DOOM speaks for itself

September 13, 2020 7:44 PM

I now know that you don't necessarily need to play DOOM to have played DOOM. You don't need to have played any DOOM at all to have played all of DOOM. Yet, I only know this because I've studied DOOM's individual level designs so intently that I can retroactively see the flags DOOM planted on the mountain tops of future game genres. DOOM is not a videogame; DOOM is the vortex nexus nucleus at the center of the idea of videogames themselves.

Tim Rogers reviews DOOM.
posted by simmering octagon (34 comments total)

Did I have a stroke or is that video 3.5 hours long?
posted by neuron at 8:00 PM on September 13, 2020 [10 favorites]

This video started out promising and then I noticed the length.

The opening roundup of Doom releases was hilarious, though.
posted by hippybear at 8:07 PM on September 13, 2020

Kotaku kept Rogers constrained to 30-60 minute videos (like his famous Dragon Quest XI review, or his Death Stranding one) so I wonder if being able to make videos as long as he wants was part of the reason he went independent.
posted by simmering octagon at 8:14 PM on September 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

Did I have a stroke or is that video 3.5 hours long?

So far, in the first half-hour, it's a discursive autobiography of his life between the ages of 15 and 20. I don't know why he made this or why I'm watching it but it's oddly captivating.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:18 PM on September 13, 2020 [7 favorites]

I still remember the "jumpscare" from a demon growling over my headphones in the dark flickering light. Right up there with the Rescue on Fractalus alien and Sinistar for scary.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:28 PM on September 13, 2020

OMG this guy is an excellent shaggy dog storyteller. I really have to go to bed but I watched the first 40 minutes like it was nothing.
posted by rikschell at 8:47 PM on September 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

> Rescue on Fractalus

I relived that terrifying moment (and you know which second and a half of 8-bit 120x60 video I mean) anew with those three words. 36 years ago. I got an Atari 130XE (upgrade over my 800) to play this, and The Eidolon. (I also remember Koronis Rift kindly.)
posted by sourcequench at 9:24 PM on September 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Needs more DOOM.
posted by blob at 9:28 PM on September 13, 2020

Ridculosity. I can't believe I'm going to watch the full thing. But I am.
posted by Foaf at 10:06 PM on September 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Can't really trust this guy because at 1:12 he says Doom was released for Game Boy Advance in 1999, but as everyone knows it was 2001. The GBA itself wasn't released until 2001! edit: wait, I just noticed the on-screen correction.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 10:15 PM on September 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

I like that this says DOOM speaks for itself when it is famously a game that has one character and no dialogue at all.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 10:28 PM on September 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

Can't really trust this guy because at 1:12 he says

I'm just going to assume this is an hour and twelve minutes in and not the first minute because I find it much funnier.
posted by Literaryhero at 10:45 PM on September 13, 2020 [11 favorites]

So far, in the first half-hour, it's a discursive autobiography of his life between the ages of 15 and 20.

So you're telling me it's basically The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Space Marine?

I think that's the nerdiest thing I've said today. So far.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 2:32 AM on September 14, 2020 [13 favorites]

I'm 40 minutes in and I could tell a shaggy dog story about DOOM and Quake III that would be a wall of text and span a decade but I was say 24-34 years old. Maybe later. Great Post! I'm always up for DOOM/Q3.
posted by zengargoyle at 3:14 AM on September 14, 2020

Released for the Amiga: never.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:34 AM on September 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

Just started this morning. I've really been looking forward to his faux-Batman "Hello." for a while now!
To those balking at the length, Tim (via his twitter) would like to remind us all:

"as always, this video consists of multiple chapters. it's not a "three-hour review." it is a DVD Box Set Of Itself. consider it six separate stories. i'd encourage you to watch them in order, like episodes of a series, though you can do so out of order if you like.
if you have time to watch only ONE chapter of this (or any other Action Button Review), as always, we recommend whatever chapter title includes the segment called "THE POINT." this time, it's story # 4. this time i some dark places and it gets A Little Weird. more like it later!"
posted by Monster_Zero at 6:43 AM on September 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

started out promising and then I noticed the length

This is basically the Tim Rogers mission statement. His whole thing is taunting chained-up editors just out of reach as they slaver and snarl, and one day a leash is going to snap and there'll be a mauling and it'll be the editor who gets put down because the world is unjust.
posted by Drastic at 7:00 AM on September 14, 2020 [13 favorites]

A four hour video seems pretty long, but to be honest I played Doom for 24 hours straight when it came out, and I am no gamer. I can only imagine how intoxicating this game could be to a true gamer.
posted by caddis at 7:45 AM on September 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

So far, in the first half-hour, it's a discursive autobiography of his life between the ages of 15 and 20. I don't know why he made this or why I'm watching it but it's oddly captivating.

It's like Ken Burns for videogames.

I was age 11 when Doom came out, slightly younger than Tim. It was like a revelation. I was also that math/CS major that remarked on Goldeneye's "frame rate". For a PC guy that was used to 60fps and freelook I was always that dick that had to change to 1.2 Solitare to be able to play Goldeneye, the person who used the controller after me always cursed me, I led my shots and it didn't matter because of auto-aim.

I could complete the Rare shooters on '64 but I was so fucking awful at Goldeneye's multiplayer. We never used my copy of the cart because unlike my friends I couldn't do perfect agent everything to unlock all the extra characters (ODDJOB IS CHEATING AND HE IS BANNED!)

But Doom? I would whip around holding shift in deathmatch with my shotgun nailing those flicks. Doom 2? That meaty double shotgun would be my best friend. I would bounce around with my rocket launcher in Quake memorizing all the DM level layouts.

I had a sleepover with a friend in '98 and we did Doom 2 on ultraviolence over the weekend. We took it life by life at the start, devolving into a a few hour shifts when one of us got tired. We got there though. Although it was my friend who actually killed the Icon of Sin.

Nowadays I play Doom Eternal which is utterly fantastic but I'm so grateful that I got to grow up with these games.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:12 AM on September 14, 2020

it's not a "three-hour review." it is a DVD Box Set Of Itself.

I wasn't going to watch this, because video isn't my thing, but if it's composed of magnificent nonsense like this I may give it a try.
posted by mhoye at 9:12 AM on September 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

I luuurve how he says "eem-one-em-one." The way this guy is so far up his own ass but totally cognizant of that, as well as being completely self-deprecating and also HE REALLY KNOWS HIS SHIT. He's like a less angry version of Tom Scharpling except for video games. I could watch this guy talk about Doom for fifteen hours, forget three and a half.

I'm six years older than "Timothy." Doom came out senior year of college for me. One of my housemates was a CS major, and his computer had a soundblaster card. He was running a BBS at the time, but I'm afraid the board got short shrift that semester as we played an awful lot of DOOM.

I have not kept up with gaming, I think partly because nothing can really replicate the revelatory immersion of going from pre-DOOM gaming to DOOM. Years later, after I'd set up a LAN for the publishing company I worked for, two other guys and I would stay late once a week to play multiplayer DOOM, then Quake, then various mods. This review gets at some of the reasons Doom was so different from what came before it, and how the game design and the game engine are both so perfect and so perfectly matched.
posted by rikschell at 9:42 AM on September 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

Watching this right now and it's fun and surprisingly touching about Tim's life. I understand that he has decided that the only way to stay relevant in an over-saturated industry is to go personal, deep and weird, and I'm here for all of it.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:17 AM on September 14, 2020

I have to wonder how many people ever read ActionButton.net because "this article is way too long and is mostly not even about the game being reviewed" is 100% ActionButton's shtick.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:57 AM on September 14, 2020 [5 favorites]

I wonder if Tim is still in touch with American McGee? I may have already told this story in another Doom-related thread, but I once had an email flamewar with him over the lack of an Amiga port. The misleading title of my email was, I believe "Pentium bug in Doom 2." It was not a particularly vitriolic or long flamewar. It was, in fact, thrilling. But I have my doubts that American McGee remembers it. I'd like to know!
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:47 PM on September 14, 2020

What the hell would you run Amiga doom on? An A4000 with an AGA and a weak ass '030? Even the 040 probably couldn't run Doom.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:54 PM on September 14, 2020

Years before I met the person I have been married to for the past decade, I was such a huge fan of Tim Rogers-as-entertainer that I took an evening to catalog every piece of public-facing writing he'd written that was either composed within or concerned with the subject of the nation of Korea; I posted this index to the Large Prime Numbers forums. Tim's subtle way of acknowledging this gesture was to include a paragraph describing the moment he read that post within an autobiographical novel he published to a hidden directory on that same web server. The only way I can prove the truth of this anecdote is with my personal copy of that novel: a Word-compatible file which is saved on a hard drive whose Windows XP installation was corrupted such that explorer.exe hangs during execution, so you can only launch applications using the Run command from within Task Manager.

I may not have time to be that person anymore, but I'm really glad Tim's still infuriating and entertaining in equal measures, 20 years after I first encountered him.
posted by jsnlxndrlv at 2:08 PM on September 14, 2020 [8 favorites]

No Amiga Doom... The closest you can get (AFAIK) is Dread, an homage to Doom but with a less-demanding game engine.
posted by Monochrome at 2:28 PM on September 14, 2020

My one great moment in DOOM was when I stepped out into the level, I shot a Sargent who in turn shot back, killing a Private, and the goddamed zombie privates WALKED RIGHT PAST ME to end this Sargent. That was the moment that I realized that these "monsters" had private lives. It was astonishing. I was used to the idea that I'M THE BIG DAMN HERO and this game is all about ME! But nope, the Privates walked past me to confront their Sarge and I was nothing more than the witness. It was unsettling and food for thought, to say the least.
posted by SPrintF at 2:44 PM on September 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

What the hell would you run Amiga doom on? An A4000 with an AGA and a weak ass '030? Even the 040 probably couldn't run Doom.

Doom was running, sloppily, on 386 machines. It totally could have run on an Amiga w/ an '030 and even just a Fat Agnes. There was just no appetite on the part of ID to make it happen.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:01 PM on September 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

For my money the best discursive ramble about a video game is S.R. Holiwell's A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II. Though there's like 1000% less youtube mugging and more IRL mugging
posted by StarkRoads at 11:20 PM on September 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

Doom was running, sloppily, on 386 machines. It totally could have run on an Amiga w/ an '030 and even just a Fat Agnes. There was just no appetite on the part of ID to make it happen.

The reason Doom could run (as someone who had to play Doom on a 386 I use the word "run" very loosely) on 386 machines was because low detail mode used VGA masks to send only one byte across the bus for two pixels. It both halved the 3D rendering time by only rendering odd columns and halved the memory bandwidth. On an Amiga the blitter still has to transfer every pixel over the bus. This is why low detail mode never really worked on other platforms that were memory bandwidth constrained. Fat Agnes already has half the memory bandwidth of a 16-bit ISA VGA card so not being able to double the efficiency or each pixel going over the bus hurts like hell. Also, Doom uses columns for its raycasting and the blitter goes right to left each scan line.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:30 AM on September 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

I just finished his review of The Last Of Us, and I really, really like his style. Thanks for posting.
posted by Gorgik at 9:28 PM on September 15, 2020

Gosh, the Action Button stuff Tim has been putting out is so incredibly for me right now. Just finished this one in my second sitting. His style is not for everyone and he hasn't been able to put as much work into a lot of his back catalog of "content" but when he goes for it... man.

I can't remember the exact phrasing but there is a part where he talks about avoiding interesting experiences at 41 after learning that living in memories of interesting times sucks. That's sticking with me right now at 38.

The first time I really got what he was trying to do was watching his exhaustive multi-part analysis of the translation critique of Final Fantasy VII. I watched/listened while recovering from complications from allergies that made it hard to keep my eyes open for long. Not only were there great personal stories weaved throughout but I also think it gave me an understanding of how Japanese works as a language. I knew language is culture in many ways but, as a mono-glot, never felt it like that.

I've been a fan ever since.

If you like his style, besides his other Action Button videos and his work on Kotaku, I recommend digging into the Insert Credit podcast which features other notable video games people as well. The format has changed over the years and it was resurrected recently as a high energy panel show, and it's very good. Based on some recent twitterings, I recently went back to episodes 109, 109 part 2 and 110. It's Tim and Brandon Sheffield visiting the 2015 Tokyo Gaming Show while each repping their respective games from the time. It continues and they part ways, the show alternates as they continue to log their travels and musings.

Also, you might find it interesting that the famous Fred Rogers was Tim's 2nd cousin.
posted by dagosto at 11:48 PM on September 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

I guess this is a good thread to mention that Nine Inch Nails' soundtrack for Quake was just released on vinyl for the first time ever. People here might enjoy that.
posted by hippybear at 6:20 PM on September 16, 2020