In this history as any, there are no firm beginnings and endings, no switch that represents a complete break with one thing and start of another. Doom, though, marks a turning point which I am going to have to adapt to, or at least acknowledge if I don’t. I have been playing games on my own, and occasionally with someone else in the room with me, and we are on our way to a world of deathmatches and connected play where that won’t represent the experience as most people enjoyed it.
Taking on other people was much of the reason for Doom’s computer-network-destroying success. Doom as a solitary pursuit played its own part, though, was surely larger in the success of the PlayStation version, a delayed opportunity to experience it with less faffing around. Freeware, mail order or pirate downloads replaced with buying a disc and putting it in a console and just playing — the appeal of the latter was a winning proposition.
And if this is slightly late to the party and simplified from the PC version, that doesn’t have to matter too much either. Limitations in early 3D didn’t get any less obvious over time, but when Doom’s demons break up into pixels at close range it works as part of the horror. Mood, as they say. More than anything since Platoon, the grain of the medium’s limitations just enhances the hellish atmosphere. That was part of the singular Doom experience that people were still coming to in 1996.
Playing Doom for the longest period I have in my life, on single player, it wasn’t something solitary that I was reminded of, though, but childhood games of laser tag. Laser tag came about in the ‘80s, before Doom or even Wolfenstein 3D, but my earliest memories of playing it are from some point in the ‘90s. They are probably from after Doom’s initial release, and our local Planet Laser may even have been influenced by Doom in its set up.
Each time I was ushered with my weighed-down teammates into its industrial, dark, smoked-filled room with details picked out in coloured lighting, I remember the sense of purposeful clarity, the sense of possibility around every corner, and above all a sense of vulnerability. Getting hit just meant a brief power down, but the feeling of being prey to an uncontainable multitude was a powerful one regardless. Taking on the incredibly stressful but held within bounded rules was a special kind of exhilaration.
All of those same feelings come back to me with Doom, in a similar mix. Much of that is because of a similar sense of place. You are channeled in an efficient way but with enough of an air that the place exists in some way beyond that reason, that something else happens (or has happened) here too. Enemies are all around and unpredictable. Doom does remarkable things with the simplest tricks of darkness and light. The lights going out is a brutally effective way of increasing terror levels. Sometimes when you, say, need to collect a blue key card, you know you’ve found it when you see an area lit up in blue in the gloom, and it’s diegetically nonsense but also incredibly atmospheric.
A video game offers a lot more possibility in the way of your character’s powers than being a sweaty child in a heavy infra-red sensor vest, but Doom isn’t in the business of taking them. It gives you some bigger weapons to pick up and lets you move at a fast glide beyond most human capability, but it places a lot more emphasis on vulnerability than power. What it takes instead is the chance to up what is against you all the further.
Doom is a game with a default difficulty level called ‘hurt me plenty’. It keeps on-screen a bloodied and battered image of the character you’re playing on to make sure you take in the suffering. The lack of any precision feedback on your firing, indeed the way that shooting at anything above or below you starts to feel more like waving what you hope is a magic wand and hoping for the best, fits too. Doom is masochist not just in the difficult gameplay sense of many games I’ve played before it, but in a more all-encompassing way.
There’s a telling point in the third level when you get the keycard you’ve been after and I started thinking ahead to backtracking and using it, and suddenly a room full of fireball-throwing demons is unleashed and just staying alive becomes the dominant thing. Mostly you’re choosing to proceed from a more informed position than that, but you’re still asked to put yourself in that position. You can shuffle around and strategise and collect all the items to increase your chances a fraction, but the ultimate task remains the same. Doom presents a series of doors to hell, and asks you to choose to keep opening them.
