© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 73
The world changed in December 1993. Scientists on Mars somehow opened a portal to hell. Millions of young men, myself included, and a good number women, answered the call to close the portal went into battle. We all came back changed in some way or other. Don’t worry. It really happened, and I haven’t gone mad. If you don’t know what I am talking about it is because you didn’t notice it. Maybe you weren’t born. Maybe you were too uncool. Maybe you didn’t have a computer.
The Revenants were my personal nightmare. I never had the nerve to expose myself in a melee attack and use the chainsaw to bring them down. I had no particular problems with the rocket-toting Mancubuses or the fiery balls of plasma spat out by floating Cacodemons.
After its 1993 Christmas release, Doom and the subsequent games, Doom 2 and Ultimate Doom, the series went on to become the most-installed game software on earth, with the obvious exceptions of Minesweeper and the solitaire games that come packaged with Windows.
Up until that time the closest thing to a ‘first-person shooter’ was the strangely camp Castle Wolfenstein, featuring the player and a group of Nazis in a castle. Wolfenstein was made by ID Soft, the same group who went on to make the Doom series. Doom began life as a plan to make the game of the movie Alien but, as history tells us, all that changed.
The huge environments with freedom to turn and shoot in any direction, imaginative game play and the then revolutionary graphics engine combined to seize the imagination of gamers. As a result Doom was widely regarded as ‘the best game ever’, and still is, in spite of its now dated pixilated graphics.
Doom wrought changes to culture. It kept a lot of young people at home as they slugged it out with the legions of hell. LAN culture emerged, centering around local area networks. People would tote their PCs to the homes of friends and play cooperatively in groups. And Doom servers enabled people to play online. A lot of people responded by making sure that they had computers at home.
Doom gained notoriety due to its violence and the efforts Mother Grundies who blamed youth violence on it. I do not accept this. Violent people do not need computer games to pick up guns. Violent people are those who are clinically psychotic or who did not have the benefit of a good upbringing. If that doesn’t convince you, consider the fact that I have never committed a massacre in spite of the fact that I have spent hundreds of hours playing Doom and the ‘first person shooters’ that followed.
The concept of the ‘first-person shooter’ was developed in games like Quake and Half Life. Graphic quality took vast strides. So did storylines. Nowadays the revenue of the games industry often exceeds that of the motion picture industry. Major studios release games based on action movies. Film adaptations of games are less successful though. Why watch the movie if you can interact with the game and influence the situations?
So why spend time writing about Doom and the first person shooter?
Some years ago Doom 3 was announced. It took years until its release, and every credible gaming website carried stories on its progress. It was released in 2004, last year. I only began playing it a year after its release, a week or two ago in reality.
It is a retelling of the original game, but dark, claustrophobic and terrifying thanks to the brilliant quality of the graphics. Every corner holds a gruesome shock. I can only play it for 15 minutes at a time, after which I have to turn it off and calm down again. The amazing science fiction of the first games has been replaced with virtual terror and adrenalin.
Still, an advertisement that I see quite often says that people stop playing when they get old, but they age because they stop playing. I guess the gray hairs that the game is giving me qualify as some form of youthfulness. What sort of youthfulness it is I suppose I will only be able to determine when I have finished playing the game.
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