Behind the Gun: Doom

So we have a history lesson that needs to be gotten out of the way, if we’re going to do this whole “writing about FPSs” thing right.  And since I’ve been going back to games of this period lately anyway, it makes sense personally as well.

So…  Doom.

Doom isn’t necessarily where the first-person shooter genre began — that honor probably belongs to Wolfenstein 3D, or possibly some game even older — but Doom is where the FPS style of game really took off.  Before Doom, the genre hardly existed.  There were really only a handful of notable games in that vein.  After Doom, the first-person shooter quickly became one of the major staple genres of computer gaming.

The success Id Software achieved with Doom is a thing of legend.  According to the stories, productivity at IT firms and computer engineering outfits ground nearly to a halt as the employees apparently preferred to install the game on their workstations and play against each other on their respective companies’ networks.  In addition to its PC release, Doom has found its way to a number of consoles, both those popular at the time of its release, and subsequent generations.  There are versions of it for the Super Nintendo, Sega’s 32X add-on for the Genesis, the ill-fated Atari Jaguar, the Sega Saturn, the Playstation, the N64, the Xbox, the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, the Gameboy Advance, and this is not a complete list.  It was also ported to the Macintosh (albeit some years after its original PC release and, oddly, after even its own sequel).  There were also several games made by other companies who licensed the Doom engine (essentially, the technology which allowed for the creation of 3D graphics, placement of items, enemies, doors, etc., and governed their operation in the game’s environment): Heretic, Hexen, Strife: Quest for the Sigil, and expansions to these.  Doom itself received a couple of expansions (and got re-released in different versions with those additional episodes included), and then had a full-blown sequel using the same engine just a year or so later.  In addition to all this, the fan community continues to create source-ports, which (for the uninitiated) are programs designed to make the game run on newer operating systems, taking advantage to a limited degree of some of the technical advances that have occurred since 1993, when the game was new.  The only game I can think of with more source-ports is Quake, also an Id Software product, and the immediate successor to the Doom crown.

Let’s let all of that soak in, just for a minute.  For the past twenty years, Doom has been commercially viable and readily available on almost any platform you could ask for.  With video games, that kind of longevity is mind-blowing.  The willingness of both fans and the developers alike to create either updated versions of the game, or software to make running it on modern systems possible, speaks of a demand practically unheard of in this particular medium.

So the obvious question practically asks itself: why all the fuss?

Well, the problem with thinking critically about Doom is that it’s so completely ingrained in the DNA of the FPS genre, it’s almost impossible to really touch.  It seems quaint, these days, though in its time it was at the absolute leading edge of both the technology seen in computer games and of game design.  It’s only because its design elements have become so ubiquitous, and been iterated and improved upon so much, that it seems absolutely mundane today.  The best analogy I can come up with at the moment is like reading about the moral panic that erupted when the Beatles became popular.  Beatles music seems so… safe, these days.  You hear them on the lite-rock stations, for God’s sake.  It’s difficult to fathom how anybody in their right mind got their shorts in a twist about lyrics like “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah,” unless you look at the context and realize that, in that time, nobody else was making music like that — or if they were, they didn’t manage to touch that particular nerve.  But now, things that the Beatles have done are practically everywhere in popular music. 

So that’s Doom today.  The Beatles of the first-person shooter genre.  And just like them, although it may seem simple by today’s standards, there’s an entirely satisfactory game that’s still quite enjoyable even today.

While it was modern for its time, Doom today still feels fairly old-school.  Its structure is still a fairly rigid, level-based affair, with clear beginnings and objectives.  Most games today tend to feature much more fluid play, breaking things up for story, but otherwise feeling like a more unified experience.  If you put Doom at one end of this play-style scale, Half-Life is a prime example of the opposite extreme, never once breaking away from the player’s perspective, and moving in a single, unbroken line from start to finish.  Most games tend toward this end of the spectrum these days.  By comparison, Doom’s sense of pacing is more… well, game-like.  You begin each level at one point, and your object is to get to the clearly marked level exit and throw a lever.  This ends the level, and you’re given a brief rundown of the percentage of enemies you’ve slain, secrets you’ve uncovered, and the amount of time it took you to complete the level compared to a given par time.

This isn’t a bad thing!  In some ways, it’s actually good.  Rather than constantly mounting tension that goes on for hours, Doom gives it to you in smaller doses, allowing you some time to relax at the beginning of a level before the challenge ramps up again.  It also serves to make your goals fairly clear.  You always know what you need to be looking for or doing at any given moment, and there’s never so much ground to cover that you have to worry about getting completely lost, or intimidated by the sheer scope of the environment.  But the level structure does make Doom feel very different from more modern FPS titles.

Another concept Doom introduced (or at least made popular) was that different weapons have a different effect.  This in itself doesn’t seem revolutionary, but there’s a template of weapon progression that Doom laid out.

1. Melee weapon (here, that’s punching or using a chainsaw, if you can find it): requires no ammunition, and generally does little damage, but still allows you to attack if you’ve exhausted your ammo and are in a tight spot.

2. Pistol: Fairly accurate, better than nothing in terms of offensive power, and ammo is fairly easy to find.  However, while it’s sufficient early on, it’s going to take forever to drop the more powerful enemies, and it has almost no stopping power.

3. Shotgun: Questionably useful at long ranges, but respectable at medium ranges (still more powerful than the pistol) and devastating up close, the shotgun is the weapon you’ll be using the most, as it strikes a good balance between offensive power and ubiquity of ammo.

4. Chaingun: Rapid-fire machine gun which uses the same ammo as your pistol.  The rate of fire makes it powerful, but that same speed means you have to use it judiciously.

5. Rocket launcher: Devastating at any range, to the point that most lesser enemies fall after a single hit.  However, the blast can damage the player as well as the enemies, and ammo is scarce, so choose carefully when and how to use it.

6. Plasma gun: The “fun” weapon, firing rapid-fire bursts of energy that are accurate and fairly damaging.

7. BFG-9000: The Big One.  Basically clears a room in one blast, but requires an obscene amount of ammo for even a single shot.

The template itself wouldn’t be all that interesting, of course, except that until pretty recently, almost every FPS followed that model pretty much to the letter.  The weapons may have gone under different names and had a different appearance, but in terms of function, order of progression and best application, this is pretty much the list for FPSs, until Halo came along and introduced the concept of a more limited and situationally available arsenal.

But what perhaps set Doom apart most in its own time was something that its predecessors were incapable of.

Atmosphere.

Now, again, it all looks a bit long in the tooth today, what with our mip-mapped, bump-mapped multi-million-polygon character models, realistic physics models, fancy lighting effects, and locales modeled from real life.  But Doom was a pioneer in its time.  It used lighting to create contrast between high-visibility areas and cramped, dark areas, for one thing.  It was able to induce a sense of actual fear.  You ran around in narrow corridors where the light flickered or was totally absent, occasionally hearing the sounds of creatures that hunted you through the level.  Wolfenstein 3D had blown people away just a year or so before, but Doom made it look about as tense and atmospheric as an early level of Pac-Man.

Part of why this was possible was due to the leap in technology between the two games.  While neither of them is truly 3D, tricks of rendering made Doom’s levels much more believable environments.  Wolfenstein 3D was very rudimentary.  You were in a series of mazes meant to evoke, vaguely, the interior of a German castle, or bunker, or something.  It varied depending on the episode.  The environments were all fairly uniform, with a flat, even floor and ceiling that had no texture, and bright, consistent lighting throughout.  There were occasionally objects placed in the environments (tables, chairs, potted plants, hanging cages), but these seemed to be placed as much to break up the monotony as for any other purpose.  They suggested a sense of purpose to various locations, but were rarely ever very convincing about it.

A modern FPS thrives on a sense of place.  Wherever you are, whether you’re struggling across battlefields in World War II, or duking it out on space stations centuries into the future, or slaying monsters in medieval fantasy worlds, a large part of what makes the game work is how convinced the player is of the reality of the environment.  Wolfenstein 3D offered little reality.  Its appearance was novel in its time, but Doom blew it away.  In addition to better lighting and sound, Doom also allowed for more varied environments in terms of overall design.  It sounds perhaps a little simple to say now, but things like staircases, elevators and moving platforms dropped jaws when Doom introduced them.  Vertical movement of any kind had never really been possible before.  It was still technically impossible then.  I could never explain it in technical terms, but there was some sort of coding sorcery at work that allowed for vertical movement in what was still technically – so far as the computer was concerned – a 2D space.  It’s one of the reasons the game offered no capability to look up or down.  The perspective only looks right when you’re looking straight ahead.  Playing Doom in source-ports, where vertical looking is possible, exposes it.  The perspective distorts in odd ways that make looking up and down kind of uncomfortable after a while.  Later source ports have fixed this, or at least mitigated the effect somewhat.  Still, the use of visual trickery to achieve the more advanced 3D effect and the resultant improved realism made a world of difference in the necessary sense of place.  Doom’s environments still seem a bit abstract by today’s standards, but if you were to make a sliding scale, with one end being abstract environments and the other being absolutely realistic, Doom would land just on the realistic side.

So what about actually playing the game?

Well, one thing Id Software seems to believe in quite firmly is that the player should not be kept waiting, that the average player starts the game not to be dragged kicking and screaming through tiresome opening cutscenes, hand-holding tutorials, or beginning levels that offer little action, no challenge and no satisfaction.  The player, in Id’s mind, wants to start up the game and just play, without distraction or delay.  That approach wasn’t quite so revolutionary in its day, but it’s a refreshing novelty today.  Not that there would be much time to waste in the first place.  The controls are simple for this sort of game, and as for story…  Really, Doom doesn’t have a story to speak of.  John Carmack, head honcho at Id, is famous for his expressed belief that video games need story about as badly as porn does, and at least with Doom, he certainly put his money where his mouth is.  Where most games have a story, Doom has a premise, which is confined to the manual, and to the brief text crawl that accompanies successful completion of an episode.  It’s simple, uncomplicated and unsophisticated, and could probably be summed up like a prompt for some drama-class exercise.

“You’re a lone space marine on one of the moons of Mars, where the government has been conducting secret experiments into teleportation technology.  However, there is an unforeseen hitch in this technology, which is that the portals work by transporting things through another dimension, which turns out literally to be Hell.  Now the demons are using that technology to invade.  You’re the last one left alive (that anyone knows of), and you have a pistol with a couple dozen rounds in it.  Go!”

And by God, that is exactly where and how Doom starts you off.  From there it’s pretty much just a brutal, blood-soaked and gory gauntlet to the end of the game.  You pick up additional weapons on your way through the Mars base and then the bowels of hell itself, and the game does a good job of keeping you tense and anxious for action.

Even the traditional complaint leveled against pretty much every Id Software game — namely, that the enemies are mindless, and their main tactic (their only tactic) is to advance toward the player and attack whenever possible — falls flat here.  First of all, for 1993, that’s about all that was possible.  Doom at least can be forgiven for this sin (its descendants… not so much).  Second, while the enemies may indeed be dumb as a sack of hammers even so, their placement is smart.  Large, massively powerful enemies may be intimidating, and are certainly lethal, but almost always pose less of an actual danger than mobs of low- to mid-strength enemies.  As the game progresses, learning how to bait enemies into attacking each other is a skill that becomes increasingly mandatory.

There’s not much to dislike, unless you absolutely can’t stand the sort of tongue-in-cheek heavy-metal aesthetic that the game uses in its imagery.  And really, even that has its purpose, which seems to be to remind us all that it’s just a game — a violent one, yes, but almost cartoonishly so — and therefore probably not worth getting into a moral panic over.

Not that that stopped anybody.