Doom

Title: Doom
Platform Played On: PC/Xbox 360
Release Date: December 10 ,1993
Date Played: 1993-1995, September, 2007
Time Played: 200+ hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes (many times)
Score: 5/5


Opinion:
Ah Doom, the game that started it all. When doom came out I was 8 years old, and it so happened that it was one of the first PC games I have ever played.

Doom was something amazing, it was a window into another world and to an 8 year old the ultimate way to spend a night.

Doom is responsible for the state of the video game industry today. It defined the First Person Shooter genre (sure there was Wolfenstein before it), but compared to Doom it seemed like a boring proof of concept rather than a game.

Although it looks rather terrible by today's standards, back then Doom featured the highest fidelity graphics, with an amazing atmosphere, and kick-ass midi music. It controlled great and the guns were versatile, yet very well balanced and fun to use. It raised the bar on graphic violence, you could literally liquefy guys with explosions. If you were cool, you played Doom.

With nothing else coming even close to Doom in its atmosphere and design it was THE game to play for years after its release. I have easily spent over 200 hours completing it over and over again. By the time Doom 2 came out, I knew every nook and cranny of Doom 1. And I mean literally, I knew where every single secret was and the best way to make it through the levels. All derived from playing it by myself. There were no F.A.Qs or internet forums to socialize about video games at that time, and being one of very few people with a computer and most likely the only person to play Doom in my whole city of Ussuriysk there was noone to get help from.

Graphic Violence

This lack of other players prevented me from playing multiplayer, which was up to 4 player co-op or deathmatch. Entirety of my Doom experience was solo campaigns, until 1999 when I was able to set up a multiplayer game with my friend David via a serial cable between a Pentium II (350mhz) and Pentium I (100mhz) computers. But at that time games like StarCraft, Blood, and Duke3d were available so after a few sessions we went back to those.

Over the (almost 2) decades Doom was ported and released on a ton of platforms other than PC, and in March 2006 it came to Xbox Live Arcade. At that point I havent played doom in over 7 years, and so I decided to pick it up and play through it. Surprisingly it was a lot of fun, I would still remember an occasional fake wall and some secrets. It was great to have a walk down the Doom memory lane.

It would probably be petty hard for anyone that didnt play it back then to play it now. It would be nearly impossible to understand its impact with the complexity of the first person shooters on the marker today. However if you did play it back in the day, or would like to see what started the FPS revolution I would recommend picking up Doom from Xbox Live Arcade, it is really cheap, yet pretty long game featuring multiple campaigns and difficulty levels.