intended to be darker and scarier, more twisted and macabre, and more realistic. The monsters have all been redesigned to look nightmarish and horror-like, and the people at id software say Doom 3 is going to be more about creeping around and being scared than just shooting everything.

And this all makes sense. If you look at the current state of action and first-person shooter games you will see that the scary, disturbing motif has become quite popular, and it isn't very surprising to see the Doom franchise making an attempt to become part of that crowd rather than remain a nostalgic inspiration. It's kind of like how Vanilla Ice tried to make a comeback as a rap-metal act, or how Ozzy Osborne tries to stay potent in the shock-rock world that he created long ago.

I was playing Doom II the other day on the old family computer in Lebanon. The PC hadn't even been turned on in a year or so, but I started her up and had some fun in the Doom world in which I used to play every day after school. I put in the codes - God mode, happy ammo, no clipping - and shuffled around the halls of hell, turning big exaggerated demons into piles of pasta. As I played, I thought about the new Doom, and the scare factor, and the disturbing imagery, and I figured "to hell with it" (excuse the pun). It hit me that all that horror stuff isn't what Doom was all about. It wasn't about being scared, or being immersed in a dark story of survival and terror. It was about shooting monsters. It was about getting a bigger gun and saying "hell yeah" the first time you use it. Back in the era of the older games, the first-person shooter was a young medium that people were just starting to enjoy. Now that a game engine had been created that allowed players to simulate first-person killing sprees, the only variables were who to shoot and where to shoot them. First, id made Wolfenstein 3D which let you walk around a castle shooting Nazis. Nazis, of course! Everybody hates Nazis! What better way to utilize this first-person shooter stuff than give everybody the chance to gun down such a widely hated villian? After the success of Wolfenstein, the Doom games used the same template and just plugged in the idea of demon-martians in hell. Brilliant! Demons and martians! They're even more basic human enemies than the Nazis!

It is obvious when playing Doom II that the purpose of the game is good ol' fashioned blowing stuff away. There's an underlying element of fun, a hint of camp, that makes the game a joy. It's the way your character's face at the bottom of the screen is slightly comic; the square jawed, confident everyman that is stuck in this horrible environment but maintains a sense of arrogance. It's the darkly-comic hidden Wolfenstein levels that throw blond, blue-eyed Nazis in with hungry monsters that will eat them as soon as you. It's what "BFG" really stands for. These are the things that made Doom what it was, and it's that very same "don't give a shit" attitude that later resurrected Duke Nukem to take the genre to new depraved heights.

Doom 3 will come soon and a new generation will sit, frightened and disturbed, in front of their computers. But when I think of the imp, I will always picture a little brown guy who shot fireballs at me before my BFG turned him into stew.