Another anniversary that will make you feel old…Doom just had its twentieth birthday. Things move very quickly in the video game world, and what’s today’s sensation can be forgotten in a hurry, but quite a few people are definitely celebrating the impact of Doom this week, and how it became a landmark for the first person shooter.
As a report on Paste feels, “Doom stands out from its more recent descendants in that it is utterly unpretentious.” Paste also called Doom “The Most Influential Shooter Ever,” and as the site continues, “The mechanics of Doom (and, by extension, virtually every first person shooter since) were designed solely to support not a narrative, but action.”
John Carmack of id Software told Kotaku.com that before the game came out, “it was blindingly obvious that this was going to be awesome. As John Romero, co-founder of id Software, added, “When I played Doom during a period of time it was something new, unknown and thrilling. It was incredible to not know what was around the corner or lurking in the darkness, because these sounds were new, the doors opening, the buttons and platforms, and the terrifying howls of wandering demons.”
As Carmack told The Verge, “Settling on the science fiction / action mold for Doom was absolutely the best decision that we could have made. Whenever I look back at all of the games I’ve participated in over the years, Doom was probably the most optimal. We hit the sweet spot on just about everything.”
Wired and Dallas News have both speculated that a Doom 4 could probably be in the works, although there is nothing official at the moment. We’re very curious to see if Doom could have a big audience today, especially with the gaming market doing very well at the moment. We’d love to see if the Doom franchise can reinvent itself and keep going strong, much like Halo has proven its mettle as a franchise after all these years.
As for Doom’s legacy today, Carmack says, “We did our job right because people remember it 20 years from the time that we wrote it. We made a mark on people, we left an impact.”
