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Doom
The grandfather of all First-Person Shooters.
- Developer: id Software
- Release Date: 12/1993
- Twitter: Unknown
- Known For: Being open source, Satanic imagery, Pissing off Jack Thompson, Being METAL, PROTIP, The Doom comic, /v/-style purists, Knee-Deep in Zdoom
Summary
Doom is one of the first First-Person Shooters ever (succeeding the less-popular Wolfenstein 3D), and is the game that started to get the culture of modding, the act of changing a video game into something else for fun or as a foray into the world of programming, on its feet. It also garners a rather large community today based solely around creating modifications for it.
Origins
After id Software finished their first attempt at making a first person shooter, they decided to do it again. After preparations were made and plans were established, work was actually done on the engine. This new engine allowed for more complexly structured maps than the square-like levels of the preceding Wolfenstein 3D and is usually designated as what made the video game popular when it was first released.
Rise to Fame
While it was rather popular when it first came out, Doom started to lose its fanbase when id Software decided to make another similar game called Quake. However, people still preferred the ease of modability that Doom provided and continued to create custom maps and content for it of varying quality.
It was only after John Carmack, the man who coded the engine itself, released the source code under the GPL in October of 1999 that Doom started to regain its popularity. With the source code, users were able to make source ports that expanded the possibilities that Doom offered and soon modders were able to make levels that rivalled the quality of the new games were coming out at the time.
Eric Harris, one of the two guys who committed the Columbine massacre, made several Doom maps and posted them online. You can still download and play them if you know where to look. "UAC Labs," one of the so-called "Harris levels," made a list of one of the worst/most infamous Doom maps ever. Despite what urban legends and chain e-mail say, none of the levels even closely resembles Columbine High School (a trait shared by many "my school/house" maps at the time). It was because of the alleged "Harris levels" that Jack Thompson started his fight against Doom and all other First-Person Shooters by assuming that playing a violent video game was what made Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold go crazy, not listening to Marilyn Manson (well, Harris didn't like Marilyn Manson [1]) and studying Nazi eugenics.
Current status
Doom has many different source ports to offer, each with their own communities and forums. Because they are all supposedly united under one game but all have different ideas about it, they frequently war with each other and produce their own internet drama, stereotypes about each other, and some of their own memes; mirroring the conflict between the boards of 4chan.
While Doom itself has spawned several games based on it or are continuations of it over the years, modders have either gone out and bought those games, made mods for Doom that replicate those games of varying degrees of accuracy and quality, or ignored them and treated them like /v/ treats sequels.
However, even though the most advanced source ports of Doom are incapable of recreating scenes from more recent FPSes without serious framerate and/or resource issues, some players still prefer the easy to learn "back-to-basics" run and gun gameplay of Doom over what recent games have evolved into (detailed by the level designer of Bioshock 2 here), leading to a massive cultural gap in between those who like older games like Doom and those who like newer games like Halo. Many a flamewar has been caused on both sides of the gap whenever the other game is mentioned. As a result, it is unfortunately incredibly easy to troll Doomers (sometimes accidentally) simply by posting a comment that puts a game like Halo in a relatively positive light in a Doom forum.
Facts
- This is one of the few First-Person Shooters that doesn't completely suck.
- Jack Thompson hates this game a lot.
- The forums of Doom are almost complete replicas of /v/, only they are about the many ways to play one game instead of vice versa.
- Strangely enough, the communities that cut-and-paste memes (about two years too late) and generally act and have all the social stereotypes of users on 4chan proclaim to hate 4chan itself.
- People that play Doom are usually just like the people that play Halo or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 except that they say they hate those games.
- It is about as easy to piss off most Doomers as it is to piss off Furries and Deviantards, probably due to the fact that around 50% of all Doomers are in fact Furries (who are mostly clustered in the SkullTag and Zdoom sects of the community) and can't take any amount of criticism at all.
Images
 A Fat Son image poking fun at the controversy and opinions surrounding a remake of Doom's first 9 levels. |
 What playing Doom will make you act like. |
 A typical custom Doom level. |
 Doom or Half-Life? (Surprise: it's Doom.) |
Videos
Related Pages
External Links
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