TL;DR: Doom is the most important video game ever made and you should absolutely take the time to experience it for yourself.
Before we begin on this multiple page love letter to id Software’s classic first-person shooter Doom, it will be helpful to provide a glossary of terms. Doom is more than a video game, it is an continuous experience constantly improved and iterated upon by a passionate community of fans. As such, the community has devised several terms you will need to familiarize yourself with in order to truly appreciate Doom.
Glossary
E1M1: “Episode 1, Map 1”. Doom is an episodic FPS, meaning that contains several episodes consisting of a series of levels called maps. An episode typically has a consistent theme and story, with each of its maps building on its concept. The first Doom game released with three official episodes and two were added later. You refer to a specific map using this notion.
WAD: “Where’s All The Data?”. This refers to the file format used by Doom for storing data. An IWAD or “internal WAD” such as DOOM.WAD or DOOM2.WAD refers to the WAD file required for executing any Doom engine game. A PWAD or “patch WAD” is a file replaces the content found in an IWAD. PWADs are often fan-made and used for custom maps, textures, sprites, and sounds. PWADs are commonly referred to as just WADs or “megaWADs” if the number of maps they contain approaches the size of a full game.
Source port: A port of the source code for the Doom engine. These are primarily open source under the GNU GPL and are necessary for cross-platform compatibility and for the addition of new features to alter gameplay. If you don’t want to play Doom in DOSBox (you don’t) or buy it on Steam (you shouldn’t), it is recommended to use a source port.
There are dozens of source ports that offer a variety of graphics and gameplay options. I prefer the more “vanilla” source ports, that is those that are most faithful to the original Doom experience in 1993. Chocolate Doom and Crispy Doom (maintained by the same developer) are quite faithful with the latter allowing for a glorious 640x400 resolution, twice that of the original 320x200 resolution. For the truly hardcore, I’d recommend PrBoom+ which comes with the option of OpenGL support via its GLBoom+ build.
If this is all too autistic for you (you can spend hours configuring source ports and it can be more fun than playing Doom), buy the “official” version on Steam. Just avoid GZDoom unless you’re an irredeemable Zoomer.
UV max: a speedrunning term referring to playing Doom on Ultra-Violence difficulty (the only difficulty you should ever play Doom on), finding all secrets, and killing all enemies. At the end of a Doom map, you are given your time, percentage of enemies killed, and percentage of secrets found. A UV Max playthrough attempts to get the fastest completion time while still getting 100% on the map.
While I think speedrunning is worse for you than heroin, completing each Doom map 100% on UV with a pistol start (no carrying over health, armor, weapons, or ammo from a previous map) and fast monsters enabled (set a -fast parameter after the executable’s name) at my own pace is my preferred way of playing Doom. The real beauty of playing Doom is you can play it however you want. You can attempt each map in a single go or quick save before every fight and grind your way through. But play it on Ultra-Violence for the definitive experience. The game isn’t simply harder on UV: there are additional enemy placements that make each map more challenging.
Knee-Deep in the Dead
I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to playing Doom. Perhaps it was my own bias that held me back. How often is it that PC games that are almost three decades old are still playable let alone good? Maybe it was the hype surrounding Doom Eternal’s release. For whatever reason last year, I decided to give Doom a go.
Initially, it was a complete disaster. I had unwittingly been playing the DOSBox version, and worse yet, I couldn’t figure out how to disabled the “feature” where your character moves forward when you move your mouse forward. This lead to many avoidable deaths and frustrations. Yet, strangely enough, I continued with the game. With the aid of The Doom Wiki and Decino’s videos, I made my way through each level (still on DOSBox), finding as many secrets as I could, and doing my best to exterminate all the monsters on the map. And, I was having fun.
Above all, Doom was fun. It sounds simple enough, games should be fun, but fun is nowhere to be found in the vast majority of modern games. While I don’t play many of the greatest offenders, even established series that I’ve always liked such as The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Pokémon I can hardly call fun anymore. Too often it feels like I’m being taken on a guided tour of a theme park and checking off a list of sights and attractions as I proceed through it. If I went a week or two without playing, I’d lose all interest in continuing. Doom was different.
Doom is not a first-person shooter. The term didn’t come around until well after Doom: first-person shooters were called “Doom clones” before they were known as first-person shooters. Doom is not even a game. It is a river in constant flux, changing and evolving but staying true to its form. Doom is a puzzle, a fast and violent puzzle. There are a discrete quantity of enemies, a discrete quantity of weapons, and a continuous quantity of scenarios in which its discrete quantities can interact. There are eight weapons, ten monsters, and infinite possibilities. Doom II adds another weapon and seven more enemies (ten if you’re a complete neckbeard and want to argue about it), but the balance remains. You’re presented with a unique combination of monsters and geography, and you must use your resources to solve the challenge. Repeat until the credits roll.
Most people would agree that Doom owes much of its strength as a game to its sense of momentum. Nobody prior to 1993 had seen a game as fast as Doom. Doom is about motion and speed: if you stand still in Doom, you’re dead. To this day, there are few games that compare to how good Doom feels to control. You can strafe and change directions with ease, and given that the majority of monster attacks are projectile based, you can avoid taking damage if you’re skilled enough. One thing I seldom see mentioned is how the lack of mouselook contributes to this. Doom isn’t truly 3D even though it appears so. The game will auto-aim your shots if an enemy is “higher” or “lower” than you. This contributes to the game’s sense of speed in that you’re not standing around trying to aim shots. Especially with the shotgun, you face the general direction you want to fire and something dies. The game does the work for you while you’re focused on moving and staying alive.
Doom’s weapons again achieve a sense of perfect balance. Doom wrote the blueprint on “classic” FPS weapon inventories: you have your melee weapon, pistol, shotgun, automatic, explosive weapon, powerful sci-fi weapon, and an ultimate weapon that kills everything on screen. The melee weapons in Doom are your fist and chainsaw. In the pre-irony era Doom released in, this was the most badass thing imaginable: an angry, buff guy going about punching and sawing demons into bloody pulp. If you learn to put aside your jaded indifference it’s still as cool as it always was. Doom’s pistol is nothing special but it shares an ammo pool with the chaingun, which does the same damage at a much faster rate of fire. The rocket launcher, plasma gun, and BFG9000 are the only non-hitscan weapons, all of which fire projectiles for massive damage. And then there’s the shotgun. Doom’s shotgun is legendary and it is easily the greatest shotgun ever in a video game. It’s your workhorse weapon, reliable and good for anything situation. It only gets better in Doom II with the introduction of the Super Shotgun, which fires two shells at once for up to three(!) times the damage of a normal shotgun shell.
The Shores of Hell
Doom’s core systems are as flawless as they come, and the same could be said for many of its early maps. E1’s maps were mostly designed by John Romero, one of the greatest developers and level designers in the industry. His 2019 SIGIL episode, a WAD containing 9 new maps for the original Doom, are a testament to his skill and some of the best maps for the base game. E1’s maps, however, are probably his most iconic work.
What’s so great about E1M1, the first Doom map, is that it teaches you everything you need to know about Doom. There are no tutorials, no cutscenes, and no intrusive arrows on screen telling you exactly where to go. E1M1 drops you in a room, gives you a pistol, and tells you to figure it out. To your right, you can see an outdoors area with some type of power-up hovering over a pond. You can’t get there yet, so you either go straight. Immediately, you are shot at from the left by a Zombieman in a room you hadn’t noticed. One Zombieman is “above” you, so you return fire and learn how the auto-aim system works. You don’t really need to aim in Doom. You pick up the power-up he was guarding and gain armor. The power-up looks similar to the one outside, clueing you in on what is does. You’re then shot at by another Zombieman you hadn’t seen, you kill him, and you pick up the shotgun. You then find a button and unlock a secret that leads you outside, teaching you to be aware of your surroundings.
E1M1 teaches you how the movement, combat, and secrets in Doom all work together. It’s not until E1M2 that keys are introduced. The main premise of a Doom map is to find some combination of a blue key, a red key, and a yellow key, and exit the map. You do not need to kill all the monsters, finish the map in a certain amount of time, or find all the items and secrets. You can if you want to, and finding certain secrets will make the maps easier, but it is up to you how you play Doom. Some maps have more than one exit that will take you to a secret map that is often more challenging than usual. Doom’s secrets are hard to find, they are secrets after all, but it is this sense of risk and reward that contribute to how enjoyable Doom is to play. Do I risk exploring the map further to look for secrets and potentially die? Or do I play it safe and exit the map, even though I might not be as powerful without the secret weapon I could find? These are emergent decisions you have to make as a player and contribute greatly to Doom’s re-playability.
E1 ends with E1M8 and a sort of boss fight against two Barons of Hell, hard-hitting enemies that become common in the later episodes. At the end of E1M8 you are killed and lose all your weapons and ammo. Each new episode or player death in Doom has you start fresh with just a pistol, fifty rounds of ammo, and full health. This is known as a “pistol start” and each map is designed to be completed from a pistol start. Some are much harder to pistol start than others (E1M9 comes to mind), but this is an additional challenge the players have the option of imposing on themselves. I prefer pistol starts as they require you to make the most of all the resources on the map. It turns Doom into a survival horror game of sorts where you have to be more mindful of your health and ammo.
E2 has some strong maps as well. Most of these maps were started by Tom Hall and finished by Sandy Petersen, the level designer for most of Doom II’s maps. Petersen has a different design philosophy to Romero, but I find Petersen’s maps to be of good quality with plenty of unique gimmicks to challenge players. The difficulty ramps up considerably in E2 as you’re introduced to longer levels, more enemies, and more enemy types. Of these enemy types, the cacodemon is the most recognizable. This floating red ball of malice are one of the most fun enemies to fight and can pose a significant threat in large numbers. Because cacodemons can fly (they technically don’t, their sprite just expands and contracts to imply height), they can appear from anywhere. Combined with the other monsters, this adds another dimension to the combat.
Lastly, E3 takes place entirely in Hell (not to be confused with E3 or Electronic Entertainment Expo which also takes place in Hell). E3 has some of the most interesting maps from a design perspective in the original game. I find the levels in E3 to be better in general than E2, as they’re less mazelike and feature more interesting locales. My personal favorite is E3M6, a wide outdoor area surrounded by lava and featuring everyone’s favorite Doom texture FIREBLU. There is a secret on this level that took me a long time to figure out. It turns out you can “jump” in Doom by running fast enough to gain the necessary momentum to skip over small gaps. This doesn’t work well and requires mastery of Doom’s movement, but most maps rarely require complex jumps.
Inferno
The reason for Doom’s eternal legacy is not the official maps, however. id Software released the source code for the Doom engine a few years after the game released leading to an active mod community. Many of these mods I’ll discuss require the DOOM2.WAD as Doom II features more enemies and weapons while keeping the core gameplay the same. Doom became something of a platform to build your own games on. Several prominent developers got their start making their own Doom maps. I’ve even read that in interviews at game companies back in the day, applicants would showcase their own maps to prove their skill at level design.
Doom has two additional episodes: E4 and SIGIL (sometimes referred to as E5). E4 came with The Ultimate Doom, a re-release of Doom that hit shelves around a year after Doom II came out. E4’s maps, despite many being designed by John Romero and American McGee (the same guy who made the Alice games), are experimental to say the least. If you want more Doom, I’d recommend SIGIL instead. SIGIL shows off things you didn’t know were possible in the base game. The levels are intricately designed, it’s challenging, and the soundtracks (both the MIDI and the one by Buckethead) are excellent. I didn’t get into Doom’s music, but you can be assured that it completes the experience. Most songs are “borrowed” from the metal bands the original id Software team were fans of and work appropriately to set the mood.
As far as must-play megaWADs, there are many to choose from. The Doom community has an annual feature called the Cacoawards where the best community-made mods are recognized. In my opinion, you can’t go wrong with WADs made by skillsaw. The best of his is by far Valiant, which is not only the best WAD I have played but one of the best gaming experience I’ve had. Valiant features 32 levels, an upgraded pistol and chaingun, tons of new enemies, and an amazing soundtrack with contributions from stewboy. The visual aesthetic is interesting and maps feature novel situations such as M7 where you have to keep a monster alive until the end. There is also a secret area in M27 that reaches such amazing heights of kino that it has to be played to be believed.
Most megaWADs are incredibly difficult and will put your Doom skills to the test. A common theme with fan-made maps is the “slaughter map”, which pits you against hundreds if not thousands of monsters at once. One particularly difficult WAD worth a look is Sunlust by Ribbiks and dannebubinga. Sunlust has an incredible visual style and some of the hardest maps I’ve ever played. I only made it to the fifth map until the WAD got the best of me. Another challenging WAD is Eviternity by Dragonfly. Eviternity has a sort of Heaven and Hell theme going on and has 32 maps divided into six episodes. Really there’s an endless amount of high-quality content for Doom, some with solid, traditional levels like Back to Saturn X and others with crazy concepts like Ancient Aliens.
Doom certainly lives up to its reputation. There’s much more I can talk about with regards to its influence on the gaming industry and society as a whole, but I think it’s best to end things here. Once you’ve properly configured Doom to your liking in a source port, it is possible it’ll be the last game you ever play. One can’t “finish” Doom as it’s a continually iterating experience. Every year there are new mods and maps that change the game in subtle yet interesting ways. The only thing you can do is experience Doom for yourself.
—Neetwo