Thy Flesh Consumed.

December 10, 2018 3:27 PM

John Romero Celebrates Doom's 25th Anniversary With Nine New Levels [Kotaku] “The original Doom first came out 25 years ago, on December 10, 1993. To commemorate the cruel, unceasing passage of time, designer John Romero is revisiting his beloved demonspawn baby. Today, Romero announced Sigil, a Doom “megawad” containing nine new single and multiplayer levels. It’s basically a big mod, but from one of the original game’s creators. The goal, Romero said on Sigil’s website, was to pick up where Doom’s original episodes left off in terms of both design and story. Sigil is coming out in February and will be free to download.” [YouTube][25th Anniversary Trailer]

• Doom is 25 and co-creator John Romero is putting out a giant expansion for it [Tech Crunch]

Sigil is a pack of nine levels that are an unofficial, but probably as official as we’re likely to get, fifth “episode” of Doom.

““I wanted the levels to feel like they belong to the original game as if they were a true fifth episode,” Romero told himself. “There’s more detail in the levels than episodes 1-4, but not overly so. The boss level is terrifying. There’s a massive room in E5M6 that is the coolest room I’ve created in any map.” [...] “I believe the most important legacy of Doom is its community, the people who have kept it alive for 25 years through the creation of mods and tools,” said Romero. “It’s not at all lost on me that I have gone from a creator to a part of the community in that space of time, and I love that.””

• 25 years later, Doom's legacy is its human connection [Polygon]

“Doom may well be the most influential game of the last three decades. As it marks another birthday, it's a work that is worth celebrating. Leaving aside the usual plaudits and the warm nostalgia, it is also worth asking just how important the game is in the great scheme of modern entertainment. Noted at the time of its launch for its technological achievements and its violence, its legacy now seems to be as an early catalyst in multiplayer gaming, in literally bringing people together around a single video game. [...] It may not be the first FPS, but it was the first FPS game that millions of people played, many of whom were seeing, for the first time, first-person game worlds that were not abstractions but which operated in the same way that they experienced life. In Doom, the player moves through a world, at a rapid pace, interacting with things. This was not the same as playing sideways-view or overhead experiences like Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros.”

posted by Fizz (32 comments total)

**Also, for a much more thorough history/retrospective, please check out Pope Guilty's 20th Anniversary post. It's an amazing read and worth clicking through.**
posted by Fizz at 3:28 PM on December 10, 2018 [4 favorites]

I had forgotten how metal the music was.
posted by GuyZero at 4:34 PM on December 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Wow, Romero releasing 9 new Doom levels is like Moses coming back down Mount Sinai with 9 new commandments.

I was not great at Doom I’m 1993, and I’m sure as hell not great at it now, but this is exciting. I hope it has sick music.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:35 PM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Wow, I feel old. I remember playing it for the first time in a CompUSA and being blown away at how it felt like the future of games.
posted by octothorpe at 4:45 PM on December 10, 2018

I expect my keyboard circle-strafe reflexes would come back pretty fast, though these days I'm 100% controller based. Some things you just don't forget...
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:02 PM on December 10, 2018

\m/
posted by Mayor West at 5:11 PM on December 10, 2018

[insert daikatana joke here]
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 5:26 PM on December 10, 2018 [10 favorites]

My dad found he could really get under my skin when I was playing games by coming into the room and saying, "Oh, is this the one where you shoot monsters in a labyrinth?" Which accurately describes every shooter that came out in the 10 years after Doom, and remains a super popular formula. I would not and still will not admit that to him, though. ("I have a nail gun in this one, dad. It's different.")

There have been many guns, many monsters, and many labyrinths over the years. I know Doom wasn't the first, but it drew the people in and built the community, so it still feels like the point of origin for that venerable tradition.

Here's to 25 years keeping the monsters on their toes.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 5:29 PM on December 10, 2018 [7 favorites]

This about as good a place as any to drop my favorite Doom Mod review channel.

Raised on Duke Nukem (the 2D version) and Wolfenstein instead of console games, it is impossible to explain how mind-blowing it was when Doom came out, or how cool it was to have my friends want to come play video games at my house for a change. My two brothers and I sat around for hours watching my dad inch his way through Knee Deep in the Dead. Oh, the pixelated nightmares. Can't wait to play through these.
posted by es_de_bah at 5:30 PM on December 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

“It’s not at all lost on me that I have gone from a creator to a part of the community in that space of time, and I love that.”

Awww. This is surprisingly touching...like rainbows and daisies sprouting up out of nowhere...just, y'know, in the darkest circles of Hell.
posted by sexyrobot at 6:16 PM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

[insert daikatana joke here]

Alas, John Romero has yet to make me his bitch. I'm starting to think that he doesn't care.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:29 PM on December 10, 2018 [13 favorites]

My dad found he could really get under my skin when I was playing games by coming into the room and saying, "Oh, is this the one where you shoot monsters in a labyrinth?"

Heh. For extra Dad Points he could have said "So are you hunting wumpuses?"
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:26 PM on December 10, 2018 [6 favorites]

Didn't get my own PC until the early '00s, but I did a little bit of Wolfenstein back in the day despite never progressing to the harder stuff like Doom. Massive respect for it and its fanbase especially for what the game did to popularise mods/wads/porting games to toasters because why not?

I'm imagining Julian Gollop going back to Rebelstar, Laser Squad or Lords of Chaos and how I'd feel about that. (A quick google reveals that I might actually need to go buy a secondhand GameBoy Advance sharpish).
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 7:30 PM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

I had forgotten how metal the music was.

Many tracks are literally MIDI versions of riffs lifted from 80s/90s metal songs - at best slightly altered for plausible deniability.
posted by atoxyl at 7:54 PM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Romero also posted a little retrospective. One forgets that it wasn't just the first game to prove that modding tools boosted sales, or that 32-bit C compilers were fast enough for games, but also that keeping a score for the player wasn't neccessary.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:04 PM on December 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also, to be clear, one does not offer Buckethead something so crude as money to make a mod soundtrack. There's a quest involved, where the developer must walk barefoot and alone to Monument Valley, climb the tallest butte and burn a big ol' bucket of assorted fried chicken, pleading their case to the rising smoke, only the pungent oils and distant echo of a badass guitar riff as their reply.

They return home, foggy and not understanding, sleeping restlessly wondering if their appeal was heard, until a week later they come upon an unmarked CD packed with Buckethead originals on their kitchen table. How did it get there? How long had it been there? Did a courier sneak it in?

Perhaps, as I believe, the Buckethead CD was always with them. They just needed to learn to see it.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 8:38 PM on December 10, 2018 [6 favorites]

I had forgotten how metal the music was.

It's even more metal if you use the Gravis Ultrasound MIDI patch set (GZDoom supports it).

Doom came out when I was 14, so it obviously had a huge effect, but I don't think I properly appreciated it as a game until I started playing it in GZDoom with modern mouselook controls. It's still basically the most frenetically-paced, ultraviolent, badass FPS out there, it just didn't really feel like it with the keyboard. Probably didn't help that my 386dx/20 at the time could only run the game in low-rez mode, in a tiny window...
posted by neckro23 at 8:46 PM on December 10, 2018

I'll have something to go in that empty space for a daikatana joke soon. by march at the latest. and it will be incredible. I promise!

ps design is law
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:15 PM on December 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

Carmack and Romero are the Lennon and McCartney of our generation.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:27 PM on December 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

"Oh, is this the one where you shoot monsters in a labyrinth?" Which accurately describes every shooter that came out in the 10 years after Doom, and remains a super popular formula

Castle Wolfenstein was a forerunner to this genre, maybe?
posted by hippybear at 11:01 PM on December 10, 2018

People remember Doom now for being a fast FPS, but I think what was really revolutionary at the time was multiplayer over LAN. I missed the "Doom in college" phase by a few years (Quake was my scene), but I heard stories about those first late nights in the computer lab with kids lugging their monstrous beige computers and lumpy 14" monitors to one another's places for late night fragging.

Action multiplayer was a whole new possibility space for games, and you can draw a straight line from Doom to Fortnite. Doom was so good right out the gate, it was as if Super Mario 3 was the first NES game released - nobody really got close to it for years and years (besides other iD games, of course).
posted by lubujackson at 11:23 PM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm just going to drop the obligatory pimp for Brutal Doom here. (SLYT)
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:26 AM on December 11, 2018

And then there were people bringing the MIDI back to its metal origins. With the best opener Evil Horde - Hangarmageddon
posted by Glow Bucket at 1:06 AM on December 11, 2018

Heh. For extra Dad Points he could have said "So are you hunting wumpuses?"

My kid is only just getting into video games right now but I'm looking forward to a decade or so of doling out "is this Fortnite?"
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:15 AM on December 11, 2018 [10 favorites]

Huh, I never even thought about the setting as futuristic sci-fi-meets-occultish-demon-invasion until reading that Romero retrospective, even though that’s exactly what it is. There isn’t really anything else like that, is there?
posted by gucci mane at 6:39 AM on December 11, 2018

dang I just can't think of a good daikatana joke to put into that empty space up there. I should probably just leave the thread. But I can't leave...

... without my buddy superfly
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:28 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

My kid is only just getting into video games right now but I'm looking forward to a decade or so of doling out "is this Fortnite?"

Asking your kid if “Is this Overwatch?” would also get you bonus points.
posted by Fizz at 7:31 AM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

Asking your kid if “Is this Overwatch?” would also get you bonus points.

Double bonus if you call it Overnite.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:34 AM on December 11, 2018 [10 favorites]

I'm just going to drop the obligatory pimp for Brutal Doom here.
It was so satisfying seeing someone get a one-shot kill of a Revenant in that. I hate those bastards so much.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:52 AM on December 11, 2018

In summary, rip and tear!
posted by doctornemo at 10:47 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

There isn’t really anything else like that, is there?

Dead Space is a fairly modern analog.
posted by FatherDagon at 12:42 PM on December 11, 2018

Huh, I never even thought about the setting as futuristic sci-fi-meets-occultish-demon-invasion until reading that Romero retrospective, even though that’s exactly what it is. There isn’t really anything else like that, is there?

"Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon... "

-Terry Pratchett
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:23 PM on December 11, 2018 [3 favorites]