Retro-Spec: Welcome to Your Doom (Doom History, Doom Retrospective and Doom 4 Impressions)

Doom. One of the great giants of the gaming industry, a franchise practically anyone who's ever touched a gamepad, a joystick or a gaming PC knows well. Doom thrusted the first person shooter from a mere concept to the most popular video game genre for years to come.

From the original, to its sequel, to their innumerable map packs, mods, spinoffs, rebrands and - programming guides? Yes, Doom captured the imagination of gamers to point, shoot and repeat for a decade. All the modern behemoths like Overwatch, Call of Duty, Destiny, Battlefield, you-name it owe something to the ground that the Doom franchise broke back in the early 90's.

There WAS that little game somewhere before that, which had something to do with...wolves...or...nazis...or....nazi robots or something...but no matter. Where there was Buck Rogers in the 30s, it was Star Trek that inspired a generation of sci-fi fans to want to adventure beyond the stars.

Doom was in many ways the "Star Trek" of First Person Shooters. You may or may not remember this, but there were several long years when every new shooter was called a "Doom clone". Doom was the cattle brand that all shooters were marked with. Yeah, that was the staying power this series had in the minds of gamers.

This trend lasted until the late 90's and early 2000's when it slowly shifted and was eventually replaced with the generic term we know now as "First-Person Shooter." So what happened then? Why do we have more Battlefields than we have numbers for, and a new Call of Duty being announced every few months it seems? Where was the love for the self-appointed grandaddy of shooting? To fully understand the evolution of Doom, let's go back to the early 1990's when a couple of dudes named John started a company called Id Software.

After making a few popular games like Commander Keen, ID released Wolfenstein 3D, which was a popular albeit now primitive-looking 2d shooter presented in the first person perspective, they went on to make Doom, which graphically blew away the competition in its smooth, tactile controls.

Great aesthetic presentation and addictive demon-killing gameplay. Doom's core gameplay worked so well several games reused the engine for other great games like Heretic, Hexen and Strife. Some of those launched their own successful series. But funnily enough, Doom's engine wasn't technically a 3d game engine.

It was a 2d shooter that PRESENTED the gameplay through the 1st person perspective. It's hard to imagine now, but in Doom, there were no stacked rooms or bridges or any level geometry other than walls, floor and ceiling. Interesting tidbit that not many people know.

Doom was a big hit in 1993, so much in fact that ID Software churned out a mostly-unrevolutionized but still very well-received sequel called Doom II. Admittedly, Doom II was the first of the series I ever played, and boy was it glorious. It was, fast, gory, glorious and a testament to action gaming.

Within seconds of a brief block of story text, you were in the game dismembering demons like there's no tomorrow. Possessed soldiers, Imps, Cacodemons, Cyberdemons and more! A few years after Doom II, ID's next game, Quake was released. Quake introduced fully polygonal levels and models.

This meant fully 3d enemies, guns and vertical level design. You could jump, climb and fall through a true 3d space now, all while killing monstrous enemies and grooving to a legit Trent Reznor soundtrack. And Oh Boy what glorious polygons those were! I count...I count 3...I think....2 and a half? Anyway, Quake was very impressive for its time.

It has definitely aged badly, but nobody can shake our belief that the 3d gun-toting, rocket-launching speedfest that was Quake was widely successful, spawned various sequels, spin-offs and treatments and became one of the greatest arena shooters of its time.

But after several Heretic, Hexen and Quake sequels, as well as other successful games like Duke Nukem 3d, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life, and even Call of Duty we still had seen no trace of our beloved demon-bashing Doom sequel which would bring the game to a new decade and a new dimension.

After eleven long years and no doubt buckets of crumpled sketches and scrapped designs, Doom 3 was finally released...and...it was good. Most people really liked it, it had great graphics and it was very impressive for the era, was much more console-friendly this time around since the game controllers were much more apt to shooters and first person games this time around.

But in my opinion, something had changed deep in the game. No longer were you just a simple "Marine" , but now you were part of a larger story, there were characters that talked to you, there was a plot of some sort, and overall the feeling I got from Doom 3 was more of a Half-Life or pseudo-survival-horror game than one of ID Software's previous entries.

It takes about a half hour of moping around, talking and "go here" questing to actually get into the meat of the game, and often in the beginning you are running around with a flashlight or a weak pistol. The game was significantly toned down to a more realistic look, and the setting was made into something darker, literally.

Hey I know it's a pet peeve of mine, but in an arena/ID Software shooter, does it kill you to properly light the place? I know Doom 3 is well known for its spooky atmosphere as compared to other games in the series, as well as the jump scares, but the last thing I want to have to worry about when I'm planning on chainsaw-ing a demon in half is what lighting I would like to have while bathing in Imp-gore.

So Doom 3 was a departure from the series, but it had been so long coming, most people enjoyed the game and it is mostly praised to this day. Then...nothing. ID Software had made some other minor updates or rereleases in the interim, but no Doom 4, the other franchises they created like Wolfenstein and Quake were taken over by other studios.

ID Software had really just evaporated into nothingness for several years until releasing the slightly underachieving Rage in 2011. John Carmack, one of the founding fathers and one of the key directors and programmers at ID talked about a new Doom game in the works, but as delays and problems seemed to mount up, Doom seemed less and less likely to release soon, or worse, be any good.

There was even a trailer, scrapped artwork and prototype gameplay and levels made for an early version of Doom 4 that was cancelled and rebooted. It had a more earthy and even Mad Max-like look, with a lot of the NPCs looking like something out of a Call of Duty or Gears of War game.

The gameplay was allegedly slow, incentivized cover mechanics, and was overall very un-Doom-like. To this day, Doom holds a special place in my heart. In fact my Gamertag/alias of many years is Indigo, which was inspired by one of the unusual colors of Doomguy you could choose from in Doom II.

My channel icon was even inspired by an older Doomguy helmet. So that's why when a new trailer for Doom 4 was shown off in 2015, people's interest spiked again. I regained some optimism that we'd finally see a true successor to the Dooms of old. When "DOOM" came out in May of 2016 -- to many's surprise it had a fantastic single player component that expertly captured the core gameplay of demon-destroying the originals cherished, but with VASTLY improved movement, verticality and audio/visuals, I jumped the gun and played it.

I had a BLAST. Within about 5 seconds of starting the game's campaign I was given a gun and demons to shoot at. It was glorious. With a creative reinterpretation of melee combat and finisher moves which makes it so close combat is never obsolete. Fast, visceral gunplay with a return of most all the classic weaponry.

Combat feels responsive, weighty and brutal. Excellent pacing and regular action or interaction with little to no interruptions for story bits or cinematic events. Large, labyrinthine maps with lots of secrets, supplies and tricky areas to get to or discover.

Blistering framerate and resolution capabilities to squeeze every iota of graphics power out of your system.
Doom 4 is fantastic. I haven't few traditional shooters that capture the simple magic of the oldschool FPSs, with only Wolfenstein: The New Order and maybe Bulletstorm really coming close.

I could do a whole video on Doom, which I no doubt will in the future. But after finishing the campaign I have to say I am satisfied with what ID Software was able to put together after the long, delayed and rocky production cycle that led up to its release.