ImpossibleFX - photography | filmmaking

January 7, 2002

This is a rant I posted in a forum at DoomCenter.com, a fan site I frequent, where someone had asked how good id Software’s upcoming game, DOOM III, was going to be and how it measured up to other games, including the classic 1993 original, DOOM.

I think rooms-over-rooms became old hat with the Build engine (Duke Nukem 3D) and has merely been done “prettier” with subsequent engines including the Quake and Unreal series. I don’t care if DOOM III is the prettiest game engine ever, it will never beat the original DOOM in the pure fun and sheer terror it gave us gamers in the mid-90s.

Not even Hannibal Lecter will make me jump out of my seat further than the horrid sound of a former human spotting me in the nether regions of Phobos Base. Nor will any other game scare me so intently that I’ll find myself ducking away from incoming gunfire in my seat, safe at home as well as DOOM continually forced me to.

I am, in short, DOOM’s bitch. As we fans all most certainly are: the game is eight years old! How does it do that? The fans do it. We do it. And nothing else in the gaming world will ever get to us as much as DOOM has and continues to do.