ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM

[Music] um hello and welcome back to video games i'm tim rogers you are watching the action button review of doom a video game developed by id software and published for the microsoft disk operating system on december 3rd 1993 the sega 32x and atari jaguar in 1994. the super nintendo entertainment system and the sony playstation in 1995 the panasonic 3do in 1996 the sega saturn in 1997 the acorn archimedes in 1998 the nintendo game boy advance in 1999 the microsoft xbox 360 in 2006 apple ios in 2009 the microsoft xbox 360 again in 2012 and on the nintendo switch the sony playstation 4 and the microsoft xbox one in 2019 updated with a fourth episode thy flesh consumed in the ultimate doom released for microsoft personal computers on april 30th 1995 and by john romero with a fifth episode sigil released for personal computers on may 22nd 2019 created by john carmack john romero adrian carmack kevin cloud and tom hall with music by bobby prince novelized by daffodab hugh and brad lena weaver in four volumes published between june 1995 and january 1996 by pocketbooks adapted into a single issue comic book featuring the lines you have huge guts and rip and tear your huge guts written by steve belling and michael stewart with art by tom grindberg published by marvel comics in may of 1996 reimagined developed and published by midway games as doom 64 released on the nintendo 64 on april 4 1997 re-engineered by night dive studios for microsoft windows nintendo switch sony playstation 4 and microsoft xbox one and published by bethesda softworks on march 20th 2020 remade by john carmack as a role playing game and published as doom rpg for symbian operating system and java 2 micro edition mobile devices on september 13 2005. adapted into a feature film distributed by universal pictures which premiered on october 17 2005 starring carl urban and dwayne johnson credited then as the rock rebooted by id software and published by bethesda softworks for microsoft windows sony playstation 4 and microsoft xbox one on may 13 2016 reviewed by tim rogers from action button on friday july 31st 2020. for those born lacking the bursting hot blood-packed freakopathic creature guts requisite to endure the entire trial that follows let us begin with the bottom line doom speaks for itself therefore in the spirit of a work speaking for itself i have decided to forgo my usual introduction extending ridiculosity in an effort to roll said ridiculosity meditatively into the following program reviewing doom requires us to reckon with doom's ultimate meaning it requires us to assess its impact both on games and on culture at large reviewing doom requires us to also joyfully discuss atari's 1979 classic arcade game asteroids and speak seriously about homicidal violent crime perpetrated at learning institutions by suicidal children doom's magnitude begs us then to present a tapestry of stories i have somehow narrowed it down to just six [Music] ever since its release in december of 1993 i have always considered doom one of the greatest video games ever made however i'd like to take this opportunity today in 2020 to apologetically confess to you that i did not actually play doom until june of 1994 also i'd like to confess that in june of 1994 i only played the first episode of doom knee deep in the dead furthermore i played it on the easiest difficulty i'm too young to die doom's forebear wolfenstein 3d chided choosers of its easiest difficulty setting which it called can i play daddy by visibly infantilizing the game's beefcakely buzz-cutted warrior protagonist with a ludicrous baby bonnet doom did not do the same though any true murder-headed game liker in 1993's imagination supplied the baby bonnet in january of 1995 i played episode one of doom knee deep in the dead again all the way through on the hey not too rough and hurt me plenty difficulties it was not until 1996 as the release of id software's doom follow-up quake impended that i on my dad's old work computer finally played episodes two and three of doom i did this as one does literally to impress a girl i did not play doom episode 4 thy flesh consumed until november of 1999 on a math major's unnecessarily for doom 3d card equipped pc in my college dorm at indiana university in bloomington indiana finally playing the almost unrecognizably iterationally twisted post-release epilogue and final episode of the original doom on that monster pc one month before quake 3 existed felt like playing doom on another planet compared to playing the shareware release of the first episode of doom 6 months after its release on my dad's old 486 it happened like this by 1999 i knew a lot about video games i wasn't the guy people on the dorm floor went to when they wanted burned playstation 1 games though i was the guy people on the dorm floor came to to ask me to play those burned playstation 1 games while they watched you could say i was a bit of a proto twitch streamer i have critically low self-esteem even to this day that's why i usually only tell stories that make me sound cool however some of you in the comments seem to think that i do this because i like myself buddy if i liked anything about myself i wouldn't be here right now anyway here's a story where i don't look cool one day in november of 1999 just about every dude on my college dorm floor was crowded around my tv goldeneye had been out for two years at this point though in my experience anyway literacy of goldeneye's deathmatch mode had only just finished saturating all of then-modern american masculinity somehow slightly over two years after its initial release every american dude of army enlistment age had some boast or another to make about their goldeneye skill my room filled up every night for a month with a handful of bros in the mood to yell even my roommate who loved nascar as much as he hated me joined in the nightly ritual like i said this had been going on for a month goldeneye had to become a sport so precious that we'd had to start lifting my tv into the common room so we could fit in everybody who wanted to get in on the action so this one night just about every dude on the dorm floor even the ra was standing around smelling like dudes and squinting at my 25-inch television screen split in four in the common room except it wasn't every dude two dudes were missing these two particular dudes never left their room one of them was a math major the other one was a computer science major the computer science major wore gray tinted glasses these guys were the only two roommates on our floor who'd known each other before the school year started in fact they'd known each other since elementary school every time i saw either one of them in the hall they greeted me as timothy with an accent like whatever high school they'd gone to had had a crew team and they'd been on that crew team so they settled up to the back of the crowd arms folded one of the guys looked at me and said timothy i asked him if he wanted in and he replied with and i quote i'm happy to watch in summary less than 10 minutes later i heard the word frame rate uttered aloud for the first time in my life one of the guys on the floor who had a girlfriend and was on the track team came up to high five me after he won around he had never played a single video game before that night he said to me dude this is amazing i thought that the guy on the track team was was pretty cool and i was a running dabbler myself back then though for reasons too various to mention i'd not ever bothered to do so competitively i liked to talk to this guy about running he was a sprinter that's that's what i'd always wanted to be i would give up video games and youtube videos to become a sprinter i'd run the 400 meters if i had the talent or skill or age or shoes to do so back in 1999 i would drop any conversation i was in the middle of having if this guy showed up in my dorm doorway to ask me how my running was going i'd tell him about my squat rack performance he'd warned me not to over train i'd ask him about his times he'd suggest we go get a gatorade later and sometimes we did go get a gatorade later this was perhaps the shallowest friendship i ever had with another person and that's saying something because i was in numerous bands in my twenties the math major too seemed to almost revere the idea of an athletic scholarship because he struck up a conversation with the sprinter which lasted two full dialogue boxes before he asked dude do you have a pc received an answer in the negative and then immediately suggested you should get one so you can play quake 3 with us suddenly something filled me i was standing there with my 20-year-old physique and my six-pack abs and my rock-hard quads and my disproportionate calves realizing that the three people in my immediate vicinity had devoted themselves to my separate hobbies far more deeply than i ever had they were each separately far better than me at the things i thought i was good at for example i could run pretty fast i regularly clocked mild times under five minutes however i didn't have no athletic scholarship i was a video game guy and i wanted desperately to make video games someday though i sure had never considered that studying computer science was just something i could do nor did i happen to have the hardware on hand to handle quake 3 or even quake 1 or even quake 2. i messed it up wait maybe that's funnier who cares that's good it sounds like i'm dunking on quake 2 for some inscrutable reason nonetheless i blurted heck yeah dude quake3 the sprinter asked what's quake 3 i spoke the knowledge i actually possessed quake 3 isn't out yet the math major then asked the sprinter dude do you want to see quake 2. 30 minutes later i'd heard another person speak the words american mcgee out loud for the first time it happened like this the math major showed the sprinter quake 2 for 10 minutes before the sprinter asked what about quake 1. so the computer science major loaded up quake 1. i had actually played quake 1 so i was like and i quote yeah dude quake 1. the math major asked me to agree with him that quake 2 sucks i'd never played quake 2. i was about to commit an act of quake 2 posery i didn't want to lie so i said all that i could i said quake 1 owns dude the math major said quake 2 is gonna stand the test of time the computer science major then called the level design in quake 2 uninspired the math major objected the sprinter sat silently playing quake 1 just to say something i said you know what level i like in quake 1 that one with the ziggurat i'll be perfectly honest with you i had only played the first episode of quake 1 as of november 1999. i had played it at a girl's house i only remembered the level ziggurat high episode one map eight because i was then as i am now a connoisseur of non-egyptian pyramids i didn't realize that referencing the level would result in the math major immediately calling american mcgee a bozo he literally said and i quote [Music] american mcgees i'll be honest i didn't know who american mcgee was i'd later meet american mcgee i'd even live in the spare bedroom in american mcgee's house in shanghai for a while back in 1999 i didn't even know his name the slandering of american mcgee's name had the immediate result of the computer science major turning to me and asking timothy say what do you think of e4 m1 i froze they might as well have been speaking klingon in case the message isn't clear yet let me lay it there i was a doom poser i wasn't a 90s kid i was a 90s teenager i listened to nirvana and megadeth and rage against the machine not metallica and marilyn manson furthermore i listened to big black the jesus lizard and nine inch nails though i did not listen to tool unlike some kids i knew who had owned a sega genesis and a sega cd i had owned a sega genesis and a super nintendo i was a console baby actually i'm at least mature enough now to admit that owning a sega genesis didn't change the fact that i was a nintendo baby many nintendo babies back then did not even know pcs had games on them until suddenly their bullies started bragging about doom i had a little head start on the other nintendo babies because my dad worked with fancy computers for the us army i knew computers had quote unquote games on them though until that day in 1992 when i first played wolfenstein 3d on my dad's work computer in the storage closet of our house on fort meade maryland i didn't know pcs had real games on them every pc game i'd ever seen had been shareware trash that couldn't touch anything on a console or interestingly scorched earth which is better than anything that's even on modern consoles one of the sergeants in my dad's office sergeant diaz was a big pc guy my dad was always bringing shareware discs home and presenting them as gifts from sergeant diaz to us kids i'll be honest sergeant diaz most of the games you gave my dad sucked we played each of them for about five or six minutes before going back to super mario bros 3. one day however my little brother got hooked on a commander keen disk my dad brought back from sergeant diaz me and my big brother let him have it because that meant he'd stay away from our super nintendo however the day my dad brought wolfenstein home our super nintendo became a little bit of a baby's toy my dad showed us the little blue disc he told us and i quote you guys ain't gonna believe this he booted it up in the storage closet in solitude he called us in when he was ready we knew we were in for something wild when he said tell your little brother he better not come in here wolfenstein 3d was a fast grotesque violent game about bloody murdering nazis it was the last game i can remember my dad ever playing all the way through to completion wolfenstein 3d's first person perspective instantly reminded me that day in 1992 of only two other games one was the bard's tale a role-playing game on pc that had required me to draw maps on paper just to find my way around the town the other was shadowgate a first person graphical adventure game for the pc and mac that i'd originally played on the nintendo entertainment system in both of these games the player moved just one screen at a time with wolfenstein for the first time i was seeing the walls whip past my character as i sprinted it was huge let me tell you a secret i never heard the wolfenstein 3d sound effects my dad's work computer didn't have any sort of sound hardware much less speakers it wasn't until 2011 when i revisited wolfenstein 3d on a more modern pc that i heard the sound effects for the first time today in 2020 i can say with confidence that if i'd been able to hear the sounds of wolfenstein 3d that day in 1992 i would definitely have been excited enough about doom in 1994 to have acquired the full game instead when doom came out i just played the shareware release we were in indianapolis indiana at this time sergeant diaz was still back at fort meade maryland sergeant diaz would be transferred to my dad's team of whatever they were a year later though today i realized that my dad had acquired the doom shareware disc by himself my dad did not like doom he set it up for me and my brother he played one level em one m1 my brother was 16. i was 14. my brother had a job and friends at school he didn't want to play video games anymore so alone i played the shareware episode of doom a couple times on my dad's now ancient work computer with no sound effects i liked that shareware episode of doom about as much as a teenager would have liked super mario brothers in 1985 if he couldn't hear the world one one theme music a couple months later final fantasy vi came out for the super nintendo and that was that three years before doom came out my grandfather died of brain and lung cancer my grandfather had fought in world war ii my dad grew up smoking cigarettes i presume he started smoking when he was like four he's that kind of dude maybe the week after my grandfather died my dad joined some support group to help him quit smoking one of the later steps of the program involved committing himself to a hobby so he bought himself a beautiful baby grand piano because as he always told us his dad had always talked about wishing he'd learned how to play the piano at age 40 my dad started taking piano lessons when my dad was 42 he played wolfenstein while my literal world war ii remembering grandmother still lived my dad laughed out loud at bloody silent dead nazis on his computer screen yet when doom came out he called the violence awful my catholic dad called doom satanic i realized today that wolfenstein 3d came out one month before my dad's 42nd birthday when my dad played all the way through the retail version of wolfenstein 3d on pc he was as old as i am today had doom been a little less satanic and maybe a little more anti-nazi my dad might literally still be a hardcore game player today instead he quit games the way he quit piano lessons by forbidding us children too to touch the hardware shortly after my brief doom shareware experience my dad's home office became a full-time storage closet and the baby grand piano became the pedestal for picture frames it continues to serve as today so it was that in the fall of 1994 pc games retreated from my grasp and i didn't argue the future of my beloved super nintendo was too bright like i said just a couple months after i lost touch with pc gaming final fantasy vi came out in 1995 i had a job at target and i was able to afford games of my own today i come to you confident that if i'd just been able to hear doom's music and sound effects in 1994 i'd have bought all the way in i'd have saved up for a pc i'd have played quake at my own house i mean i'd probably still have also played it at the girl's house because who's not going to accept a girl's invitation to play quake at her house in 1996. though if i'd just been able to hear doom's shotgun rackings and demon screams and imp squeals and butthole guitar riffs i'd have been ready to play quake at that girl's house in 1996. instead i went through the rest of high school as a nintendo baby and a doom poser only are you really a poser if you keep it to yourself i never talked to anybody about doom every time doom got referenced in a video game magazine i thought yeah doom i know that game yeah that's one of the best games of all time i sat alone at lunch during my freshman year of high school some kids used to throw stuff at me a kid from my algebra class used to pour his milk on my head he did it like once a week once he stole an apple out of my lunch bag during class took a bite of it during lunch and then threw it at me while i was reading my dad's pristine first edition of ian fleming's on her majesty's secret service the next week a couple kids started sitting at my lunch table every day i didn't know who they were i'd never seen them before one of them was a god one of them was just an idiot who wore metal band t-shirts they introduced themselves as bob and korg they were a year older than me korg he was the goth he he told me that he called himself korg because he wanted to buy a korg synthesizer someday bob said his name was robert they said they wanted to be my friends i never said a word to them because back then i didn't say a word to anybody if i thought they were making fun of me it wasn't until october of 2019 when i was writing an essay about some other awful aspect of my high school experience that i realized they'd been serious they had literally seen a kid get beaten up and bullied and they decided to sit at his lunch table they sat at my lunch table every single day for the rest of that school year they tried unsuccessfully to get me to talk exactly once every day before they gave up and continued their conversations and progress they talked about literally three things metal dungeons and dragons and doom once bob and korg started sitting at my lunch table nobody threw food at me for the rest of the school year so let me get real with you for a second here for 25 years of my life i owned this memory of these two absolutely genuine people doing me a real kindness and even as i grew up and matured and experienced many adventures and careers i repressed this memory i mentally wrote these two guys off as two jerks who were just making fun of the fat kid until one day last year sitting at my desk in a pitch dark room in the middle of a high floor in a skyscraper in goddarn times square in new york manhattan i failed to let myself know that i probably had had some form of escape from my terrible high school experience all i had had to do was say one word to bob and korg about doom maybe i would have done that if i'd been able to hear the sound effects in wolfenstein 3d back in 1992 maybe not it's impossible to know for sure though dad you should have bought a sound blaster like sergeant diaz told you to well here i am reviewing a video game in a video on the internet after failing at every other career i've tried in the 25 years since bob and korg sat at my lunch table i have noticed traces of their attitudes and opinions and many people i've liked and admired to summarize bob was john romero korg was john carmack i liked these guys even though i wouldn't let myself believe otherwise than that they were making fun of me they talked all the time about making computer games i wonder if they ever made any i should have made computer games with them oh well sooner or later life is at last a list of things you every day deal silently with not having done as i played and replayed final fantasy 6 which we called final fantasy 3 by the way in case there's any confusion you can't even call it final fantasy 3 anymore these days political correctness and got hyped for chrono trigger bob and cork still continued to repeatedly discuss doom i at the time could not empathize with anyone who had seen that much in doom it had not blown my mind in the slightest bob and cork kept talking about death match and i honestly did not even know what death match was though perhaps persuaded by their fanaticism in january of 1995 i replayed the shareware episode of doom on my dad's old computer several more times on higher difficulties i got more out of it during this second experience i can't say i exactly understood bob and korg's love of the game and i won't pretend that i at once understood the meticulous intricacy of john romero's iconic level designs though i promise you i liked it a lot more than i had before it clicked i had once understood the meticulous intricacy of john romero's iconic level designs well over a year later my dad bought a new computer so he gave me his old computer a girl invited me to her house to play quake i purchased a used retail copy of doom in a big dented cardboard box i also purchased a sound card a sound blaster installing that sound card in my dad's old pc was the first time i'd ever actually seen the inside of a pc i played doom episodes one two and three and i promise you that at that point i finally definitely loved it for its speed its momentum its geometry its violence its mazes its loneliness its quiet parts it's loud parts i loved doom's experimental levels i loved doom's straightforward levels i loved doom i at last understood the meticulous intricacy of john romero's iconic level designs however three years later when the computer science major asked me what i'd thought of e4 m1 i had no idea what he was talking about they might as well have been speaking klingon i was silent for a second too long the mask might have slipped revealing the doom poser underneath the computer science major offered a hint he said you know heck beneath except he didn't say heck if you know what i mean he was talking about heck beneath except it's not heck get used to i'm sorry heck beneath an american mcgee level the math major asked timothy didn't you play ultimate doom i recalled just then having seen an ultimate doom box on a retail shelf once or twice so i was like ah no i never played ultimate doom suddenly the computer science major into the math major dropped their trivial rivalry for a second and yelled dude the computer science major always a more jovial fellow than the math major put his hand on my shoulder and said timothy are you telling me you've never experienced perfect hatred to which i replied maybe not in the sense that you mean we all laughed we became friends they later made me read neil stephenson novels so they could quote unquote pick my brain i started making fun of them for liking lord of the rings because i quote myself nobody ever gets laid in lord of the rings the math major left his big hardcover copy of george rr martin's brand's new novel a game of thrones atop my dad's old work computer and as a counterpoint for the rest of the school year i didn't read that book until 2011. i was a song of ice at fire poser way back before we could begin earnestly discussing for example gandalf's sexuality i had to play doom episode 4 thy flesh consumed with three guys standing behind me arms akimbo they made me play it on ultra violence i died about 600 times they yelled all night until it was saturday morning so american mcgee if you're watching this i'm sorry i hated e4 m1 10 years after i first played e4 m1 my friend stabo and i took american mcgee out to dinner in tokyo we'd met american mcgee about a hundred times before this night every single time we had ever hung out with american mcgee i told stable beforehand to not embarrass me i was always begging stabo don't ask him about doom that night finally stabo didn't listen in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely sumo wrestling we were talking about sumo wrestling in the middle of a conversation about sumo wrestling stable asked and i quote did john romero personally forbid you from putting a plasma rifle in heck beneath and he didn't he didn't say heck though if you know what i mean american mcgee laughed and simply said no to which stable replied you should have put a plasma rifle in there to which i interjected going into perfect hatred with a plasma rifle already would have sucked the conversation died into a morose half drunk partial silence and that my friends was the closest i ever got to not being a doom poser until today today i look back on my formative experiences with the early days of three-dimensional first-person murder simulators and declare the battle still winnable for the past month and a half i have worked hundreds of hours toward the goal of once and for all fully obliterating from my soul any iota of street credlessness recolon doom i arrive at the end of my intensive research process knee deep in degreeless mode those two for lack of a better word poindexters forcibly arguing about whether quake 1 was better than quake 2 might as well have been undercover fbi agents or people in a tv commercial holding a video game controller upside down compared to me as i am right now so american mcgee if you haven't closed the tab yet let me say that on monday july 6 2020 i finally came to terms with what you were trying to accomplish in e4 m1 i dare say it's a good level and not just in the sense that in a game so shimmeringly pure as doom you'd need to be a chimpanzee with a hammer to make a truly bad level american mcgee with e4 m1 aka heck beneath you hit on some sort of primordial thrill years ahead of the curve by having enemies instantly begin insipidly teleporting in from no explainable anywhere the second the level begins you crafted an evil simulation of the terrible experience of walking into an online battle royale deathmatch ambush of infinitely experienced 12 year olds your level is hateful and fast and stuffy and chaotic and cramped a claustrophobic single player simulacrum of a stacked round of 200 against one capture the flag i can't say i like your level and i won't but i certainly respect it in a sense having said that when later in this review i begin presenting breakdowns of specific level designs i might forget to mention it well now that that's out of the way let's leave 1993 behind for the meanwhile and move on to our next story [Music] i began this reviews researching process with one goal to once and for all remove the doom poser stain from my hideous flesh i knew that such a cleansing would require me to play a lot of doom in my continuing quest to go above and beyond even the most unreasonable viewers expectations i decided that the only way for me personally to play a lot of doom was to play all of doom the most difficult decision was the first one one of the key characteristics of doom is that it quote runs on everything unquote so legendarily is john carmack's masterpiece of programming optimized that hackers and weirdos have gotten doom running on even the most inanely underpowered systems so inanely underpowered are these systems that to this day we game touchers continue to joke about getting doom running on such and such new toaster blender coffee maker or pressure cooker i weighed my options and decided that the best way to experience the original doom was via crispy doom which is based on the source port chocolate doom if we consider optimization a cornerstone of doom's legend then using crispy doom's unlocked frame rate feature on a 240 hertz monitor did not exactly amount to sacrilege crispy doom also offers high resolution textures which i disabled crispy doom also allows the player to scale down doom's generously large bottom of screen heads up display i did not utilize this feature much as i tend to favor clean user interfaces i cannot stand for cleaning up dooms it's it's it's too iconic crispy doom also offers flawless mouse controls which i issued in favor of a keyboard only experience let me just say you ever want to get hungry looking at a computer mouse try playing all the way through doom with just a keyboard in the year 2020 playing doom with just a keyboard sucks until suddenly it totally owns once i'd set my mind on crispy doom and performed my initial experiment which we'll talk about later i played through all three original episodes on the middle difficulty level hurt me plenty doom episode 4 thy flesh consumed initially released on april 30th 1995 as part of the ultimate doom re-release that's six months after the release of doom 2. so i tentatively did not consider thy flesh consumed technically a part of doom 1. after playing through doom episodes 1-3 on crispy doom i played through doom 2. then i played through doom episode 4 thy flesh consumed on hurt me plenty once i'd finished thy flesh consumed i came to the decision that i had been wrong thy flesh consumed is in fact part of doom 1. likewise doom 2 is also part of doom 1. so now i faced a crucial philosophical question how do we play all of doom furthermore how do we play all of any video game completionism makes up its own genre of youtube video these days completionism suffices for some people's entire personal brands the typical game liker's completionism most often takes the form of commitment to a game's internal metrics completionists most often satisfy themselves by obtaining every item killing every enemy unlocking every achievement finishing every side quest and topping every progress numeral up to 100 doom presents players only three post-level numbers kills items and secrets achieving 100 in any of these numbers ultimately means little achieving 100 of a doom level's secrets might put your clear time high over par achieving a 100 items score might require a play style that is dinkier in the eyes of a spectator one might guess that a complete play of doom requires intensive exploration of every difficulty level in my research for this review i played through all nine levels of each of doom's four episodes on each of the game's five difficulty levels i did this in pursuit of a complete experience that complete experience has led me to the conclusion that the highest difficulty setting nightmare represents what i consider over completion in summary nightmare is a stupid difficulty level that turns doom into an almost bad video game i love it doom's higher difficulty settings differentiate themselves from the lower settings by presenting more enemies and fewer pickups while playing through the game's higher difficulty settings i consulted my video footage of the lower difficulty settings through careful comparison i determined that doom's individual level designers believed in clearly different definitions of default difficulty as i said a higher doom difficulty setting presents the player more enemies and fewer items than a lower difficulty setting therefore a level designer must start designing a level with one particular difficulty setting in mind john romero clearly favored hurt me plenty the central of doom's five difficulty settings on higher difficulty settings some of john romero's levels become comical exaggerations they come to resemble a farcical fake video game meant to implicate doom as inspiration for a fictional teenager's murder rampage in an episode of law and order to play john romero's masterpiece perfect hatred e4 m2 on the hurt me plenty difficulty is to glimpse the mind work of a level design genius as vital as the technical genius of john carmack on the nightmare difficulty setting however perfect hatred looks about as much like doom as that one animated gif of that super mario maker 2 remake of world 1-1 from super mario brothers with all those fireball chains in it looks like super mario brothers back in 1999 when i first played perfect hatred super mario maker did not exist today in 2020 super mario maker 2 exists and it gives me the perfect framework for thinking about 1993's doom to play doom on every difficulty setting is to play more doom than all of doom this exercise however allowed me a peek behind doom's red curtain doom contains more than itself where some works of art are more than the sum of their parts doom is more than more than the sum of its parts doom's comically bloated superfluous difficulty settings thus point the way toward doom's true nature doom is bigger than itself john carmack technically designed doom with modders in mind as the first game of this exact kind doom thus spiritually if not legally owns all of the games it inspired therefore to play all of doom is technically to play video games every day for the rest of one's life i set myself a deadline of six weeks for the composition of this review script so i didn't have time to play video games every day for the rest of my life i needed a plan seeing as it runs on everything amounts to a core pillar of doom's legacy i committed myself to playing at least episode one of every port of doom i ended up playing all of every port of doom illegally and ill obtained every version of doom ever made suffice it to say every non-pc version of doom sucks in a unique way the super nintendo version is a particular nightmare the atari jaguar version is mostly okay if you pre-possess an interest in software engineering the sega 32x version interested me primarily because while i was staring at its japanese and north american box arts during the pre-production phase of this review i fell into an imagination of what creative direction which executive gave the graphic designer of the north american sega 32x logo i mean clearly the mission was to use the same font that they'd used uh for the words genesis and sega cd on the sega genesis and sega cd game box art templates though on the other hand why the 32x version of doom unfortunately was not as interesting as the graphic designer job interview i had imagined you know what's more interesting than the 32x version of doom is the fact that the 2003 book masters of doom refers to the 32x as quote the new console from sega unquote likewise the 3do version of doom offered me little of interest aside from the experience of downloading a 3do emulator for the first time in my life maybe i'll look for an iso of way of the warrior one of these days actually you know what 3do game i really want to play i want to play lucian's quest i remember reading about it in an issue of game fan a long time ago i've had it on this games to play someday list in my head since literally 1996. all i can remember about it as i type this not as i sit in front of the prompter reading this is that lucian's quest was made by micro cab and the developers of mysteria the realms of lore for sega saturn that's a pretty good game you know what sega saturn game is not pretty good though doom it turns out that running on everything doesn't always mean it runs well on everything doom for sega saturn is a port of doom for the sony playstation i love doom for the sony playstation i've loved doom for the sony playstation ever since my friend liz ryerson said on the internet many years ago that doom for the sony playstation is an extremely interesting version of doom after she said that i watched a bunch of let's plays of doom for the playstation played a little bit of it in an emulator and started telling people i loved it yes i admit i've been a poser about doom for the sony playstation for several years now however today i come to you having played all the way through doom and final doom for the sony playstation doom for the playstation fascinates me unlike the pc original doom's playstation versions feature colored lighting and an oppressively dark ambient musical soundtrack by aubrey hodges who composed the music for doom 64 as well playing doom for the playstation renews one's perspective on the original doom the original doom for pc comes across as rinky dinky in some aspects compared to its playstation remake the original pc doom's brighter white lights and bouncy music give one clownish whiplash upon returning to it from having just spent many hours knee-deep in the playstation remake the playstation version of doom might in fact represent a purer realization of doom's harder striking mission statement than the pc original accomplished that's not to say the pc original of doom is a failure in any regard i'll go ahead and say it in so many words the pc original doom is better than the playstation version of doom because of bobby prince's sometimes clowny blooping music not in spite of it doom is goofy elevating it to cinematic horror balloons the goofishness toward a perhaps unintended effect you know what version of doom is a failure though the game boy advance one i played it in an emulator on my 15-inch laptop screen and i've got to say if i'd had to squint at that on an original game boy advance screen when it released in 2001 i'd have given up video games forever i'd be working in a law office right now if i'd played doom on game boy advance the story of doom's development famously mythologized the division of roles of programmer and designer given the endurance of the carmack and romero archetypes doom embodies one of the first colloquial instances of a game engine with doom carmack turned id's previous game wolfenstein 3d into a factory for making itself powered by romero's tinkering making levels in doom was so user-friendly in comparison to all games that came before it that today in 2020 i dare say you can't say you've played doom much less played all of doom if you haven't waded into the modding community user created mods aka wads were and are doom as much as john romero and sandy peterson's levels were doom so to play all of doom is to play every wad when we consider that many wads might sit unfinished on their makers computer hard drives we realize that one can't actually play all of doom without committing a few breakings and enterings since i was short on time i dedicated myself to playing only the number one wad from each single year top 10 list on doomworld.com top 100 wads of all time the doom modding community's dedication to the game over those 10 years of its history amazed me the adaptability of john carmack's doom engine unfolded before me as i played wad after wod i thought to myself some of these wads make the original doom look like wolfenstein so to test my gut feeling i had to boot up wolfenstein and play through its first two episodes my hunch hadn't been far off doom community designers with a decade of doom experience had proven that the doom engine's very limits were malleable at the hands of a good designer as i reflected on doom wads i recalled an anecdote from david kushner's 2003 book masters of doom which chronicles the rise and plateau of id software between 1990 and 2003 when john romero left id software in 1996 after the release of the original quake he based his new company ion storm on the dream of creating a game development studio where game design was king i recalled that the book had painted a portrait of romero as creatively stifled exasperated with the pressure of designing a game around technology that was still being invented to make sure i'd gotten the anecdote right i then re-read david kushner's book masters of doom so as to better grasp john romero's 24 years ago notion of design as king i then played the opening chapter of his 2000 game dai katana then played his 2019 doom wad sigil in fairness i then decided to play through all of quake 2 the game that most directly competed with john romero's die katana i figured it would be proper to replay quake 1 prior to replaying quake 2. so of course i did that using vanilla quake with trent rezner's original soundtrack while replaying quake 1 i formulated one of the hypotheses we'll touch on toward the end of this review that game likers have deified carmack and romero both for going on these decades and clearly carmack is a smart enough guy to transcend video game development and become a literal rocket scientist in his spare time while romero on the other hand left id software to make a highfalutin game company that burned money in the penthouse of a big skyscraper today we generally understand that both john's were essential to doom's success though without john carmack's technology john romero's game design would have had no room to breathe though in replaying quake 2 before re-re-replaying doom 1 i became burningly desirous of an answer to one question exactly mathematically how essential was john romero to doom's success to answer this question i knew i had to perform a deep analysis on each of doom's level designs i replayed all of doom once more then i replayed doom 64 doom 3 bfg edition and doom 2016. when i had played about three hours into 2020's doom eternal i had to vacate my apartment because my lease had run out however the property manager of our new apartment has yet to review our paperwork despite our starting the process literally last year so in the middle of my research process i found myself forced to relocate temporarily to a small room on the top floor of a hotel in times square new york manhattan because of a global virus situation that has for the moment extinguished to the tourism industry i ended up paying less for that hotel room than i'd have paid to live in my old apartment however for various complex logistical reasons i was unable to transport my beautiful alienware ryzen pc to the hotel room i figured we'd be out of the hotel room in a week anyway so i committed myself to researching my review in other ways during my hotel stay for example i read the doom novels knee deep in the dead heck on earth infernal sky and end game by daffodab hugh and brad lena weaver those books have some really mormon stuff in them wearing nine dollar panasonic ergo fit earbuds on my seven-year-old laptop in a king-sized hotel bed while eating an entire eight dollar two bros pizza i joylessly watched the 2005 universal pictures film doom starring dwayne johnson credited as the rock and dreads carl urban i have absolutely nothing insightful to say about that film when one week in the hotel had ended the news trickled down to me from the condo board that they were in fact absolutely jerking me around stuck in the hotel for three more weeks i replayed doom and doom 2 on my nintendo switch five times each on both hurt me plenty and ultra violence difficulties while i was doing this i asked my fellow action button founders truck heck developers and true doom murder heads brent porter and michael kirwan to send me high quality captures of each level of doom michael kirwan took the john romero heavy episodes 1 and 4. brent porter captured the sandy peterson playgrounds of episodes 2 and three porter and kerwin each played their respective levels with keyboard controls only they dropboxed me their files which i then took four days to download on hotel wi-fi analyzed using the action button method against my own playthroughs finally as my month-long hotel stay came to an end i watched the 2019 film doom annihilation on my seven-year-old laptop while wearing nine dollar panasonic ergo fit earbuds and eating an entire tuberose pizza i have nothing insightful at all to say about that movie except that by this point these two bros meant more to me than my real two bros and yes my real two bros are mario and luigi halfway through a second replay of doom 64 on my nintendo switch i realized that i should start writing this review i started writing this review six hours and six minutes before typing this exact sentence nice that's true i actually i log all my workouts log your work hours everybody especially if you're a freelancer or working for yourself like i do log your hours so when someone asks you how long does it take you to do that you just know because you've got a spreadsheet that's got ten years of data in it log your hours six hours and six minutes while playing so much doom across so many vintages and versions and remakes and sequels spiritual or secular it never occurred to me that i would ever truly experience all of doom it occurred to me at one point deep into a knight playing doom 2 on my nintendo switch in portable mode that doom is as jorge luis borges described the 1001 nights that the idea of infinity is consubstantial with it that the thousand and one nights is not something which has died it is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it for it is a part of our memory i know now that you don't necessarily need to play doom to have played doom you don't need to have played any doom at all to have played all of doom yet i only know this because i've studied doom's individual level designs so intently that i can retroactively see the flags doom planted on the mountain tops of future game genres doom is not just a video game doom is the vortex nexus nucleus at the center of the idea of video games themselves i could have perhaps reviewed doom more efficiently than i am about to review doom now without actually playing doom therefore to perfectly review doom is to play doom and then reflect on how life would have proceeded without your having played doom you cannot literally play all of doom as i've said you don't need to play doom to have played doom however i'd recommend you play doom you could play it on your pc via the crispy doom source port you could play it at 240 frames per second or in the spirit of its immortal optimization and port ability in an act of righteous revenge for the censorship nintendo perpetrated on wolfenstein 3d they made the blood green and they turned the attack dogs into rats you could purchase doom for five dollars and play it on your nintendo switch in a hotel bed with imperfect yet relatively historically acceptable frame rate if you find yourself transforming into a doom connoisseur i'd furthermore encourage you to experience doom for the sony playstation for its colored lighting its ambient music and its aggressive leaning toward doom's erstwhile subtle insinuations of horror or if you want to get weird with it i'd recommend you just play doom 64. night dive studios recently remastered doom 64 for all consoles and pc it's 4.99 on every platform it runs at 240 frames per second on in widescreen on my pc thanks steven kick doom 64 was originally developed at midway in 1997. it features no levels designed by any id software designers therefore it is the closest thing we have to an officially sanctioned wad encompassing the spirit of doom perhaps as succinctly as is scientifically possible and they released it on the same day as doom eternal which i don't like in summary the complete doom experience does not require you to play any doom at all though you might as well because as we'll explore in the next chapter doom is good [Music] doom is and always has been one of the best video games ever made as i said earlier i knew this before i even played the game i knew this when i first played the game in 1994. i knew it deeper when i played the full game in 1996. i knew it in quadruplicate when i replayed the entire game in the summer of 2010 and when i replayed the last of us last month for the purpose of reviewing it on this same channel i knew doom's greatness again now that i have completed my research process my knowledge of doom's greatness is as total as doom's greatness itself doom's greatness encompasses its technological historical significance the story of its development and design process the dubious political ramifications and repercussions of its violence and the experience of playing the game itself for the moment let's review doom as a video game one plays as one might have played it shortly after its eruption in december of 1993. doom is a simple game to summarize doom in terms 1993 would understand doom is asteroids pac-man zelda dungeons with f-zero speed in a first person 3d perspective i will for the remainder of this section presume the player is playing on the ultra violence difficulty setting because ultra violence sits directly beneath the obviously central default choice hurt me plenty it's 1993 so we're assuming our first time player is a young male who considers video game difficulty a badge certifying masculinity in doom you play the part of a marine stationed on mars a clever wordplay on the first three letters of the name of that particular branch of the united states military on online message boards or dot matrix printed on a slip of paper in the ziploc bag containing your shareware disk you might encounter a scrap of story as the book masters of doom tells us john carmack said of doom story in a game like doom is like story in a porn movie one expects its presence even if one does not engage with it intellectually as doom begins something has happened on this military base and our hero is alone pointing a pistol into a room with a blue floored portion in its center turn left and we see some men we need not the game designers sketchy fiction that demons have possessed these men to diagnose that these men have problems we line them up in our gun path and press the kill button we watch blood spray one of them has a shotgun we kill him and take the shotgun we point to the shotgun toward a man and he dies as well in doom we didn't need a mouse to aim upward in doom we aimed upward automatically ascend the stairs to find some armor surrounded by windows outside of which we see mountains we take the luxurious body armor we descend the stairs back to the room with the blue floored portion already we have experienced what will become a core feature of later doom levels a backtrack this is the game's first test of our sense of direction some of our brains in 1993 flipped a coin others remembered that we'd started to the right and progress lurked to the left as we approach the hallway on the left-hand side of the room with the blue floored portion we see a wall of windows a sky and mountains outside should we stop to contemplate the view doom rewards us with a foreshadow in the courtyard below we can very clearly see another armor pickup similar to the one we already collected except it's not green it's blue we know it's different from the one we've already collected we surmise from its distance that it's better than the one we already collected and it's outside we're inside here doom has impressed upon us another vital lesson we now possess a forever undying immortal expectation of secrets we turn left now we enter the first of doom's many long narrow hallways at the end of the hallway we see a door in front of the door we see a bloody dead man doom in 1993 has here committed an act of environmental storytelling behind this door we see three dirty men in a blue box in the middle of a charcoal gray military room we kill them because we now through experience know that they don't want to hug us even without stepping out of the continuous hallway we sense that the bigness of the room before us exceeds our narrow view we step forward into the mouth of the doorway and into the large room immediately we acquire the soldier's instinct to check our corners we rotate 90 degrees to the right and surely enough a filthy depraved soldier approaches us with a shotgun we kill him let's review what's happened so far in less than one minute in its first 38 seconds by my reading inside adobe premiere doom has taught us its controls it has calibrated our spatial perception it has enticed us to always hunger for secret bonuses and it has implied heavily the value of situational awareness as seamlessly as it has showcased its graphical engine then it keeps going now we step backward and aim to the left as another shotgun soldier approaches us from the opposite corner we kill him as well and doom has imparted its final elementary lesson always expect more where that came from now we proceed behind the blue box in the center of the room awaits another corpseable military freak we proceed through an already open door into an odd angled hallway here the level designer john romero eagerly demonstrated to us early the doom engine's advantage over the wolfenstein 3d engine non-orthogonal walls soldiers come flowing through the wide mouth at the end of the non-orthogonal hallway we palpate grandeur here from inside one room with a landmark feature and texture personality we see through a hallway of quirky shape into a cavernous other room the level now impresses us with the continuity of its geometry now we pass through the hall and into a room teeming with impressive nightmares a non-orthogonally ostentatious zigzagging pathway spans a pit of visibly hazardous glowing green liquid hateable freaks parade across this bridge we contend ballistically with the enemies while two more gruesome opponents linger apparently on a raised distant ledge yet inaccessible to our ground-bound avatar these more contemptible contenders are imps the first and weakest of doom's demon enemies weakest demons though they may be they express themselves audaciously enough to impress even the first time player from their inaccessible to us high up perch they project fireballs we can track the fireballs as movement from their instantiation right up until their impact either harmlessly against a wall or arm fully against our point of view in the space of this one encounter fragment doom wires into our brain a higher capacity for situational awareness we know these spiky brown enemies imps can threaten us from a distance because the level designer john romero placed them at a considerable distance from our entry into this room and because john romero has blocked our line of sight to the imps with a corner of wall so that we must enter the room completely in order to see and thus shoot them we will likely on our first ever play of this level witness the imps's attack from our very first encounter with imps we learn how they attack and how quickly their attack projectile moves we battle the enemies until we've cleared the room we gingerly step across the zigzagging path we enter a hallway we see a door we open the door if we shoot the glowing green barrel therein we learn that explosions can kill nearby enemies now we see some walls with holes in them we can't walk through these walls though we can shoot the enemies behind them and those enemies can shoot us at the end we open a momentous feeling door between two candlesticks and underneath a sign clearly labeled exit an imp demon lunges forward to confront us from the tiny room within we kill it internalizing the final lesson that doom will never stop trying to get us thus ends the first time players first traversal through episode one mission one aka em1 m1 aka the hangar maybe our first time through this mission we walk right past the odd colored wall on the right-hand side of that final hallway past the zigzag bridge maybe we need to see a kid in the computer lab at school open it up before we know that it was there all along like that first one up block before the first deadly bottomless pit in super mario bros 1. it was there it is there it's been there all along we press the space bar and that wall slides up like a door we enter a basement hallway crawling with jerks and we blast our way out into the courtyard we saw earlier and we take the prize that was foreshadowed to us we have to step across a green waist pit that hurts us in order to get that armor so that's how we learn that some floors can hurt us i didn't write that in my script though i just thought that's pretty smart right now smart level does that good job john romero likewise maybe the first time we play through em 1m1 we don't realize we can go back after opening the exit door and now run across the hurt pit in the zigzag bridge room and into a trove of armor bonuses we ride an elevator to the top of a secret alcove and now we can see down onto the zigzag bridge room as we occupy the vantage point of our slaying enemies from before we now understand every word of the language doom will go on to speak across 35 more levels of increasing complexity just as the blue armor waits for us in the middle of a hurt pit in a courtyard outside the first window we encounter all of doom sleeps lurks and crouches here within em one m1 i've heard the melodious phrase eem1m1 a 1001 times in my career as a video game scrutinizer the video game internet positively teems with hey geographies of e1m1 a level designer at a studio at which i once worked declared it the super mario brothers 1 1 of first person shooters to which i back then retorted no super mario brothers 1 1 is the e1m1 of 2d platformers i was a doom poser even then when i announced my intention to review doom many of my viewers asked are you going to talk about e1m1 and i immediately felt a suspicion that many many youtube videos must talk about e1 m1 i imagined a game maker's tool kit video about em1 m1 there's got to be a game maker's toolkit video about e1 m1 i've seen several of game maker's toolkits videos picking apart zelda dungeons though i've never seen a video about e1 m1 from them when people asked me if i was going to talk about e1 m1 i immediately imagined they were asking me to regurgitate a game maker's toolkit video so here's what i did without checking to see if game maker's toolkit did an m1m1 video without even revisiting my video footage of e1m1 i wrote my description of e1m1 off the top of my head i filled in the part about an exact adobe premiere timestamp in my second draft after uploading this video to youtube i will search game maker's toolkit doom e1m1 on youtube and watch whatever video tops the search results to answer my viewers this question as to whether i'm going to talk about e1m1 i just did though what the heck let's talk about it some more one m1 is the rosetta stone of doom as we'll go on to explore later in this review doom is the rosetta stone of modern video games so e1m1 embodies a tiny rosetta stone sitting next to a bigger rosetta stone like all good rosetta stones the rosetta stone of e1m1 is incomplete e1m1 introduces every element of a doom level except card keys e1 m2 aka nuclear plant promptly introduces this mechanic close to the entrance of the level the player encounters a door m1m1 taught players how to open doors with the use button when the player tries to open the red door early in e1 m2 they encounter a dialog message the red card key is required to open this door in the classic fashion of good game design this level of doom has shown the player something they cannot do shortly before showing them how to do it the first half of e1 m2 sees the player navigating in labyrinth and encountering the red card key the second half of the level as it were sees the player returning to the entrance via a different route than they took to the key here doom imparts a quieter more final lesson that despite the simplicity of its design progress involves more than mere forward motion in doom you don't just pass through a level you must explore and master every corner what impressed me most when i first played doom in 1994 still impresses me most now that doom itself seems to enjoy the very idea of its 3d first person perspectives bewildering effect on the human sense of direction littered amid samey corridors of gray and brown are sometimes red sometimes blue sometimes green landmarks of indescribable geometry memorizing every twist and turn in doom's mazes taxes our sense of direction miles beyond any naturally occurring structure we get lost in doom much more easily than we'd get lost in real life both because in real life we have the benefit of a space actually existing and informing our spatial memory with a million intangible cues and clues and also we get lost easily in doom because the spaces in doom present us absolute deadpan parodies of bureaucratic nonsense architecture earning familiarity with any of doom's level designs thus amounts to a sort of shaggy dog puzzle we must earn this familiarity whilst contending with action monsters though once that contending is done and we're alone with the geometry we might glimpse the trick more than any other sensation this is what i remember about my first experience with doom episode 1 back in 1994. by the end of one level i'd killed all the monsters and now had to wander the halls alone seeking whatever arcane mechanism i needed to activate in order to unlock the exit i talk a lot about game flavors here on action button reviews so here in this review of doom i'd like to add a new tidbit of lore to the game flavors mythos the fewest flavors a game can have is two a game with one flavor is not a game doom has two flavors think of them as meat and potatoes usually these two flavors intertwine like red and white stripes on a meat and potato candy cane though occasionally one encounters a spurt of one flavor that for the moment erases the memory of the other doom's two flavors are simply put search and destroy searching entails traversing hallways between action encounters on the largest scale the player searches to find keys and unlock doors and the player needs to unlock doors to complete the level on the medium scale the player searches to access areas of the map they have not yet entered bristoling with the joy of discovery when they happen for example upon a group of yet unkilled enemies these enemies present evidence that the player has not yet entered this particular room and on the smallest scale the player searches for items to replenish their stock of gun ammunition health or armor on harder difficulties players will find themselves taking sprouge breaks after every other encounter here doom tests the players mastery of its architectural geometry if a player is at full health or ammo they can't pick up items however the items remain persistently where they fell a doom player soon acquires the skill of micro memorization use a pistol to kill a shotgun zombie who drops shotgun ammo your shotgun ammo is full use your shotgun to kill a room full of demons later now remember the location of that fallen shotgun ammo from earlier now navigate back there without getting lost in this way doom encourages players to master its levels as architecture for both large and small reasons all while moving at blazing high speeds most ingeniously on an even smaller scale doom's search flavor also encompasses secrets in a game already obsessed with taxing a player's ability to retain three-dimensional spatial information secrets break the elephant's back wolfenstein 3d had introduced players like me to the idea of pressing the spacebar in front of every suspicious segment of wall until finally we were pressing the spacebar in front of even the most unassuming of walls doom vitalizes this behavior players seeking to enjoy a straight run through each mission of an episode need all the item accumulation momentum they can get and that means finding and memorizing the locations of all the secret troves battle encounters punctuate doom's search cycles like pepperoni on a pizza you fight in hallways you fight in rooms you fight in wide open chambers sometimes you fight in courtyards you contend with imps launching visible projectiles from ledges and shelves you grow wary of invisible specters looming in the darkness of flickering lights you anticipate a shotgun jerk around every corner you come to expect pinky demons to come winking and stomping out of every door you're about to open you battle with a pistol shotgun chain gun plasma rifle rocket launcher or bfg 9000. generally each of these weapons is stronger than the last with increasingly rare ammunition conservation of ammo for more valuable weapons becomes the first time players primary psychological burden during battle the first time player repeatedly asks themselves should i use the strong weapon on this guy or is there going to be a harder encounter later in this level the repeat player knows the flow of encounters and can budget accordingly turning the item economy and restock acquisition into a fast-paced puzzle so it is that even during moments of destroy search jockeys for real estate in the player's mind while i was researching for my review of the last of us which compartmentalizes story heavy item scrounges and horror style action conflicts into their own separate bubbles i couldn't stop thinking about doom i find the last of us a structure wonderful for what it is though i couldn't help thought experimenting what would the last of us look like if it lifted doom 1993's structure to be perfectly honest i figured it'd look real bad though i enjoyed the thought experiment anyway to better understand doom's structure i performed an analysis of each level of the first three episodes of doom primarily i wanted to determine the search destroy balance i found that sandy peterson's levels in episodes 2 and 3 leaned slightly more towards search than destroy though john romero's episode 1 levels present players an almost perfect 50 50 search destroy ratio i should note i performed this analysis on game footage captured by my action button co-founders and truck heck co-developers brent porter and michael kerwin they're doom veterans and captured the footage on ultra violence difficulty using keyboard controls in their playthroughs i asked them to collect 100 of the secrets porter and kerwin are not doom speed runners they're simply fans of the game who had at the time of their game capturing not played through the campaign in several years at least not all the way through they who what true doom murder head is going to open up doom and play a level every now and again every once in a while you think while you're working on a video game or think about video games you remember a doom level and you pop doom open that's why you keep it on your windows desktop at all times you always no icons on your desktop just do i determined setting the difficulty on ultra violence and asking the players to collect 100 of the secrets would allow me the purest numbers ultra violence difficulty features sort of an explosion's worth more monsters than hurt me plenty the medium difficulty though even so we ended up with traversal accounting for a hefty percentage of the game time i replayed each mission of doom on ultra violence difficulty and then hurt me plenty difficulty and additional once through during this research process i did so on my nintendo switch in a hotel room while repeat looping the 2005 film doom on my television accompanied by a tiny wolf while suffering a bout of shingles speaking of which wow shingles is the worst pain i've ever felt in my life and i've had a root canal without anesthetic before literally that's not even though these last two playthroughs represented my sixth and seventh time through the game's missions even though by this time i possessed the intimate familiarity that comes with john maddening my way through video game tape video footage of expert level playthroughs i still felt the friction of doom's maze running aspect my repeat playthroughs and my scientific scrutinizing approach had represented my attempt to desensitize myself from the maze running that desensitization did not happen charging down those halls to pick up left behind armor health and ammo never stopped feeling like a video game game likers from time immemorial have bristled at the mere mention of the term backtracking heck some prehistoric individuals living in future aztec country or the amazon or mesopotamia probably busted out all the cuneiform yet invented in haterism of all the back and forth field crossing necessitated by their primitive version of soccer game likers are all about that forward progress doom especially at high levels of difficulty encourages frequent backtracking to acquire items as the game goes on the levels get generally bigger so those backtracks become more lengthy every time i played through sandy peterson's level limbo e3 m7 i wound up killing every monster on the map before collecting the final key after that i practically owned the place the only thing that could still hurt me were those stupid lava floors every time through episode 3 i wandered the empty mansion of limbo as it were topping my doom guy up with collectibles before heading to the exit i started to think of that level like a street in an old neighborhood or at least like a town in an old role-playing game doom requires such circuitous crochet-style knitting in and around its level designs yet in my recollection not nearly as many people criticized doom for its back tracking like they accused for example super metroid released that same year heck i was talking to a co-worker about super metroid last year and you're never going to believe this the guy said he never beat it because and i quote i can't stand games with backtracking i'd argue that in super metroid backtracking is integrated incredibly well you get items abilities and weapons that allow you to re-traverse previous areas in fresh new ways from new angles in new entrances and out new exits to summarily dismiss action-adventure game backtracking and super metroid because of backtracking constitutes a lack of imagination big enough to sail a t-rex through we'll revisit this topic at great length in my eventual review of dark souls we don't exactly need to wear any protective equipment to spelunk into an investigation of why doom doesn't land high up in the list of backtrack complaint worthy video games from one thing doom has levels not a persistent metroid style world doom's levels are big though not so big that you can't hold a sketch of their complete geometries in your head at all times while playing likewise remembering where you left ammo to pick up later turns backtracking into a delightful spectral conversation with your past self and that feels like a video game most importantly however we don't mind backtracking all the heck of the way across a vast doom map on a moment's whim because movement in doom is brisk and delicious in fact the briskness and deliciousness of doom's locomotion might account for 60 of the game's initial sales appeal on the one hand as of late 1993 every 3d video game not made by id software involved either stopping to look at menus every four seconds or put the player in control of a boat or a space boat doom's emphasis on visceral speed set it apart it got people's attention the ubiquity of doom's shareware availability ensured that millions of people saw doom and seeing doom meant seeing how fast doom was seeing how fast doom was immediately impressed upon one the fullest realization yet of the novelty graphics we have to thank john carmack for what must have amounted to hundreds of joyless hours sanding down the edges of his floppy disk optimized 3d engine until it was capable of displaying blistering speeds even on a 486 though we have to equally thank john romero for the exact frictive texture of that speed the top speed impresses the casual over shoulder observer though it's the accelerations from sticky zero and the bald room dancing and changes in direction between firearm blasts that sell the game hardest to the player in doom's player movement we feel the weight of all john romero's childhood expertise in the classic game asteroids the acceleration on the player's rotation speed the hefty bump that begins and ends every strafe and the cuisine perfect magnitude of palpable momentum as the player slidingly slows to a stop from a sprint all evoke tactile remembrances of romero's evident influences namely asteroids and super mario brothers 3. let's also not forget that the book masters of doom points out that john carmack and john romero played f-zero on the super nintendo entertainment system during breaks while developing do this perhaps also influenced the sheer speed of doom guy's olympic level sprinting prowess a tendency toward speed that has infested modern shooting games with even the most hyper realistic graphics can i just pause here for a moment and uh say that when i read masters of doom in 2003 it shocked me to hear about how much john romero referenced pac-man super mario bros 3 asteroids and f-zero while working on doom because i'd always thought of doom as like some ancient video game even though i knew doom came out when i was 14 years old i saw it come out i was there and i had i was i was i was 100 there and i was very i was self-aware at age 14 believe it or not i mean maybe you were too i had somehow believed it to be some kind of monumental pillar then when i read masters of doom again in 2020 it shocked me again to read about carmack and romero playing f-zero and street fighter 2 every day i'd somehow forgotten that tidbit again that is how conceptually powerful doom is in 2020 though i was like wow these these two guys loved super mario bros 3 asteroids pac-man and f-zero and somehow they wound up making something new i mean they made commander keane first and that was a 2d platformer with pixel art and some graphics ripped right clean off of super mario bros 3. it had exact super mario bros 3 stuff in there i mean in an alternate universe they would have just kept making platforms maybe they would have i don't know maybe they would have thought to add some slow-paced physics puzzles or time travel puzzles to those platformers i bet john romero and tom hall could have designed some pretty decent puzzles for a platform game they didn't do that though they made doom after making after making hover tank catacomb 3d and wolfenstein 3d those other 3d games clearly 3d was their thing doom has all the motion joy of a super mario brothers and john romero's episode 1 levels emanate all the sage level design wisdom evident in shigeru miyamoto's once upon a timely advice that a game designer should design the first level of their game last john romero's first few doom levels offered players a perfect venue for showcasing doom's movement john romero's first few doom levels created the first person shooter genre as we continue to know it in summary movement in doom thrills the player because it's fast and it's heavy in the heft lies the master stroking the sea sickifyingly relentless up and down bob of our viewpointer and his gun lords over every frame of motion with wolfenstein 3d id software had eschewed every theoretical nuance of game designerly baroqueness in pursuit of sickening speed with doom id faced an early choice would they build systems and depth atop wolfenstein's foundation or would they polish the engine and make more or less the same game again only louder bigger harder wilder and faster again id chose speed speed anchors every other design decision in doom i'm not 100 sure of my math here though i wouldn't put it past john romero and john carmack to have made the player character in doom exactly as fast as they could get him before the graphics exploded maybe romero's thirst for speed informed carmack's pursuit of a cleaner more optimized engine i scoured interviews i reread masters of doom i could not find a single anecdote insinuating that doom had ever at any point been too fast for john romero i found no sound bites wherein romero said okay guys let's slow it down a bit the heaviness and the speed of the player character informed every other design decision enemy speed enemy firing frequency enemy quantity enemy behavior player weapon firing rate and perhaps most importantly battle encounter level geometry every doom battle encounter presents a spiderweb tug of war hoedown dance between these chess pistely elements all frictions fire flawlessly alone or in compound concert simply strafe sidestepping an accelerating fireball shot by a distant visible imp feeling the thump as you change direction at the end of the sidestep and then blasting someone with a shotgun releases a niagara falls of brain chemicals and it happens at least every three seconds you don't have to reload your weapons and do as long as you have a supply of ammo you can keep firing this is clearly by design not because the designers didn't know how a gun works they clearly didn't they chose to do it this way because all the different guns possess unique rates of firing with sometimes unnoticeably tiny cooldowns after every shot they have these cooldowns because that makes fights interesting whereas reload animations would make the fights slow doom's fights aren't slow even when you're hammering a baron of heck 50 times with your pistol because you're out of ammo for everything else throughout the simple dance of dodging shooting it's dodging moving backward moving in a circle moving away dodging shooting dodging contending with the threat of other chess piecely monsters interloping on the fringes your brain remains engaged and entertained heft and speed express themselves even on the micro level of each action encounter the shotgun's visual and sonic presentation scream power enemies fly backward as the player bobbingly recoils doom enjoys the weight of its objects as much as asteroids does in each of these granules i recognize the voice of an author as you may know doom often encourages the player to circle around a group of enemies so as to befuddle their aiming behaviors this technique called circle strafing has become a subconsciously fundamental element of all modern 3d action video games it's a pleasant motion to perform in a vacuum and more pleasant to perform in practice groups of enemies and level design geometry situations present texturally unique circle strafe opportunities in the process of researching for this review as i've already pointed out i took it upon myself to play through the entirety of doom's campaign using only my beautiful filco magestouch 2 ninja keyboard with cherry mx blue switches performing doom's famed circle strafe maneuver without the aid of a mouse or even a modern analog stick requires the player to rely on the character's momentum using comma and period to strafe and the arrow keys to turn and the control key to shoot produces a cacophonous rhythm from clacky mechanical keys in this rhythm i hear the heartbeat of an author sure we wouldn't love doom if it wasn't 3d we wouldn't love doom if it didn't have big labyrinthine level designs and non-orthogonal geometry we wouldn't love doom so much if we couldn't look out of windows onto yet unreachable places or down from ledges into rooms teeming with enemy activity however we also wouldn't love doom if it weren't so fast and we definitely wouldn't love doom if the actions and weapons weren't so perfectly tuned to balance heft and speed to that end i say congratulations john romero for your contributions to doom i have ascertained that you represent pound for pound at least as talented a game designer as shigeru miyamoto of course we also wouldn't love doom if it weren't so excruciatingly violent back then 1994 kids were pulling the fire alarm all the time it was uh it was as much fun as watching beavis and butthead just pull the fire alarm somebody lit the gym on fire and uh the gym did not blow up the kid did not get caught and then a few months later he let the gym on fire again i'm saying he because let's face it 1994 beavis and butthead on the television you know grunge doom mortal kombat it was a it was a a boy who lit the gym on fire it wasn't me so i was actually on this law and i exited that door there the day there was a fire i exited that very door and i was standing uh i believe i was standing right here though yeah i saw it a column of smoke just erupted column of black smoke it was on the evening news it was on the national news it was a nationally newsworthy moment of school place violence perpetrated the authorities were convinced by a student and there was this investigative journalist who was this guy on wthr channel 13 news he always uh he always had a shot where he was walking toward the camera at the beginning of the investigation and then he would like stop and like touch something like you see them everywhere you think they're perfectly safe then he puts his hand on top of like a gumball machine and he goes gumball machines might be giving your kids rabies and then he was in front of this school weeks ago a fire destroyed the 17 million gymnasium at north central high school here on the north side of indianapolis authorities say it was a student who lit the blaze with violent video games such as doom all the rage and does it even matter where he went from there does it even matter there weren't even any guns involved it wasn't even any personal harm involved nobody was injured or killed and these people went straight to video games in 1994. in december of 1994 a kid who never got caught burns down my high school's gymnasium then the biggest and most expensive high school gymnasium in all of the state of indiana someone on the local tv news blamed doom five years later on april 20th 1999 two teenagers committed mass murder at a high school in columbine colorado the children one of whom had a last name that sounded like a dungeons and dragons monster wore trench coats and killed 13 of their classmates and then themselves with automatic weapons people on television found evidence that at least one of the killers had played doom he'd created his own doom wads even because the internet like me remembers everything as research for this project i played his doom watts all due respect they're worse than american mcgee's levels at the time the columbine massacre happened i was in college enjoying several healthy friendships and even a nuanced romantic relationship with a woman much more interesting than myself i played video games almost daily and made straight a's i had six pack abs and i was starting to learn what self-confidence was years earlier as a dirtbag idiot teenager i'd never once imagined that i'd ever have any kind of social life at all i hated myself for a long time for many reasons one of those reasons was maybe that i thought video games were stupid and that playing video games qualified me as an idiot way back in 1993 some of the video game magazines i'd regularly read at the supermarket such as electronic gaming monthly reported venomously on the attempts by one senator joseph lieberman to regulate sales of violent video games we didn't have youtube back then or even the internet so i only perceived the ongoing battle against video game violence and snippets and blurbs in the pages of magazines for people who like me already knew video games were awesome this senator joseph lieberman and his best friend first lady hillary clinton were talking like a bunch of nimrods and my favorite video game blurb scribes full of proto-shawn babyish boldface vigorousness lampooned these poindexters into smoking dust what lieberman had wanted exactly fourteen-year-old me never knew clearly though by 1999 when the columbine massacre happened i'd read up enough on the subject to know what i know now lieberman had wanted the video game industry to voluntarily adopt a video game ratings system to warn parents of potentially harmful content if the video game industry failed to unanimously do so he wanted the government to step in ultimately a couple of hobos and a basement threw together the esrb those dirt bags so the government never had to intervene and take it joseph lieberman 1993 got exactly what he wanted which was to make enough easy noise for someone i.e me to learn and then subsequently never forget his name though he didn't want to make so much noise that he had to do anything afterward i'm 41 years old right now myself and i gotta say i respect that in 1999 i had constant unfettered internet access and i was majoring in journalism at indiana university i could not escape a torrential stream of media knowledge of the columbine massacre i read everything i could about it even before the media started chasing its tale about the doom connection once the ambulance chasers dragged video games into it though the story bled into the websites i read for fun the minor media circus around video games as inspiration on columbine gave us such gold mine pre-century-turned proto-memes as the term murder simulator i witnessed the expression of many hilarious jokes and articulate opinions on forums i frequented i formulated several articulate opinions of my own back then studying journalism studying writing studying linguistics and politics and sociology and statistics and so many other important things i felt for a fleeting moment that i had information that could possibly help solve a problem though when senator joseph lieberman showed up on television to criticize doom and evidenced to us articulate opinion havers that he was in fact not actually paying attention i in a process that continues to snowball today started to wonder what in any case the point was of paying attention and knowing stuff when those in power take pride in not knowing anything for example joseph lieberman had said of doom's influence on the columbine killers that and i quote the school of gunman murderously mimicked doom down to the choice of weapons and apparel as a player of doom episodes 1-3 at that point in time i found this insinuation paper thin and ignorant the columbine killers wore trench coats the main character of doom does not wear a trench coat lots of people thought the player character of doom wore a trench coat when bill gates appeared in an internal microsoft promotion for the windows port of doom he was wearing a trench coat remember that anyone who'd ever played death match or looked at the game's box art would know that the player character of doom did not wear a trench coat player character doom is master did senator joseph lieberman know he was wrong or did he think he was right was he confusing doom and the matrix whatever the case may have been this made me think if this clown is going to get a detail like this completely wrong just so he gives off the appearance of proving a point what's the point of getting the details right i use the trench coat mention as a single example though the 1999 reignition of high level social interest and video game violence overflowed with such distortions and generalizations here i'd just like to point out that as a journalism major in college at the point this all happened this was not exactly my first philosophical crisis regarding the nature of truth i don't talk much of my experience getting a college degree in journalism probably because i never ended up becoming a journalist sure i wrote a few magazine columns sure i've contributed secretly to several large pieces of mainstream investigative journalism one of which i think should have won a pulitzer though i myself have never been able to claw my head up above the rim of the nihilistic pit into which i'd gradually fallen over four years studying journalism i maintained an interest in exploring the corruption and pollution of information over the next two decades of my life during those two decades information became complicated we might say reality twisted facts have slowly lost their mainstream appeal throughout this twisting process i've struggled to straighten and keep straight my own understanding of my own relationship to the truth over the past 21 years i've slowly acquired a list of subjects i want to be able to speak truly about as i fill the list the world spirals more and more toward complication in this complicating world the list of requirements for satisfying myself that i now know enough about such and such topic to finally arrange my thoughts and speak plainly grows too long to understand i realize that my perfectionism is the result of a privilege i might never be ready to say something perfectly helpful with your permission however today i would like to try oh yes here today 21 years late is my contribution to the does video game violence cause real life violence debate you might wonder dear viewer why i'm bothering to speak at all on a subject so old first of all let me squash your faint hope no i'm not going to present an answer at the end of this i wish i had an answer i'm speaking only so that i might inspire maybe the person who inspires the person who does find an answer i find it important to speak on this subject because while you and i and everyone else who knows video games are harmless has long since walked away from the debate other people idiots mostly have continued to have it during my research process i became aware of a particular individual he's a retired us army lieutenant colonel he's become the go-to guy for fools to book on their sensationalist news programs whenever a mass shooting happens and the nra would prefer it if we blamed video games again this man is a professor of psychology at west point and after watching him on many archived fox news appearances on youtube and reading two of his books i say with some conviction that anyone studying psychology at west point is probably going to wind up needing to see a therapist immediately after graduation this man is one of the most interestingly unintelligent individuals i have ever encountered in my entire media consuming life and i've looked at twitter i feel like if this squinty weirdo can get on tv and spray this half-baked diarrhea maybe i a squinty weirdo can spray some half-baked diarrhea of my own on youtube also for what it's worth my dad is a retired us army lieutenant colonel too and he told me when i was nine years old that i was already smarter than him so let's see how this goes here is what i know mass shootings perpetrated by individuals under the age of 21 in america have since the 1990s grown in both frequency and magnitude doom was released six years before columbine six years after robocop two years after terminator 2 judgment day and eight months after mortal kombat 2 which was released six months after mortal kombat 1 which was released five months after wolfenstein 3d prior to this cluster of games violence had never caught my eye quite the way it did in wolfenstein 3d i'd committed many virtual murders as of my entrance into the 13th year of life though i'd never seen results quite so graphic wolfenstein 3d's nazis's blood was as red as its floors were blue dead bodies in games never lingered on the floor in hamburgery piles quite so persistently as they did wolfenstein 3d then mortal combat happened i first saw mortal kombat in a dark arcade in the glen burnie mall in maryland i didn't even know about fatalities when the game first spoke to me i merely saw him one guy playing scorpion uppercut another guy playing liu kang and watched that stark red play-doh-like shooting star of blood eject ascend spread and fall back to speckle the earth my immediate internal monologus reaction to this was this is bad bad in the parlance of the day meant good i'd seen robocop at this point five years earlier quite traumatizingly at age eight even they'd advertised robocop during cartoons for god's sake my aunt apologized to my mom for an hour afterward since that day something began to build in me eventually i joined the droves of dirtbag young white boys who didn't realize they were dressing like john connor in terminator 2 on purpose i'd played narc in other arcades i'd made drug dealers bleed for a dollar an hour in pizza parlors on u.s military bases though the killing always felt so frivolous and flimsy when you gave me this power in first person when you let me with a single keystroke hamburger eyes a wolfenstein nazi you had my attention when you showed me this geizarian uppercut blood and mortal kombats intimate photorealistic digitized one-on-one setting and then a kid who was in high school showed us sub-zero's spine ripping fatality the damage was done i'd seen the t-1000 impale a guy's head through a milk carton and through his mouth a dozen times at this point though when you told me i could control her perpetrate such creatively gruesome violence without anyone explicitly asking me kindly or unkindly i like so many other aspiring dirt bags found myself hard hooked on digital red why were all us jag-off chubby white boys with uncut hair and dirty jeans and mega death mixtapes lining up back then to slobber all over digital red video game violence as a trend happened because we enabled it we enabled it because it spoke to us curiously no mega million dollar marketing machine had previously sold us this exact brand of violence we engaged with it as a let's say a fashion choice we were expressing ourselves by electing to engage in extreme entertainments as you may or may not know about me i suffer a somewhat rare neurological condition that requires me to remember just about everything in my life all the time on the one hand this condition has never been useful outside of the odd party trick involving years-old gas station receipt dollar values and even then the money won on bets is negligible and usually spent more frivolously than even the rest of my money on the other hand this condition allows me a perhaps unique opportunity to channel exact mind states from any lived experience of my life it's for this purpose of course that i've tried to keep my life uninteresting because trust me there's nothing worse than being trapped in a remembrance of an interesting experience for the purpose of this review of the 1993 video game doom i allowed myself to pour over the entirety of the first five years of the 1990s in search of the exact countercultural spark that made me personally its target audience i've written a novella length personal essay about this experience centered on the game final fantasy vi i posted this essay somewhere on the internet immediately before setting this video to live feel free to find it if you want i'll warn you right now it's not funny at all and it goes into some pretty dark personal places if you're watching this video maybe more than a couple months after it was posted there's a chance i might have deleted the essay in which case no i will not send it to you if you find my email address and email me posting essays in mysterious locations on the internet and then deleting them later on a whim has been one of my favorite pastimes over the last two decades one of the principal characters of my early 1990s reverie is my only friend at the time my only friend in 1994 was the only kid i knew who owned all of doom coincidentally he was the only person i knew who owned a sega cd he'd received that sega cd for christmas 1992. i watched him play sewer shark on that sega cd he would not let me touch the controller or the console and god forbid i touch even the cases of the cds while i watched him play super shark he told me his mom was a quote unquote [ __ ] for buying him night trap a game that totally quote had boobs in it unquote which it didn't he asked his parents for a 3do for christmas 1993. he received that 3do when i went to his house three days after christmas 1993 i had hoped he'd show me doom on his fancy pc instead i had to watch him play gekks while he played gex he told me three things firstly that dana gould could suck a shotgun barrel for all he cared secondly that they should have gotten dennis leary to voice gex dude and third that doom was a game for homosexuals just to clarify that's not my language there that's his that's literally what he said well except he didn't say homosexuals he said the much worse word i didn't want to sugarcoat it i guess i sugarcoated it a tiny bit that was his definition of doom and i point this out because it's going to be important a little bit later eight months previous as the school year wound down this boy's mom drove him and i to the putt-putt mini-golf by washington square mall in indianapolis indiana every saturday we stopped at the liberty bell flea market on the way where on the day we'd first see mortal kombat 2 i purchased a loose cartridge of final fantasy 2 for the super nintendo for nine dollars this kid and i had spectated every mortal kombat 2 fatality as the bigger teenagers discovered them when mortal kombat 1 came out on sega genesis on mortal monday september 13 1993 five months after we'd first seen mortal kombat 2 in the arcade he invited me over to his house to control player 2 so he could practice every character's fatalities at his insistence i chose sonia blade the only girl in the game and yielded my controller every time i won so he could practice sonya's fatalities eventually we'd seen sonia's fatalities a lot to this day i'm pretty good at playing sonia though i couldn't do one of her mortal kombat 1 fatalities if you put a gun to my head four months before this at the beginning of the summer vacation we'd gone to putt-putt and had our routine birthday party experience without it being either of our birthdays his mom funded him a 100 mortal kombat 2's losses worth of tokens and my mom had funded me 10 victorious games of nba jam i'm real good at nba jam grand pooh bear if you ever want to play sometime i could probably i don't know if i could beat you because you're just preacher naturally gifted at video games so we could probably have a competition one time during the car ride to putt-putt my little friend had told me he'd heard whispered rumors that instead of a fatality players could perform a quote-unquote friendship at the end of a mortal kombat 2 match my little friend told me that johnny cage could sign an autographed photo instead of kicking a guy's head off for example my little friend asked me if i could believe that i neither believed it nor disbelieved it later that afternoon one teenager announced he was going to do the friendship my friend yelled me over to the cabinet and we watched the teenager as promised did the friendship johnny cage did in fact autograph a photograph and give it to the loser in lieu of kicking his head off my little friend was uncharacteristically speechless though only for a moment when he finally spoke he said and i quote that's what he said dude that's so gay told you that that would be important it's going to be important a little bit more even later so hold on we did not play mortal kombat 2 again after that yet when mortal kombat 1 later released on the super nintendo and the sega genesis he commanded his mom to buy him the sega genesis version he invited me over to control player 2 in a joyless exposition of fatalities perpetrated against the game's only female character numerous times throughout this funerally grim exercise he commented that and i quote the genesis version is so much better than the super nintendo version the next time i went over to his house he made me watch him play selfie for sega cd he told me that a guy in the game says i got a big one give me another when you shoot down a particular type of ship he kept trying to get that voice clip to play he never got that voice clip to play if he did he'd been talking over him by repeating the line he was trying two months after this he played gex while repeatedly insisting that i not sit too close to his 3do during this experience i heard him once comment on doom a game he perfunctorially owned as an owner of every game-playing device on the market at the moment he had accused doom of homosexuality in the exact same manner he had done for mortal kombat 2's friendships it occurs to me now that the fatality practice day two months earlier had held more importance than i'd given it credit for at the time why did he need me to control player two couldn't he have done what every other player did when they practiced fatalities and just plugged the second controller in and let the other player stand inert i realized that he he most likely wanted simply to demonstrate to me a game he owned that i did not for no reason more complicated than that his mom had bought it for him because he asked her to he'd probably asked her to just to see if she would buy it or perhaps he wanted the superficial veneer of competition he perhaps wanted to play the game as intended perhaps deep beneath his dirt bag boy habits having exterior lurked a rules-loving stickler whatever the case may be this set of memories of the dark bedroom in a rich boy's house touches me today in this year of hindsight where did all this murderous rage come from and where did it go my acquaintanceship with this particular boy ended shortly after this experience when his family moved away while writing this script i looked him up on every public database i could find i got absolutely nothing that doesn't mean he hasn't committed any murders it just means that if he did he was never caught yet something tells me and seeing his interests shift from repeated joyless executions of creative digital murders to debating a video game publisher's choice of stand-up comedian to voice a cartoon gecko that he grew up in the space of those two months at least a little bit i dare say he's probably happier and more successful than i am by a long shot i mean i have a couple more stories about this kid that might be important for example the weekend after kurt cobain died this kid and aspiring comic artist drew a picture of kurt cobain killing himself he'd scrawled the words i hate myself and i want to die on the wall behind kurt cobain's corpse and one of the first times i ever went to this kid's house he had shown me mario paint he had meticulously recreated a sprite of sonic the hedgehog in mario paint and he'd animated a short sequence in which sonic performs a spin dash into mario slicing mario's head off red airbrushed tuna blood spraying out of mario's empty neck he didn't laugh he said mario paints bad butt dude except he didn't say butt you know what i mean and a year later he was grumbling about the finer points of gex a game whose developers didn't grumble about any of its finer points while making it what happened to his relationship with shockingly violent entertainment over the course of the next 26 years i developed many theories i come to you today a lifetime removed from this experience i worked for a while in the advertising industry i've developed video games i've written several bad unpublished novels and i've thought a great deal about the world i have a theory while researching this project i looped a playlist of early 1990s toy and serial commercial compilations on youtube for six hours i let myself distinctly recall the emotions i felt when encountering these commercials during regular television viewing with my older brother and younger brother during that time period specifically my older brother and i hated commercials i was also a weird savant with a perfect sense of timing so eventually i hated commercials so much i got the idea to turn the television off as soon as the commercials started and turn it back on as soon as they ended it was a marvelous trick it unnerved my mother before i learned that trick i osmosed many bad feelings from those television commercials of doom's era from my experience in the advertising industry and let's be honest from my experience watching all of mad men four times i know that advertising's goal is to make the viewer feel inadequate without the precious product young boy targeting television advertisements of the early 1990s did more than make us feel inadequate they made us feel uncool so many commercials placed heavy bets on a young boy's disdain for adults and for girls serial commercials are the most obvious example why did cereal commercials almost universally depict children depriving the cereals mascot of the cereal the kids in the commercial just they just don't want tony the tiger is like a gym teacher they let him have the cereal because it's his and also they have like a friendly relationship with him lucky from lucky charms like his leprechaun pot of gold it's like leprechauns are supposed to be notoriously protective of their pot of gold why does lucky it's like he's very ineffectual at keeping his pot of gold close because the kids just go wild on it tricks rabbit tricks up kids these kids are dirt bags i think he's the mascot of the cereal shouldn't he be the one who eats it captain crunch kind of just what is he he's they they eat the cereal with him they kids hang out captain crunch he like van candies them into singing sea shanties on his on his boat which exists just to eat cap and crunch and fight creatures made of milk cookie crisp no they're trying to steal the cereal pretty much every cereal just won't let the cereal mascot eat the god darn cereal there was like a pole at one point should the trix rabbit be allowed to have tricks and the kids voted yes do you all remember that remember that does anybody remember this yeah you remember remember the tricks rabbit they had a poll they had a poll being like should the trix rabbit be allowed to eat tricks the fact that that was the advertising campaign the advertising agency or whoever came up with kind of says something like the kids are gonna say no god darn it i got myself worked up about a point i'm going to more articulate than making a minute so i should continue i should continue reading my script thanks for enjoying my improvisational segment everybody one commercial that i put on the television in my hotel room in times square while i sat with my tiny wolf suffering the gunshot wound-like pain of shingles was for bubble tape a product so stupidly frivolous its advertisers said no other strategy in mind at all than to show us a bunch of caricaturizedly ugly adults and insist they hated the no product jose you don't know what bubble tape is it was a little plastic is it still around it's still around i ain't seen it it's a little plastic can that has a roll of six feet of bubble gum sweetened with sugar and you roll it out and you cut it like like tape somebody patented that probably just to feel the thrill of patenting something now as of 1993 i personally had yet to meet and engage in conversation with a single advertising industry executive yet i had lived in kansas and thus i had seen the wizard of oz every time a teacher fell ill i knew what the man behind the curtain looked like old white out of touch a professional second guesser whose first guess clearly wasn't good enough because if his first guess had been good enough he'd be doing something else in us children of the late 80s and early 90s a conflict ensued humans naturally dislike authority figures that's why so many people kick cops in the nights just every day it took advertisers until the 1990s to try to weaponize that for dollars from children by the 1990s advertisements so ubiquitously and cynically patronized us children teenagers slapping us in the face repeatedly with our supposed disdain for authority that even the dumbest of us many of us had by that point already built a house of cards of an identity around our contempt for authority to see for example a bubble tape commercial with the slogan for you not them amounted to a rug pulled out from under us simultaneously with a wool being pulled off of our eyes for you not them might as well translate that into latin and put it on the back of the quarter simply put i can tell you with absolute autobiographical memorial certainty that mainstream culture's patronizing tone alienated me hardcore in the early 1990s i already had no friends at school because my family moved every three months for several of my most formative years television made me feel like a freak so like many other generation x youth i gravitated toward counterculture video games were not mainstream video games were not on tv video games were not cool video games were what i wanted i listened to metal i watched random stimpy and his butthead i owned every nirvana album before kurt cobain died i was 13 so i think that's pretty decent taste kurt cobain's evident discomfort with the mainstream felt friendly to me when i in middle school discovered megadeth's 1985 album killing is my business i thought cool this album cover has a skull on it when i heard the cover of nancy sinatra's these boots are made for walking a song i knew at that point because my dad had the record i realized that jokes don't have to be quote unquote funny i realized that skulls can be part of jokes right [Music] right someday my skull will be part of a joke yours when i first saw a nazi explode into blood in wolfenstein 3d i thought it was funny when i saw sub-zero rip a dude's head off and spine out in mortal combat i thought that was hilarious i never stopped thinking it's hilarious horror movies are hilarious the funniest people i've ever met have been in metal bands and i'm talking about the metal bands that play like three notes for like an hour the fatalities in mortal kombat 11 are hysterical i guess until my little friend with the sega cd and the 3do and the pc and mortal kombat on genesis i guess until he saw johnny cage's autograph signing friendship he hadn't noticed that mortal kombat didn't just have a sense of humor it was a sense of humor john romero and john carmack didn't make violent video games because there was something wrong with them they didn't even make violent video games because quote violence sells unquote they made violent video games because violence was and is loud they had the newest fanciest fastest graphics engine video games had ever seen they had the power that science fiction readers and idiots like my friend with the sega cd had dreamed of they had the power to put people inside a video game they had the speed to make the experience feel realer than a two-dimensional video game one of id's founders tom hall wanted to use that 3d immersion to make a slower more thoughtful game abounding with exploration and conversation john romero's brilliance was emptying the game design of any filler they made doom fast and they made it violent because most all of us would never see that kind of violence in real life they made doom violence for the same reason that dma designs made grand theft auto a game about stealing cars and killing cops because virtually none of us would ever do that and it's funny to think about doing that in a video game that's one way to grill some bacon i suppose violence didn't sell doom immersion sold doom violence dialed that immersion up to the max the hilarity of the violence got us in doom's door the game's pristine quiet loud search destroy dynamics kept us there and keep us remembering the game decades later i could smother you with anecdotes about how for example i've never killed anybody or even thought about killing anybody even a cop i'm having a good time killing cops in this game those cops were defunded of the currency of their life i could fuzzily emphasize that i personally don't play games to escape reality i play games to i don't know just hang out man just hanging out and elling mao most of the time two american pastimes for god's sake i could drag out all the old half-baked arguments i've overheard over the years about doom and wolfenstein that the bad guys are literally nazis and demons and that if you think any death is too grotesque for a nazi you haven't read enough history books and if you think any shotgun blast is too brutal for a demon then what kind of christian are you dad i could for example tell you that i watched every ted talk on youtube about video games just so i could say i watched every ted talk on youtube about video games and i did i watched every ted talk on youtube about video games i could tell you about how cognitive researcher daphne bavellier says in her ted talk your brain on video games that action games particularly first person shooters like doom expand the brain's problem-solving centers and train our brain-eye pattern recognition coordination skills in ways that make us provably better suited to everyday functioning i could beseech you to believe me when i tell you that 3d shooting action video games impart such spatial recognition skills onto their players that ever since i finished designing my first quake level 20 years ago i have never once had to ask a member of a restaurant's staff where the bathroom is i just feel it when i wrote this script that was true i had never asked someone where the restaurant bathroom was or the gas station for that matter however i wanted to sound humble in the paragraph so i didn't say gas station however last night on route to south bend indiana burning down state road 31 is it state roads the state road burning down state road 30. had to go to the bathroom real real bad stopped at a gas station was goddard closed stopped at a second gas station it was open i i burst in about as quickly as one can burst while bursting with the need to use the bathroom the two individuals at the counter teenagers they were feeling each other up not figuratively literally they were figured they were feeling each other up they quickly snapped to attention to behold me this strange individual wearing sunglasses and a mask a surgical mask wasn't a doctor there's just a coupon of i was out there and uh i felt the need to say something so i said uh is there a bathroom in here i said the uh was to to make myself sound colloquial to sound approachable to make myself sound like a normal person not whatever it is i am and they directed me to the bathroom now i could have found the bathroom but i could have found it on my own i could have race tracked my way like a call of duty player until i found it and i would have found it less than half a circuit so i felt like i should say something also i did wanna in hindsight i did want to conserve my steps anyway that's the end of my story thanks for paying attention thanks furthermore i could present some original research and insist that violent action video games can also teach us the mathematical value of teamwork for example suppressing fire in gears of war's co-op campaign presents a scenario that scientifically proves having someone who agrees with your definition of right and wrong can save your life yet as joe says at the end of david mamet's film house of games you can't bluff someone who isn't paying attention none of my arguments would sway someone who's not paying attention and most of the people who aren't paying attention don't want to pay attention you don't even need to know what a tinfoil hat is to know that video games have only ever been a deflection that gun lobbyists and the like know that they can trust people who aren't paying attention anyway to not care to learn anything at all about video games pundits who target video games do so because it's easy to point at something they can trust their audience to never investigate on their own persons of certain political alignments viewers of specific news networks love acquiring and then immediately installing pre-baked opinions concerning subjects they had until that moment lived completely in ignorance of to many of them it feels almost like learning something might feel to you or me in reinvestigating senator joseph lieberman's 1993 interrogation of video games and various politicians his 1999 comments after columbine i came to feel that political pundits like my tv news network after that fire in 1994 name-dropped doom because they'd heard of it they'd judged it as humorless and they'd disrespectfully presumed its creators were unlike for example the nra to lowbrow to fight back for my first replay of doom for the purpose of this review i decided to mind palace roleplay a circa 1994 teenager who within 10 years would be arrested for homicide i thought how would such a teenager play i thought of my little friend from middle school and i decided that once he'd play on god mode for the first of the six replays of doom's entire campaign i performed for this game review i played on god mode on nightmare difficulty this lent me the experience of being perfectly proficient at doom's combat despite rusty familiarity with its level map layouts i thought this experiment would perhaps lead me to some conclusions on how a future killer's brain flower might bloom in the wake of experiencing doom's violence unshackled i placed a bet going in that at some point i'd experience some epiphany or another i didn't i had a generally pleasant time even on god mode budgeting ammunition amounts to a thoughtful challenge even without death doom is still doom the only epiphany-like sensation i take away from this part of my research process is the distinct impression that doom this exact game right here on december 3rd 1993 with its violence and macho man grimacing in the center of its omnipresent heads up display represents the camel's backbreaker of no return the moment where video games finally from a demographic marketer's perspective anyway crossed the threshold separating for everybody maybe from boys club territory as i later learned in my marketing industry experience if you want to sell something first you got to decide who it's for doesn't matter who it's for doesn't matter what it is connect something to something else if you put a song in a movie song is more popular than it would be without being in the movie the movie's more popular than it would be if it didn't have the song in it it's magic just gotta decide who something's for what goes with what doesn't matter what just make the choice let me squash your faint hope no i'm not going to present an answer at the end of this i wish i had an answer i'm speaking only so that i might inspire maybe the person who inspires the person who does find an answer hello hello it's uh it's me i i normally would not do this though i would like to make a couple of comments here real quick it is it is monday september 7th 2020. a lot has happened since i filmed this this video that you're watching now on july 31st 2020 in south bend indiana i've i've i've moved twice i've lost 20 pounds taken my glasses off grown a sort of hoax beard got a haircut that's that's how i lost the 20 pounds i'm i'm recording this little interjection here as i watch the video for the first time which is as i edit it i mean i really i i just suddenly i saw myself say that i'm i'm not ready to say something important and it it suddenly just hit me like like oh god this huge deja vu because i'm like i definitely did not succeed i was not kidding when i said i was not going to present a solution would totally definitely not kidding i took a chance i tried to do something with with these videos the sort of thing that i want to do with these videos i want to do this sort of thing all the time but i mean i mean it's again it's it's a big topic i don't want to make light of it i don't want to there's jokes in here i mean maybe maybe there that doesn't mean i'm making jokes about this there's just jokes i i feel just kind of exhaustedly stupid watching myself say all this stuff and editing in all these beefs and butthead references i really do care about a lot of this stuff and didn't perfectly come out perfect i'm sorry that i didn't solve any problems uh with whatever this is i wrote and i hope i hope you uh appreciate them somebody appreciates it appreciates it anyway i'm gonna i'm gonna try again to do something again and i hope it goes just a little bit better just a little bit a little bit better every time and maybe someday someday i want to do something good and uh i've been working on it for a while that's all i have for now um i'm gonna finish editing this video doom wasn't the first man's man's video game not by a long shot though it's certainly the most important one because immediately after doom every game became doom in their seventh ever issue dated april 1994 the united kingdom's edge magazine gave doom a seven out of ten the edge review of doom remains a cult legend to this day some hold it up as a brilliant example of point missing some people fools mostly accuse the review of being ahead of its time i say why not a little bit of both and a little bit of neither edge gave doom a 7 out of 10 probably because they were only 7 issues old and their recently scribbled battle plan evidently required to them to position themselves as some sort of critical authority for example a not insignificant bulk of edge's 1994 review of doom focuses on what other critics and other publications were saying about doom in fact it starts with a question inviting the reader to behold other critics with incredulity and follows immediately with the most reductive description of doom possible maybe it'd be easier for me to just quote it or maybe it would be easier for me to get somebody else to quote it for us doom evil unleashed it doesn't seem rational does it along comes a fairly simple 3d perspective maze adventure slash shoot em up and suddenly hundreds of grown men start acting like they've never seen a video game before i've got to admit the cleanly plain-spokenness of that prose delights me even 26 years later yet i now more so than i'd have done then find the reasoning behind the writing a little grody in the process of researching this review of the 1993 video game doom i acquired pdfs of and read the first eight issues of edge magazine cover to cover in an attempt to better understand the man behind the curtain of the issue 7 review of doom instead i found myself better understanding myself i know from the personal experience of building my own video game critique website actionbutton.net which i modeled on edge by the way that engaging in a little inflammatory opinionistic contrarianism is a good fast way to build an audience and the easiest way to employ contrarianism is to stuff thyself a straw man and refer to the dreaded other critics with such shadowed pejorative phraseology as grown men edge listen to me you were hating i liked your magazine back then because the local barnes and noble at clearwater crossing in indianapolis indiana stocked it they charged ten dollars for it however so i couldn't afford it however yours was the only british video game magazine at the barnes noble in indianapolis indiana not wrapped in crinkly plastic it was also the only british video game magazine too small for my only friend at the time to hide an issue of penthouse inside of yes i'm talking about the guy from the previous segment by the way so i am ashamed to admit i never bought your magazine i did however look at it every time i saw a new issue i appreciated the clean graphic design i felt like i was reading a lifestyle magazine i read every review i let the language wash over me some of that language ended up wriggling its way into the skull beneath my skin then i went home where i had my issues of electronic gaming monthly and die hard game fan and of course whatever pile of books fiction and gnawing i had checked out from the school library i know my intellect is a bit of a salad bar second helping in the same issue where edge gave doom a seven out of ten they also gave mega man x a seven out of ten they said the music was bland and did and i quote little to add to the atmosphere of the game actually that's kind of a bad example because i i don't like mega man x i don't i don't like mega man at all you know why mega man has a gun because they they couldn't figure out how to just make him moving and jumping feel good that's why we'll talk about mega man at some other point in the future on the pages immediately following edge's review of doom edge reviewed the arcade version of ridge racer they gave ridge racer an 8 out of 10. yet as i sit here hind seeing 26 years to edge's back to back reviews of doom and ridge racer i dare say doom and ridge racer possessed more aspirational similarities than differences they were both all about fast 3d graphics [Applause] ridge racer was an arcade game and let's face it a relatively bare bones one ridge racer for the arcade had one track just one the first ridge racer was just virtually a demo for future ridge racers doom on the other hand was an enormously hugely full video game speaking of fast graphics one month later edge gave the fast shooting atari jaguar game tempest 2000 a 9 out of 10. they gave the fast 3d racing game virtual racing for the sega mega drive 8 out of 10. and they gave the admittedly excellent sega mega drive 2d spaceship shooting and exploration game subterranea a 9 out of 10. i love subterranea however i dare say it's only about as good at doing what it does as doom is having said that let me give you a full disclosure i have written reviews for edge magazine i never got paid for any of them by the way give me my money actually don't don't give me my money i don't i don't want it i don't want it at this point it's been like 17 years it's been a long time don't get me wrong i know from this experience that edge takes critical voice quite seriously that's why their reviews never featured bylines in all the years that i read edge if they feature bylines now i wouldn't know because i haven't seen a magazine in years in other words whether multiple different writers or not reviewed doom virtual racing subterranea and ridge racer all those numbers represent the opinion of edge more than of any individual human i can't pretend to have listened in to the editorial meeting when edge decided to review doom four months after its release though i can say as an amateur detective that i sense the 7 out of 10 score resulted from a committee decision to take doom down a peg in a gamble that would pay off big time if it later turned out that the windows personal computer died as a game-playing platform i mean this is just a hunch i i don't know where i get this hunch either it's from my own experience running a one out of four stars review of the legend of zelda twilight princess written by heather ann campbell who you can hear now on the podcast how did this get played on my brand new video game review website actionbutton.net in 2007 or it's the fact that edge ran a five-page feature on the reasons the windows pc could not compete performance wise with the amiga or the mac in the pages immediately before their review of doom if indeed edge did make a strategic decision to smack talk doom for dramatic effect at the very least they did do their philosophical homework after making that decision as a former contrarian of perhaps similar professional success i can attest to the importance of this step above all others any good devil's advocatarian begins the composition process with a statement they do not agree with and then researches deeply until they muster some fragmentary angle toward that statement that they do agree with in the case of their doom review edge landed a couple good ones in three separate locations in their review once in the body text and twice in the screenshot captions edge praises the parallax action on the mountains visible outside the windows of the first mission of the first episode of doom complementary hyperfocus so calculatedly petty that it serves as the perfect lead-in to a barrage of criticism so knuckle-headed it knocks the wind out of me even today here and there throughout my career as a video game designer and a critic i thought i was good at infuriating contrarianism then i just recently looked back on edge's doom review and i could barely breathe maybe it was dakona vi was because i did have that i had pneumonia from that the doctor said my lungs looked like pulled pork she said i don't know whether to prescribe you steroids or make a sandwich out of this a wise man once said to rub your hands together and lick your lips immediately after you hear any variation of the words having said that let's listen that said though there are problems with the game edge has no intention of joining the rabble mindlessly praising doom beyond its worth yes it is good in fact it's a very very technically impressive piece of programming god imagine saying very twice in a row and then writing it again like a paragraph later who wrote this but where's the genuine 3d look up and down of ultima underworld where's the variety in the gameplay it's all just kill kill kill and looking at it coldly what is there really in doom apart from the graphics to set it above even the most average most highly repetitive and tedious 2d shoot-em-up this paragraph takes my breath i don't even know where to start i i feel like i'm looking at mount everest and i've got a plastic fork in my hand edge literally called every other critic even those writing for magazines under their own same publishing umbrella a mindless rabble they have the gall to ask where the variety is in the gameplay it's all over the place doom is filthy with variety in its level designs doom is not quote all kill kill kill unquote a lot of it actually is searching for keys or running across lava though the definite richest nitpick lies in the name drop of ultima underworld edge's critic asks why do blacks quote unquote genuine 3d they ask why you can't look up and down in doom the way you can in ultima underworld to which i ask into a time tunnel reaching 26 years into the past have you played ultima underworld more like ultima underwater by mentioning ultima underworld in their doom review edge is perhaps on purpose missing the point with the virtuosity of an olympic gold medal gymnast edge critic of 1994 i know you'd played ultima underworld i know that you like me had also paid whatever the 1994 quid equivalent of five dollars was to feel confused and bad for three minutes in the primitive virtual reality experience dactyl nightmare you know why doom does not have look up and down in it mate i know you know this because you gave ridge racer an 8 out of 10 despite it's only having one track you gave ridge racer an 8 out of 10 because it was fast and you likey da fasta graphics just like me buddy join the club you can't look up and down in ridge racer either yigna ramus for what doom has to set it apart from the most average repetitive and tedious 2d shoot-'em-ups well as i explored in an earlier chapter of this review doom feels perfect most average repetitive tedious 2d shoot-'em-ups circa 1994 did not trust me i was there to this day game likers lampoon the final point of edge's doom review in which the writer imagines and we quote if only you could talk to these creatures then perhaps you could try and make friends with them form alliances now that would be interesting that edge decided to close out their groundbreakingly petty 7 out of 10 review of the hottest video game phenomenon of the moment with such a knuckleheadedly petty musing continues to entertain me to the core of my soul even today like most doom enjoyers i've laughed at the phrase turn talk to these creatures for a kaleidoscope of reasons for most of my life at this point from one it's a funny phrase creature is a funny word i call my dog a creature sometimes do you know the word critter is a british english shortening of the word creature that's the origin of that that word it's great for another shin megami tensei had come out in japan two years earlier games where you could talk to the creatures already existed for another supremely hilarious reason either out of hubristic ignorance or in a wildly high-level troll edge's review had numerous times referred to doom's demons as being green and lizards they didn't even know what creatures they were talking about maybe the most interesting reason i find talk to these creatures hilarious is that i don't want to talk to the creatures in doom shooting them is good their simple behaviors are interesting tricking them into shooting each other and then watching them fight is pretty much the same thing as talking to them in some languages if we take edge's closing comments at face value we can conclude that they wanted doom to be a 3d first person real-time strategy game or a 3d first-person real-time graphical adventure game or a 3d first person role-playing game edge wanted doom to be something else so they gave it a 7 out of 10. and that 7 out of 10 is absolutely philosophically profoundly actually a 10 out of 10. let me explain elsewhere in their review of doom edge had broken down id software's execution of the shareware distribution model they described the installation of doom's free first episode on millions of pcs like it was a bad thing like it was corrupting the youth or like it was corrupting the adults as hard disks they described doom's legendary optimization like the game suffered a dearth of creativity for targeting lower end systems get behind this prickly cynicism i see real true love as i often found myself saying in response to angry readers after i wrote a negative review of a video game on my website actionbutton.net if nobody complained about anything nothing would ever get any better i had the infinite word count of the internet at my fingertips so i didn't need the sort of brevity henry ford for example exhibited when he said what he said about faster horses edge as of issue number seven had poured a lot of money into publishing on the fanciest paper their decidedly sophisticated tiny font and wide margins left little room for rumination for our youtube video reviews of games didn't exist yet so edge's writers needed to write with economy some game likers today pointed to edge's 7 out of 10 review of doom as a cautionary tale they consider edge to have failed completely to predict the success of the first person shooter as a genre that has endured longer today than for example the 2d platformer had at the time of doom's release i see it as something else behind the bewildered awkward musing of the economical phrase if only we could talk to these creatures i see a 10 000 word love letter to the then past and then future of video games finally a 3d video game had arrived that inspired this self-appointed intelligentsia of video game critics to dream doom was fast doom was smooth doom was popular doom was everywhere doom ran on everything doom loudly meant more like it was definitely coming edge could see that by the time the reviewer finished doom i bet they thought that all the yet non-existent games bubbling around in their head were their own ideas they weren't they were doom's ideas as the book masters of doom famously points out id software co-founder tom hall originally planned for doom to possess myriad complex systems and cinematic story moments yet john romero insisted on trimming the fat and letting the fast 3d engine speak for itself as loudly and quickly as it could the fat thus trimmed many of doom's level designs begun by tom hall and finished by sandy peterson represent fascinatingly skeletal forebodings of upcoming groundbreaking video games the fact is edge critic of your doom made you imagine all those imaginary games it made you imagine them with its speed its simplicity and its confidence for example mount erebus e3 m6 with its weird shortcuts and passages and ramps and clumsy jumps is basically a super mario 64 prototype limbo e3 m7 with its big central chamber its multiple puzzle rooms and its non-linear structure is practically a prototypical the legend of zelda ocarina of time dungeon masters of doom describes the id boys shrieking delight upon discovering a fan-made star wars reskin of wolfenstein for doom john carmack in a hacker's mindset insisted on making robust level designing tools freely available and easy to understand this resulted in an avalanche of mods of a vast range doom made players become amateur level designers doom made professional designers obsessed with 3d first person and shooting doom inspired big budget developers to tweak its formula as slightly as many players were tweaking its levels 3d realms wondered what if the main character had a personality and spoke garbled one-liners ripped clean off of evil dead the answer was duke nukem 3d and money making doom made john romero obsessed with the types of possibilities the edge review of doom would wisply insinuate meanwhile doom got john carmack hooked on optimizing and advancing his technology ironically john carmack's technology advancements and john romero's game design imagination fed one another so intertwinedly that the two men would never match doom's genius ever again as john carmack beefed the quake engine harder and harder john romero's hunger for innovation blimped ultimately as masters of doom tells it it had an engine without a plot in desperation for quake the developers stuck to what they knew a silent protagonist no more plot than a porn movie guns and monsters quake is a work of its own kind of genius and the way a street food stall in thailand can deservedly earn a michelin star i love quake it's doom's little brother i even love quake 2 which john romero didn't even work on i sort of even loved dai katana though i reckon not a high enough percentage of the viewers of this video are psychologists for me to legally continue this sentence love however is just that an irrational prickly mass inextricable from our memories of college speaking from a viewpoint of wisdom and hindsight no nothing anyone from id software ever worked on after doom was as good as doom not even doom 2 and not even doom 1 episode 4 thy flesh consumed definitely not the first level of thy flesh consumed though definitely the second level perfect hatred is as good as doom just on a whole and by itself that episode is not as good as doom just the john romero parts are as good as doom at any rate from the outside looking in id software's doom appeared to the at-large game world like the splitting of the atom and the invention of cold fusion at the same time to glimpse doom whether as a player or as a critic or as a developer was to feel the lightning strike of inspiration here was an exciting new template within which even the most simplistically skeletal expressions could sufficiently and blockbustingly capture the minds and money of millions immediately after doom every game was doomed and when i say every game was doom i don't just mean in the sense that super 3d noah's ark was wolfenstein or in the sense that chex's quest was literally doom i i mean every game embraced or at the very least understood doom's speed its immersion and the cleanliness of its design mechanics every game after doom was aware of doom every game after doom built on doom's memory would we have super mario 64 zelda games or elder scrolls games without doom maybe though would they be as good i don't know why am i asking these questions i don't know maybe i'm just trying to make you think because making you think is a shortcut to artistic profundity similarly the greatest trick doom ever pulled was making us the players think maybe more than its makers thought about it we hungered for and expected more and more developers answered us eventually though many of us didn't wait to this day fan created doom wads and quake levels are a video game genre unto themselves i played a lot of doom wads in my research for this review i adore many of them though if i had to pick one favorite level from amidst all the wads i played i'd have to go the iconoclastic route and pick the ultimate dooms episode 4 thy flesh consumes sixth map against the wickedly designed by john romero i don't even really like it it's got too many mandatory situations wherein you have to traverse hurt floors i don't even like it however i love it i adore the straight-faced brazenness wherein 33 levels into a video game campaign john romero introduces a new mechanic wherein the single central teleporter takes you to a different location in the level based on which puzzle you most recently solved i love the cold-hearted gumption with which romero forces the player to fight a cyber demon blocking the exit on a narrow walkway against the wickedly is an official level though it feels like a fan level in the best possible ways by the time id sat down way post-release and made episode four john romero was unabashedly and shamelessly such a huge fan of his own game that this level genuinely qualifies as fan made and that is beautiful you know what else i like about against thee wickedly that when i first played it in 1999 on a computer science major's high-powered pc i distinctly remember wishing aloud dude there should be a doom like castlevania i wonder why there's never been a doom like castlevania oh wait that's just demon souls seven months after they gave doom a 7 out of 10 edge gave doom 2 a 9 out of 10. they praised doom 2 for its speed and its immersive 3d they claimed that the level designs had gotten more interesting and the game structure more varied sure doom 2 does certainly have scientifically provable more interesting level designs than doom 1 such as its several outdoor big city maps nevertheless it feels to me now 26 years later that edge were covering their tracks by giving doom 2 a 9 out of 10 after giving doom 1 a 7 out of 10 because i just played doom 1 and doom 2 back to back all the way through multiple times in a hotel bed on a nintendo switch while suffering a bout of shingles with my tiny wolf by my side and i've gotta say it's never been clearer to me that doom 1 and doom 2 are just two halves of one game so if you give doom 2 a 9 out of 10 in 1994 you're giving doom 1 a 10 out of 10. and that's the straight dope [Music] if indeed edge did make a strategic decision to smack talk doom for dramatic effect at the very least they did do their philosophical homework after making that decision as a former contrarian of perhaps similar professional success i can attest to the importance of this step above all others any good devil's advocatarian begins the composition process with a statement they do not agree with and then researches deeply until they muster some fragmentary angle toward that statement that they do [Music] and now it's time for the bottom line doom speaks for itself doom with its immersive 3d visuals shocking bloody violence and addictive high-speed competitive play action caused many mainstream television personalities to independently settle upon the declaration that video games have come a long way since pac-man we hear this phrase in the mainstream media even today video games have come a long way since pac-man yes though only if you're looking at the numbers on a treadmill the fact is in 1993 as of doom video games had not come too long of away since pac-man doom even practically has pac-man in it it's a joke about the caco demon the big spherical guy with the mouth video games have and video games haven't come a long way since pac-man yet at the same time video games haven't come a long way at all since doom sure doom and its loud guns and idiot pig demons inflated masculinity to cartoon proportions though ultimately the conversations that began around its technical triumphs informed the greater game design conversation that continues today in addition to teaching other game developers that making your own 3d engine could be quite hideously lucrative doom and its readily available level editor taught millions of players that level design was game design and that game design was video games and thus that anyone with a computer could make video games dooms perfectly pleasantly playable yet at times so spartan its cryptic skeletality amounts firstly to a great work that says just as much as it has to and secondly to an invitation to the world to do better doom's incompleteness inspired innovating imitators thus due to the inspiration it represented for so many modders doom is ultimately more than itself whether on the macro scale by big ideas left unfinished within skeletal level designs or by bigger genres sketched casually in fleeting moments or on the intermediate scale by structural or atmospheric differences between ports and versions or on the less than micro scale by taking novelizations and films into account by being a game so bare it begs fools to novelize and film adapt it we can confidently declare that doom is bigger than itself doom is bigger than itself because doom speaks for itself that's a it's a wildly terrible sentence uh i like it we're leaving it in there people ask me all the time do i say really dumb stuff on purpose i mean of course this is you see how much fun i'm evidently having right now that that's like the worst sentence in this whole review it's so good this is i mean i'm i'm genuinely very entertained this whole review is just full of stuff that um i'm just it's just for me to to like drop the needle on the youtube video 10 years later and just go lol that i'm getting the 10 years later feeling right now with that sense that's really good and when doom speaks for itself it turns out that doom is a magnificently excellent video game if you've ever fired doom's shotgun you certainly don't need me to soliloquize about it and if you've never fired doom's shotgun any soliloquy i could compose could not compete with the shotgun itself doom runs on everything you could be firing that shotgun 10 seconds from now on the lcd screen of any appliance in your house or at least certainly in less time than it would take me to romanticize it and once you fire that shotgun you will know that though it is tactilely beautiful in a vacuum an infinitude of yet unmade situations lend kingly context to that beauty all games after doom are doomed we can smuggle away from doom the experimental impression that the best games are always inspirationally incomplete the best games are games only an absolutely delusional individual can claim to have played all of minecraft super mario maker street fighter tetris and doom you can't say you've played quote unquote all of doom unless you've played every wad unless you've death matched with every player who ever lived moreover the tendrils of its legacy stretch mangrove route like inextricable beneath all of post 1994 game history we cannot say we've played all of doom until we've played most video games that have ever been made you can't say you've played all of doom unless you've played the single-player campaign of unreal tournaments because tim sweeney probably would have never made a 3d engine if john carmack hadn't made it look so hard gabe newell worked on the windows port of doom so you can't say you played quote unquote all of doom unless you've played half-life half-life 2 half-life 2 episode 1 half-life 2 episode 2 or half-life alex you can't say you've played quote-unquote all of doom if you haven't played every video game made by every studio that ever asked for doom maps or quake maps in a game design job application you can't say you've played quote-unquote all of doom unless you've played every call of duty game and no one has played every call of duty game except me in order to play quote unquote all of doom i'm sorry you're gonna have to also play all of fortnite ironically i think you don't need to have played id software in bethesda softworks this 2016 game doom or their 2020 game doom eternal in order to have a complete doom experience they're wonderful games one's a little bit more wonderful than the other you know what i mean though i dare say remaking doom isn't doom making a new game and calling it doom is not as doom as making a new game and not calling it doom quake 1 is more doom than doom 2016. quake 2 is more doom than doom 3. you probably perfectly understand what i'm saying so i don't need to discuss this particular point too much right right in the bottom line on its 2008 review on actionbutton.net i called clifford blezinski's gears of war 2 video games the video game what this quote unquote clever turn of phrase omitted was that at that point in time the definition of video games was doom in our original review of doom on actionbutton.net we called doom the 15th best game of all time and awarded it the bottom line a vintage ford truck of a video game andrew tupes wrote that review it was not finished when he sent it to me it cut off in mid-sentence he said this is all i got man i don't know what he was doing that day so i finished it for him there's some weird sentences in there i put the bottom line on there vintage ford truck video game 12 years later i do not disagree with this bottom line especially because ford just announced the 2021 ford bronco which looks to me to be the doom of vehicles at the time i oversaw andrew tupes's feverish screed on doom i myself was employed in daily producing gray boxes of video game levels in the unreal engine for a game i would to be perfectly honest never play as a video game developer i knew doom more and more deeply than i knew any other game anyone you talked to in a aaa studio had doom all over them there was a 3d artist in the studio where i worked who told me he liked such and such level i'd sketched up because of the way i'd mixed areas with orthogonal walls with areas with non-orthogonal walls we were speaking english by the way i was in japan this was a fellow english native speaker he'd literally just used the word orthogonal twice in a casual conversation he was dutch i told him i love that word orthogonal and he said yeah dude i learned it from doom as i read a doom game fact from 1994 1994. on gamefaqs.com during the research phase of this review i saw the phrase non-orthogonal walls in the overview section and i remembered that guy that 3d artist that dutch 3d artist quite fondly then i remembered every other time doom came up during my career in game development a career that continues even now as my colleagues and diet action button continue to develop our game truck heck for pc and next generation consoles and the nintendo switch numerous times in my life i have collaborated temporarily with game developers who regularly invoke the names carmack and romero like a sort of prayer i have at times joined in the invocation masters of doom describes the man as drinking diet coke and eating pizza and playing f-zero and street fighter 2 for super nintendo while working on literally doom all hours of the night these men eschewed what their contemporary age group peers might have considered a normal social life in order to live what future generations would consider a normal social life except we we drink coke zero i realized that people of my generation and my professions mythologizing of carmack and romero's diet coca-cola workaholism has resulted in a complicated culture of crunch i won't lie i myself crunch i work on each of these videos for 300 or more hours deep into the night every night these videos hurt my head and my eyes and my neck and yes i often scream the way i did back in my college dorm in 1999 addicted to quake death match i wouldn't wish this game addiction-like crunch mentality on anyone else maybe we'll talk about this more in a future video i'm 41 years old and i still think about dooms romero and carmack every day of my life whenever i consider the video game i myself am trying to make truck heck almost belongs more to doom than it belongs to me for going on most of my career i've heard carmack and romero's names capstoning sentences which in their ends collapse in defeatism easily as many times as if not more times than i've heard that kurt cobain and jimi hendrix both died at age 27 i have heard that doom came out when john romero was 26 and john carmack was 23. i know a movie that came out when it's writer director and star was just 26. in summary for all the reasons i've encoded and embedded into the length of this presentation i declare unequivocally that doom is the citizen kane of video games apropos of this conclusion i pray that whatever eventually causes my inevitable death leaves me at least an interval of conscious time sufficient to think to utter a single doom demon death impression in lieu of last words save the investigative journalists of that future day their time the story my friends has been right here all along well that's all i have time for today we hold these truths to be self-evident that video games were created awesome that i was born stupid however i will not die hungry video games forever action button [Music] well that's the end of the video [Music] hello it took kind of a long time to make this video i think it took like three months no it's not three months okay it's definitely not three months almost it's like two and a half or so months so during the time i i spent making this video i'm as you probably heard if you watch the whole video you skipped to the end hello you can go back and watch more of it later if you watched all the video you know that during the time that i was researching and writing the script i ended up moving two times i got the coronavirus again i gained 40 pounds because of the the steroids prescribed for the lung damage and because of two bros pizza i got a haircut i lost 20 pounds i grew a kind of fraudulent beard like a like a trickster's beard i shaved it off the shortly before filming this we we can't use the bathtub here yet we're waiting for somebody to re-glaze the bathtub i want to thank everybody for waiting this long to watch this video i know that if you if you're you're a fan fan a viewer of this channel if you're a viewer of this channel you'll likely appreciate quality you're likely here because i'm not a guy yell reacting to insipid news for 10 minutes twice a day three times a day whatever it is the typical youtuber i don't think of myself as a youtuber i'm just a guy i'm really glad that people pay me to do this and i promise you your money is is going some pretty good places right now as you can see while i am recording this epilogue while you're watching the epilogue and uh i'm gonna overlay it over myself when i i throw this into adobe premiere and and just ripple trim a million things you're seeing ryan taylor and josh watson uh just kind of they're they're riffing around on the e1 m1 theme music from doom those those are my my two editors for these videos so we've got uh josh watson just like with the last two videos was a champion of getting me video game footy when i needed it and ryan taylor is is as you can see he's the one who helped film this thing in south bend indiana beautiful south bend indiana home of the crooked you wonderful restaurant he helped film this uh it helped i mean i don't know i didn't have those cameras so he he filmed it on 8k red cameras that's hobbit cameras jerry i want to thank ryan taylor's mom in south bend indiana for ending a sentence in jerry in my presence without knowing that two days earlier i now a resident of the upper west side of manhattan had started ending sentences and jerry this is my new apartment by the way i should take these sunday i'm going to take these sunglasses off i didn't want to do this in sunglasses i'm going to try to make this epilogue i'm going to try to edit this epilogue down to the length of their e1m1 jam session so let's see how this goes we're going to do a slightly faster pace than usual since i've been displaced from my workplace and i've only recently come back into the possession of all my boxes plugged my computer in sat down hunkered edited this whole thing in one disgusting setting just stewing in my own juices since i've only recently come back into this experience and i was spending two months on the road as it were various hotels were in new hampshire for a while the the writing process of this script was bonkers luckily doom runs on everything so i was able to play it on a wide variety of devices in order to assemble all of the thoughts that went into this review during that i also went ahead and go sticking with the runs on everything theme and also on the other hand trying to trailblaze toward a review of cyberpunk 2077 that i can hopefully deliver around christmas time it'll be my christmas present we're going five hours on that one i found two more games that i would like to review and i went ahead and played the heck out of them played them until their wheels fell off watched a lot of long plays super plays researched as thoroughly as is probably humanly possible given the coronavirus situation and whatnot i went ahead and wrote the scripts for those reviews and those games are pac-man and tokimeki memorial forever with you for the sony playstation and or sega saturn i played both versions you play the game multiple times i played through that game about eight times so i might play through it a couple more times in the in the editing process though my thoughts are complete as far as the writing goes i think those two videos are going to be pretty good they're going to be a little bit shorter than this one was they're going to come out a little bit sooner than this one did in the patreon description i did promise you one hour of densely scripted video content per month i have at this point delivered literally nine hours of densely scripted video content so i'm working my way up to a two year vacation we'll see how we do we are also god darn it we're building a website i want to thank nick splendor for helping us build this website this website's going to be wild i also want to thank well i can't i'm not going to thank anybody else on the merch front i'm not going to thank anybody on the merge front because then you're gonna be able to guess what the merch is oh and also i've got i actually took notes for this epilogue which is which is fun second no i don't actually think it's very good on a completely unrelated note if you're a graphic designer with with page layout experience and if you have a high tolerance for busy work just uh try to get in touch with me my uh business email address is at the top of my twitter profile you should be able to find it there most people can find it there if you can't find it up there then you've kind of disqualified yourself as a as a layout expert a lot of people have been asking if we're going to be producing any text only reviews for the website the answer to that is we're thinking of something i've got i've got something in the planning stages i don't want to speak too much about it i don't want to spoil it too much oh i'm also on an unrelated note i'm looking for if you're like a computer programmer who knows how to make pdfs i'm just i'm just here reading these these notes and sublime text and i got to say i want to thank sublime text for being the best text editing software i've ever used been using them for years i want to thank might as well while i'm here thank phil co for for making my keyboard zowie for making my mouse getting a spam call right now i'm waiting for the bathtub regulator to call so i have it off of do not disturb mode for the first time in eight years if you saw that bathtub you'd know why sublime text filco zowie these these they're not actually my sponsors and i don't want them to be they have never given me a cent and i hope to keep it that way oh man i almost forgot that for this video i tracked down a pair of the american optical z83 gold tall glasses that john carmack is wearing in the sword photo and i thought that i wouldn't be able to get my hands back on the music or in my storage unit however i have my boxes right here so let me see if i can find them yeah i got them got them in this bag hold on these are them what do you think anyway i have a list of people i want to thank so let's go through this real quick uh i i feel like this is going to be longer than their seven minute whatever number of seconds jam session so i'll just just loop it i'll loop the jam session in the background if you see it twice don't freak out i want to thank university of california at berkeley's own lauren miller phd for replying almost instantly to a text message that i sent her asking for a translation of the bubble tape slogan from english into latin she replied immediately with a reasonably long well-structured explanation of why she translated it in the multiple ways she translated it thank you for that i want to thank my my action button co-founders and truck heck brothers michael kerwin and brent porter for capturing all the doom footage that was used in this video pristine doom footage now i can play doom pretty well myself at this point however i lacked perfectly clean captures when we had to hurry out of our old apartment because the situation got weird thanks for stepping up guys uh i i hope to work with you again on truck heck uh in a couple of minutes i wanna i wanna thank mobygames for having all this game box arts on there for free to use that i just download hundreds of them for every one of these projects i want to thank my buddy delicious mccune not for not for any particular reason just because you sent me a text message the other day and it was funny i didn't reply to it immediately though it was a good text i want to thank adam tarwacki at the granger community church in granger indiana for letting me talk to him about some ridiculously stupid thing that i was thinking about before i went and filmed the hard part of this video of course i want to thank mimsy and my tiny wolf baby babies where's bibby baptist baby babis come here i want to thank minzy and my tiny wolf bibby baptist for being my best friend and my beast friend respectively i'm going to put him down he needs a wash i want to thank john romero for designing so many levels in a video game that every time i play them they're still incredibly uh ridiculously good kind of uh just a whole bunch of home run level designs just universally enjoyable exciting good video game levels to play through i gladly played through doing seven or eight times in the course of compiling the resources necessary to make this review i sure did just have myself a real good time every time a john romero level started up i was just like heck yeah so uh thanks for making those levels that that inspired me too long time ago back in back in 2000 i didn't get into this in the review that really kind of just got me really thinking about level design and really thinking about making video games and i ended up actually sort of doing that later so thanks for that oh and i have some backer shout outs tried to memorize all these names i don't know if i did it right i'm going to try to do it i know it's number one is justin scormarovsky golock jacob gillespie i actually owe everybody two shout outs so i've got i'll do them all twice justin scormarovsky justin scormarovsky golock golock jacob gillespie jacob gillespie tess smith tess smith woody jang woody jang john h john h asked rolad astro that bernard kinchious bernard kinkius i don't know if i'm pronouncing that correctly i've met you in real life several times red muffler man red muffler man reza serranotai i don't know if i'm pronouncing that correctly i'm sorry the laser girls the laser girls joshua jarvis joshua jarvis anti-novice anti-novice matthew matthew dumont dumont a little bit of a twist on that one dave brown brown dave sam g sam g james schroeder james schrader pronounced it two different ways christopher lopez christopher lopez trance one two one five trans 12 15. jacob jacob i technically already you you got included in the jacob gillespie wonderfully oh now jacob gillespie's got three oh now jacob gillespie's got four now jacob gillespie's got five david shaw david shaw nate and nate mimsey and mimsy i've actually shouted out mimsy earlier ryan lang ryan lang keith miller keith miller stephen taylor not stephen tyler stephen taylor the coconut kid and the coconut kid jonathan longnecker jonathan longnecker scott olson morales scott olson morales dario britania dario britania kenny carranza kenny carranza ranger mankin ranger mankin seth carlson seth carlson charles schultz charles schultz sarah sofia sarah sophia did it as always thank you for backing us on patreon if you don't back us on patreon and you don't want to that's okay if you don't back us on patreon and you do want to you can do that go to patreon.com action button if you want to join our discord go to discord dot gg action button if you want to just subscribe to the youtube channel that's youtube.com action button and if you want to follow us on twitch that's twitch.tv action button and if you want to follow us on twitter that's twitter.comactionbutton i got them all pretty good branding purposes also i think i might buy one of these these two skull jackets soon so let me know which one you think i should buy i just want to reiterate that these these videos are as you you might have noticed if you've watched them which i hopefully you have there they are i have to reiterate they're horribly hard to make there is a lot of work involved in these there's three of us making them now and it's uh i've only been making it harder for myself i could show you my premiere timeline again i'll throw up a pin dot png of that though i think i've i've exhausted that joke at least for the rest of this year and just just just take my word for it you you you could not believe how much my head hurts right now it's why my my glasses are off that's why i was wearing sunglasses earlier because my head hurts that bad because of this video that you just watched usually i prepare some kind of little surprise to put at the end of the video usually there's been two videos this is the third one usually i provide a surprise at the end i decided to work the surprises into this video so that's why there's no surprises sorry about that i want to thank our friend hbomberguy for recording a full reading of that itch uh magazine 1994 review of doom uh we only used a little bit of it though i think it was pretty good anyway you can you can subscribe like comment whatever it is you want to do if you want to do any of those things if you don't that's okay i'm not the cops i will never be the cops i mean that's it that's all i got i'll uh see you next time [Music] goodbye [Music] [Music] did you hear about this this doom thing the youtube kept blocking the video we just uploaded it uh i uploaded it like two nights ago i was up to like four in the morning i had to upload it like 14 times like five times i think it was five five times we did five final exports with like a million hilarious names he kept blocking it because some robot thought it owned a copyright to beethoven's pathetic kept flagging it blocking it was like this video was blocked in some territories and i clicked on the some territories and it said united states and the united kingdom and i was like i know those guys yeah so right at the end the bureaucracy making me look like a liar are we ready are we rolling are we are we rolling okay well hello and welcome back to video games i'm tim rogers you are watching the action button review of pac-man a video game designed by toru iwatani oh man i just thought of something there was a line in the pack the the doom review i was i'm looking at this prompter i said to iwatani i knew it was missing and i didn't say anything about it i forgot there was a line at the end of the uh the the edge section where i reviewed the the edge 7 out of 10 review of doom there was a line that was in there and i'm hearing todu iwatani because i i know did you know told me about tony played one of my games and he recommended it to somebody like there's a story about that in this pac-man thing there was a line that was like the end right before i said and that's the straight dope was supposed to be also in 2012 edge magazine gave action buttons game ziggurat for ios a 9 out of 10. so when i say that they meant to give doom a 10 out of 10 i know what i'm talking about and that's the straight dope i wanted that to be in the doom video because it's very important to what i say in the in the pac-man video do we have time to like reshoot the whole doom thing i'm not the cops

Channel: Action Button

Views: 266,555

Rating: 4.9087439 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 38zduHkwGcc

Length: 210min 22sec (12622 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/wolfcore]

Trying to imagine the time that went into this video ... jesus.

[u/spb1]

i cant believe this only got 1 comment. i guess not many original doom fans here. incredible video