How Doom Revolutionised the First-Person Shooter Game Market and why it is Worth Playing.

Doom is a first-person shooter game about a man, who is the only survivor left on Mars, who is being attacked by demons. The objective of the game is to kill all the demons and to get back to Earth. The reason why you are on Mars, to begin with, is because you disobeyed your commander’s orders. You did that because he said you must shoot a bunch of civilians. After killing all the demons, you decide to go back to Earth, only to find the demons have taken over Earth, but most importantly they kill your pet rabbit. Doom was created by ID software in 1993, with the main programmers being John Carmack and John Romero.

Demons are some of the enemies you will face in Doom (1993). The first one is zombie men, who are soldiers who have been turned by corruption. The Imps like to shoot a fireball at a far distance and if you get close to them, they will claw you. Pinky and Spectre like to rush at you on their two hind legs to bite you. Spectre is a different version of Pinky; they are always invisible and are hard to see. Lost souls are just floating flaming skulls, when they hit you, they explode, and they are also fast. Cacodemon is a large flying head monster with red scales, horns and one eye. It moves slowly but has strong jaws and can spit out lightning balls from a distance. Baron of Hell acts like the mini-bosses in ‘Knee-deep in the dead’ resembling large blood-red Satyrs. They can hurl streaming balls of green plasma and employs a powerful clawing attack at close range. They can also take a lot of punishment before being slain. There are more bosses, but I will let you go and play the game and see for yourself.

Image: Bethesda/id software

Doom was cutting edge at the time of its release in 1993. One of the things that made it big is it has its engine and it looked unlike any game that came before. Doom was one of the first violent games to be released to the public, it had lots of blood and gore in it. The storyline wasn’t the focus for the developers, the gameplay was the key focus instead. The gameplay was fast-paced, and it was always engaging as there was never a dull moment. This game has mods, which not many games did at the time or even nowadays. One of the mods I’ll mention is called Brutal Doom, it was popular in the Doom community because it expands the game by adding new weapons and demons. 

Doom is a revolutionary game as it made first-person shooter games so popular in the late 90s. The current state of first-person shooter games right now is thanks to games like Doom. There is a good chance that some of your favorite first-person shooter games might not exist, for example, Halo and Call of Duty, if not for Doom making the first-person shooter genre so popular. Not many developers would take the chance to create first-person shooter such as Doom because other genres would be more popular than it, such as role-playing games or RPGs. The reason behind the satanic parts in the game is to feel part of the world and be noticeable because many people know about satanic rituals in real life.

Since Doom is a huge game, it has a massive community following. The Doom team try to involve the community by having the mod, and in a later game called Doom (2016) they added a way to make maps. By having the ability to create your maps, this allows you to create your unique mission. Let’s talk about the mods and how they involve the community. The reason the Doom community survived for so long is that the mods made the game so fresh, there was always new mods every day, so the community never got bored. Doom (2016) added a new mode that allows you to create stuff. This was a new way to make the community connect and this also replaced mods for this game. 

Image: Bethesda/id software

In Conclusion, Doom was a game that had many unique features that will be the foundation for future first-person shooter games. Even though it is a very old game, it is still brought up nowadays because of its unique features. New versions of the game are being released to this day, it’s still alive and kicking. The latest version is called Doom Eternal which was released on 20 March, 2020. I do recommend playing this game to see what it’s like. Anyway, this is the end of my third article, I hope you enjoy it.

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