There was a palpable sense of death’s imminency, but that came predominantly from the sheer density of its imaginatively-designed monsters. Sure, hellish imagery was pervasive in the classic games.
Is it the horror? I would contend that Doom didn't become a horror series properly until Doom 3, where it finally gained a graphics engine capable of creating dark, claustrophobic environments. Should the series progress further along that path, adding more non-combat interactivity and scripted sequences, or maybe even character customisation? Or does that push it too far towards Call of Duty, as a scrapped Doom 4 project demonstrated? Conversely, can an old-school shooter compete in today’s market? Throwbacks exist, like Serious Sam or Pain Killer, but those games consciously buck the overwhelming trend towards storytelling, tactics and complexity. Even Doom 3 was a conscious move away from its frantic origins, in favour of a more story- and horror-driven experience. But there’s a certain antiquity to the pacing and rhythms of Doom combat. Many of the paradigms it introduced - the pistol/shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher armoury, the power ups, the scores of monsters - are still in play today. Is it the shooting? Doom did, after all, bring first-person shooting to the masses. What can set a new Doom apart in 2014? What makes it worth reviving? The first-person shooter has evolved from the cacophonous pixelly mayhem of 1993 into a range of sleek, often complex beasts like Battlefield and Titanfall. So what can a new Doom actually do for us? The franchise did its innovating and made its contributions twenty years ago. Worse, that game struggled to stake out its own niche, trapped in between classic shooter gameplay and more open, RPG-like gameplay.
This is an id Software lacking focus: its divisive Rage demonstrated that a pretty graphics engine and shooting does not cut it these days. DOOM will be the first in the series developed largely without the input of creator John Carmack, who left id last year to change the world with VR pioneers Oculus. Hulk capitals aside, the game itself has been torn up and restarted several times in its journey through - appropriately - development hell. Who knows what further changes the title will undergo in the future? We know it’s had a torturous path getting here: when the game was first announced nearly six years ago, it was called Doom 4. We know it’ll look great, likely building on the foundation of Rage’s id Tech 5 engine. We know it’s ditching numbers, colons and subtitles like Tomb Raider, Thief, and Star Trek, in an attempt to seem fresh and new. Now we’re facing the imminent release of a beta of a new Doom, entitled DOOM (in all-caps), which will piggyback onto a new instalment in another age-old id property, Wolfenstein: New Order.
Now, when you say its name, all the kids think of is the increasingly popular Dhoom series of Bollywood films. The disastrous 2005 release of the franchise’s big-screen adaptation* all but killed the series. Through the late ‘90s, Doom got supplanted in id’s development priorities by Quake 2003’s Doom 3 was met with praise more for its graphics engine than for its gameplay, which stagnated where the likes of Half-Life had innovated. And it formed the foundation for id Software, whose games and game engines would form the backbone of the game industry for decades. It similarly popularised and honed multiplayer gaming, the core mechanics of which are maintained to this day. Doom popularised the first-person shooter genre, which now holds undisputed commercial dominance over the medium. Its contribution to the world of video games can’t be overstated.
It’s as old to us now as Pong was to it on its 1993 release.