doom.md

ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM by Tim Rogers

introduction

Um.

Hello and welcome back to video games. I'm Tim Rogers. You are watching the Action Button review of DOOM — a video game developed by id Software and published for the Microsoft Disk Operating System on December 3rd, 1993; the Sega 32X and Atari Jaguar in 1994; the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sony PlayStation in 1995; the Panasonic 3DO in 1996; the Sega Saturn in 1997; the Acorn Archimedes in 1998; the Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 1999; the Microsoft Xbox 360 in 2006; Apple iOS in 2009; the Microsoft Xbox 360 again in 2012; and on the Nintendo Switch, the Sony PlayStation 4, and the Microsoft Xbox One in 2019.

Updated with a fourth episode, "Thy Flesh Consumed," in The Ultimate DOOM — released for Microsoft personal computers on April 30th, 1995 — and by John Romero with a fifth episode, SIGIL, released for personal computers on May 22nd, 2019. Created by John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud, and Tom Hall, with music by Bobby Prince. Novelized by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver in four volumes, published between June 1995 and January 1996 by Pocket Books. Adapted into a single-issue comic book featuring the lines "you have huge guts" and "rip and tear your huge guts," written by Steve Belling and Michael Stewart, with art by Tom Grindberg, published by Marvel Comics in May of 1996. Reimagined, developed, and published by Midway Games as DOOM 64 — released on the Nintendo 64 on April 4th, 1997.

Re-engineered by Night Dive Studios for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, Sony PlayStation 4, and Microsoft Xbox One and published by Bethesda Softworks on March 20th, 2020. Remade by John Carmack as a role-playing game and published as DOOM RPG for Symbian operating system and Java 2 Micro Edition mobile devices on September 13th, 2005. Adapted into a feature film distributed by Universal Pictures, which premiered on October 17th, 2005, starring Karl Urban and Dwayne Johnson — credited then as "The Rock." Rebooted by id Software and published by Bethesda Softworks for Microsoft Windows, Sony PlayStation 4, and Microsoft Xbox One on May 13th, 2016. Reviewed by Tim Rogers from Action Button on Friday, July 31st, 2020.

For those born lacking the bursting, hot, blood-packed, freakopathic creature guts requisite to endure the entire trial that follows, let us begin with the bottom line: DOOM speaks for itself. Therefore, in the spirit of a work speaking for itself, I have decided to forgo my usual introduction-extending ridiculosity in an effort to roll said ridiculosity meditatively into the following program.

Reviewing DOOM requires us to reckon with DOOM's ultimate meaning. It requires us to assess its impact both on games and on culture at large. Reviewing DOOM requires us to also joyfully discuss Atari's 1979 classic arcade game Asteroids and speak seriously about homicidal violent crime perpetrated at learning institutions by suicidal children. DOOM's magnitude begs us, then, to present a tapestry of stories. I have somehow narrowed it down to just six.

I'M TOO YOUNG TO DIE (or, "I Was A DOOM Poser")

Ever since its release in December of 1993, I have always considered DOOM one of the greatest video games ever made. However, I'd like to take this opportunity today — in 2020 — to apologetically confess to you that I did not actually play DOOM until June of 1994. Also, I'd like to confess that in June of 1994, I only played the first episode of DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead. Furthermore, I played it on the easiest difficulty: "I'm Too Young To Die."

DOOM's forebear, Wolfenstein 3D, chided choosers of its easiest difficulty setting — which it called "Can I Play, Daddy?" — by visibly infantilizing the game's beefcakely buzz-cutted warrior protagonist with a ludicrous baby bonnet. DOOM did not do the same, though any true murder-headed game liker in 1993's imagination supplied the baby bonnet.

In January of 1995, I played episode one of DOOM — "Knee-Deep in the Dead" — again, all the way through on the "Hey, Not Too Rough" and "Hurt Me Plenty" difficulties. It was not until 1996, as the release of id Software's DOOM follow-up Quake impended, that I — on my dad's old work computer — finally played episodes two and three of DOOM. I did this, as one does, literally to impress a girl.

I did not play DOOM episode 4 — "Thy Flesh Consumed" — until November of 1999, on a math major's unnecessarily (for DOOM) 3D card-equipped PC in my college dorm at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Finally playing the almost unrecognizably iterationally twisted post-release epilogue and final episode of the original DOOM on that monster PC one month before Quake 3 existed felt like playing DOOM on another planet compared to playing the shareware release of the first episode of DOOM six months after its release on my dad's old 486.

It happened like this: by 1999, I knew a lot about video games. I wasn't the guy people on the dorm floor went to when they wanted burned PlayStation 1 games, though I was the guy people on the dorm floor came to to ask me to play those burned PlayStation 1 games while they watched. You could say I was a bit of a proto-Twitch streamer.

I have critically low self-esteem, even to this day. That's why I usually only tell stories that make me sound cool. However, some of you in the comments seem to think that I do this because I like myself. Buddy, if I liked anything about myself, I wouldn't be here right now.

Anyway, here's a story where I don't look cool.

One day in November of 1999, just about every dude on my college dorm floor was crowded around my TV. GoldenEye had been out for two years at this point, though in my experience anyway, literacy of GoldenEye's deathmatch mode had only just finished saturating all of then-modern American masculinity. Somehow, slightly over two years after its initial release, every American dude of army enlistment age had some boast or another to make about their GoldenEye skill.

My room filled up every night for a month with a handful of bros in the mood to yell. Even my roommate, who loved NASCAR as much as he hated me, joined in the nightly ritual. Like I said, this had been going on for a month. GoldenEye had to become a sport so precious that we'd had to start lifting my TV into the common room so we could fit in everybody who wanted to get in on the action.

So this one night, just about every dude on the dorm floor — even the RA — was standing around, smelling like dudes and squinting at my 25-inch television screen split in four in the common room. Except it wasn't every dude. Two dudes were missing. These two particular dudes never left their room. One of them was a math major; the other one was a computer science major. The computer science major wore gray-tinted glasses.

These guys were the only two roommates on our floor who'd known each other before the school year started. In fact, they'd known each other since elementary school. Every time I saw either one of them in the hall, they greeted me as "Timothy" with an accent like whatever high school they'd gone to had had a crew team and they'd been on that crew team.

So they settled up to the back of the crowd, arms folded. One of the guys looked at me and said, "Timothy." I asked him if he wanted in, and he replied with — and I quote — "I'm happy to watch."

In summary: less than 10 minutes later, I heard the word "frame rate" uttered aloud for the first time in my life.

One of the guys on the floor who had a girlfriend and was on the track team came up to high-five me after he won around. He had never played a single video game before that night. He said to me, "Dude, this is amazing." I thought that the guy on the track team was pretty cool, and I was a running dabbler myself back then, though for reasons too various to mention, I'd not ever bothered to do so competitively.

I liked to talk to this guy about running. He was a sprinter. That's what I'd always wanted to be. I would give up video games and YouTube videos to become a sprinter. I'd run the 400 meters if I had the talent or skill or age or shoes to do so.

Back in 1999, I would drop any conversation I was in the middle of having if this guy showed up in my dorm doorway to ask me how my running was going. I'd tell him about my squat rack performance. He'd warned me not to over-train. I'd ask him about his times. He'd suggest we go get a Gatorade later, and sometimes we did go get a Gatorade later.

This was perhaps the shallowest friendship I ever had with another person, and that's saying something, because I was in numerous bands in my twenties.

The math major, too, seemed to almost revere the idea of an athletic scholarship, because he struck up a conversation with the sprinter which lasted two full dialogue boxes before he asked, "Dude, do you have a PC?" Received an answer in the negative, and then immediately suggested, "You should get one so you can play Quake 3 with us."

Suddenly something filled me. I was standing there with my 20-year-old physique and my six-pack abs and my rock-hard quads and my disproportionate calves, realizing that the three people in my immediate vicinity had devoted themselves to my separate hobbies far more deeply than I ever had. They were each separately far better than me at the things I thought I was good at.

For example: I could run pretty fast. I regularly clocked mile times under five minutes. However, I didn't have no athletic scholarship. I was a video game guy, and I wanted desperately to make video games someday, though I sure had never considered that studying computer science was just something I could do. Nor did I happen to have the hardware on hand to handle Quake 3 — or even Quake 1 — or even Quake 2.

I messed it up. Wait, maybe that's funnier. Who cares? That's good. It sounds like I'm dunking on Quake 2 for some inscrutable reason.

Nonetheless, I blurted, "Heck yeah, dude, Quake 3!"

The sprinter asked, "What's Quake 3?"

I spoke the knowledge I actually possessed: "Quake 3 isn't out yet."

The math major then asked the sprinter, "Dude, do you want to see Quake 2?"

30 minutes later, I'd heard another person speak the words "American McGee" out loud for the first time. It happened like this: the math major showed the sprinter Quake 2 for 10 minutes before the sprinter asked, "What about Quake 1?" So the computer science major loaded up Quake 1.

I had actually played Quake 1, so I was like — and I quote — "Yeah, dude, Quake 1."

The math major asked me to agree with him that Quake 2 sucks. I'd never played Quake 2. I was about to commit an act of Quake 2 posery. I didn't want to lie, so I said all that I could. I said, "Quake 1 owns, dude."

The math major said, "Quake 2 is gonna stand the test of time."

The computer science major then called the level design in Quake 2 "uninspired." The math major objected. The sprinter sat silently playing Quake 1.

Just to say something, I said, "You know what level I like in Quake 1? That one with the ziggurat."

I'll be perfectly honest with you: I had only played the first episode of Quake 1 as of November 1999. I had played it at a girl's house. I only remembered the level "Ziggurat Vertigo" — Episode One, Map Eight — because I was then, as I am now, a connoisseur of non-Egyptian pyramids.

I didn't realize that referencing the level would result in the math major immediately calling American McGee a bozo. He literally said — and I quote — "American McGee's a bozo."

I'll be honest: I didn't know who American McGee was. I'd later meet American McGee. I'd even live in the spare bedroom in American McGee's house in Shanghai for a while. Back in 1999, I didn't even know his name.

The slandering of American McGee's name had the immediate result of the computer science major turning to me and asking, "Timothy, say, what do you think of E4M1?"

I froze. They might as well have been speaking Klingon.

In case the message isn't clear yet, let me lay it there: I was a DOOM poser.

I wasn't a '90s kid; I was a '90s teenager. I listened to Nirvana and Megadeth and Rage Against the Machine — not Metallica and Marilyn Manson. Furthermore, I listened to Big Black, The Jesus Lizard, and Nine Inch Nails, though I did not listen to Tool, unlike some kids I knew.

Who had owned a Sega Genesis and a Sega CD? I had owned a Sega Genesis and a Super Nintendo. I was a console baby. Actually, I'm at least mature enough now to admit that owning a Sega Genesis didn't change the fact that I was a Nintendo baby.

Many Nintendo babies back then did not even know PCs had games on them until suddenly their bullies started bragging about DOOM. I had a little head start on the other Nintendo babies because my dad worked with fancy computers for the US Army. I knew computers had quote-unquote "games" on them, though until that day in 1992 when I first played Wolfenstein 3D on my dad's work computer in the storage closet of our house on Fort Meade, Maryland, I didn't know PCs had real games on them.

Every PC game I'd ever seen had been shareware trash that couldn't touch anything on a console — or, interestingly, Scorched Earth, which is better than anything that's even on modern consoles.

One of the sergeants in my dad's office — Sergeant Diaz — was a big PC guy. My dad was always bringing shareware discs home and presenting them as gifts from Sergeant Diaz to us kids. I'll be honest: Sergeant Diaz, most of the games you gave my dad sucked. We played each of them for about five or six minutes before going back to Super Mario Bros. 3.

One day, however, my little brother got hooked on a Commander Keen disk my dad brought back from Sergeant Diaz. Me and my big brother let him have it because that meant he'd stay away from our Super Nintendo. However, the day my dad brought Wolfenstein home, our Super Nintendo became a little bit of a baby's toy.

My dad showed us the little blue disc. He told us — and I quote — "You guys ain't gonna believe this." He booted it up in the storage closet in solitude. He called us in when he was ready. We knew we were in for something wild when he said, "Tell your little brother he better not come in here."

Wolfenstein 3D was a fast, grotesque, violent game about bloody murdering Nazis. It was the last game I can remember my dad ever playing all the way through to completion.

Wolfenstein 3D's first-person perspective instantly reminded me that day in 1992 of only two other games. One was The Bard's Tale — a role-playing game on PC that had required me to draw maps on paper just to find my way around the town. The other was Shadowgate — a first-person graphical adventure game for the PC and Mac that I'd originally played on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

In both of these games, the player moved just one screen at a time. With Wolfenstein, for the first time, I was seeing the walls whip past my character as I sprinted. It was huge.

Let me tell you a secret: I never heard the Wolfenstein 3D sound effects. My dad's work computer didn't have any sort of sound hardware, much less speakers. It wasn't until 2011, when I revisited Wolfenstein 3D on a more modern PC, that I heard the sound effects for the first time. Today, in 2020, I can say with confidence that if I'd been able to hear the sounds of Wolfenstein 3D that day in 1992, I would definitely have been excited enough about DOOM in 1994 to have acquired the full game.

Instead, when DOOM came out, I just played the shareware release. We were in Indianapolis, Indiana, at this time. Sergeant Diaz was still back at Fort Meade, Maryland. Sergeant Diaz would be transferred to my dad's team of whatever they were a year later, though today I realized that my dad had acquired the DOOM shareware disc by himself.

My dad did not like DOOM. He set it up for me and my brother. He played one level: E1M1. My brother was 16; I was 14. My brother had a job and friends at school. He didn't want to play video games anymore. So alone, I played the shareware episode of DOOM a couple times on my dad's now-ancient work computer with no sound effects.

I liked that shareware episode of DOOM about as much as a teenager would have liked Super Mario Brothers in 1985 if he couldn't hear the World 1-1 theme music.

A couple months later, Final Fantasy VI came out for the Super Nintendo, and that was that.

Three years before DOOM came out, my grandfather died of brain and lung cancer. My grandfather had fought in World War II. My dad grew up smoking cigarettes. I presume he started smoking when he was like four. He's that kind of dude.

Maybe the week after my grandfather died, my dad joined some support group to help him quit smoking. One of the later steps of the program involved committing himself to a hobby, so he bought himself a beautiful baby grand piano — because, as he always told us, his dad had always talked about wishing he'd learned how to play the piano.

At age 40, my dad started taking piano lessons. When my dad was 42, he played Wolfenstein while my literal World War II-remembering grandmother still lived. My dad laughed out loud at bloody, silent, dead Nazis on his computer screen. Yet when DOOM came out, he called the violence "awful." My Catholic dad called DOOM "satanic."

I realized today that Wolfenstein 3D came out one month before my dad's 42nd birthday. When my dad played all the way through the retail version of Wolfenstein 3D on PC, he was as old as I am today.

Had DOOM been a little less satanic and maybe a little more anti-Nazi, my dad might literally still be a hardcore game player today. Instead, he quit games the way he quit piano lessons: by forbidding us children, too, to touch the hardware.

Shortly after my brief DOOM shareware experience, my dad's home office became a full-time storage closet, and the baby grand piano became the pedestal for picture frames it continues to serve as today. So it was that in the fall of 1994, PC games retreated from my grasp, and I didn't argue. The future of my beloved Super Nintendo was too bright.

Like I said, just a couple months after I lost touch with PC gaming, Final Fantasy VI came out. In 1995, I had a job at Target, and I was able to afford games of my own.

Today I come to you confident that if I'd just been able to hear DOOM's music and sound effects in 1994, I'd have bought all the way in. I'd have saved up for a PC. I'd have played Quake at my own house. I mean, I'd probably still have also played it at the girl's house, because who's not going to accept a girl's invitation to play Quake at her house in 1996?

Though if I'd just been able to hear DOOM's shotgun rackings and demon screams and imp squeals and butthole guitar riffs, I'd have been ready to play Quake at that girl's house in 1996.

Instead, I went through the rest of high school as a Nintendo baby and a DOOM poser. Only — are you really a poser if you keep it to yourself? I never talked to anybody about DOOM. Every time DOOM got referenced in a video game magazine, I thought, "Yeah, DOOM. I know that game. Yeah, that's one of the best games of all time."

I sat alone at lunch during my freshman year of high school. Some kids used to throw stuff at me. A kid from my algebra class used to pour his milk on my head. He did it like once a week. Once he stole an apple out of my lunch bag during class, took a bite of it during lunch, and then threw it at me while I was reading my dad's pristine first edition of Ian Fleming's On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The next week, a couple kids started sitting at my lunch table every day. I didn't know who they were. I'd never seen them before. One of them was a goth; one of them was just an idiot who wore metal band t-shirts. They introduced themselves as Bob and Korg. They were a year older than me. Korg — he was the goth — he told me that he called himself Korg because he wanted to buy a Korg synthesizer someday. Bob said his name was Robert.

They said they wanted to be my friends. I never said a word to them because back then I didn't say a word to anybody if I thought they were making fun of me. It wasn't until October of 2019, when I was writing an essay about some other awful aspect of my high school experience, that I realized they'd been serious.

They had literally seen a kid get beaten up and bullied, and they decided to sit at his lunch table. They sat at my lunch table every single day for the rest of that school year. They tried unsuccessfully to get me to talk exactly once every day before they gave up and continued their conversations in progress. They talked about literally three things: metal, Dungeons & Dragons, and DOOM.

Once Bob and Korg started sitting at my lunch table, nobody threw food at me for the rest of the school year.

So let me get real with you for a second here. For 25 years of my life, I owned this memory of these two absolutely genuine people doing me a real kindness. And even as I grew up and matured and experienced many adventures and careers, I repressed this memory. I mentally wrote these two guys off as two jerks who were just making fun of the fat kid.

Until one day last year, sitting at my desk in a pitch-dark room in the middle of a high floor in a skyscraper in goddamn Times Square in New York, Manhattan, I failed to let myself know that I probably had had some form of escape from my terrible high school experience. All I had had to do was say one word to Bob and Korg about DOOM.

Maybe I would have done that if I'd been able to hear the sound effects in Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992. Maybe not. It's impossible to know for sure, though: Dad, you should have bought a Sound Blaster like Sergeant Diaz told you to.

Well, here I am reviewing a video game in a video on the internet after failing at every other career I've tried in the 25 years since Bob and Korg sat at my lunch table. I have noticed traces of their attitudes and opinions in many people I've liked and admired.

To summarize: Bob was John Romero; Korg was John Carmack. I liked these guys even though I wouldn't let myself believe otherwise than that they were making fun of me. They talked all the time about making computer games. I wonder if they ever made any. I should have made computer games with them.

Oh well. Sooner or later, life is at last a list of things you every day deal silently with not having done.

As I played and replayed Final Fantasy 6 — which we called Final Fantasy 3, by the way (in case there's any confusion, you can't even call it Final Fantasy 3 anymore these days: political correctness) — and got hyped for Chrono Trigger, Bob and Korg still continued to repeatedly discuss DOOM. I, at the time, could not empathize with anyone who had seen that much in DOOM. It had not blown my mind in the slightest.

Bob and Korg kept talking about deathmatch, and I honestly did not even know what deathmatch was, though perhaps persuaded by their fanaticism, in January of 1995 I replayed the shareware episode of DOOM on my dad's old computer several more times on higher difficulties. I got more out of it during this second experience. I can't say I exactly understood Bob and Korg's love of the game, and I won't pretend that I at once understood the meticulous intricacy of John Romero's iconic level designs, though I promise you I liked it a lot more than I had before.

It clicked. I had once understood the meticulous intricacy of John Romero's iconic level designs.

Well, over a year later, my dad bought a new computer, so he gave me his old computer. A girl invited me to her house to play Quake. I purchased a used retail copy of DOOM in a big, dented cardboard box. I also purchased a sound card: a Sound Blaster. Installing that sound card in my dad's old PC was the first time I'd ever actually seen the inside of a PC.

I played DOOM episodes one, two, and three, and I promise you that at that point I finally, definitely loved it — for its speed, its momentum, its geometry, its violence, its mazes, its loneliness, its quiet parts, its loud parts. I loved DOOM's experimental levels. I loved DOOM's straightforward levels. I loved DOOM. I, at last, understood the meticulous intricacy of John Romero's iconic level designs.

However, three years later, when the computer science major asked me what I'd thought of E4M1, I had no idea what he was talking about. They might as well have been speaking Klingon. I was silent for a second too long. The mask might have slipped, revealing the DOOM poser underneath.

The computer science major offered a hint. He said, "You know, 'Hell Beneath'?" Except he didn't say "Hell" if you know what I mean. He was talking about "Hell Beneath." Except it's not "Hell" — get used to it. I'm sorry. "Hell Beneath" — an American McGee level.

The math major asked, "Timothy, didn't you play Ultimate DOOM?"

I recalled just then having seen an Ultimate DOOM box on a retail shelf once or twice, so I was like, "Ah, no, I never played Ultimate DOOM."

Suddenly the computer science major and the math major dropped their trivial rivalry for a second and yelled, "Dude!"

The computer science major — always a more jovial fellow than the math major — put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Timothy, are you telling me you've never experienced 'Perfect Hatred'?"

To which I replied, "Maybe not in the sense that you mean."

We all laughed. We became friends. They later made me read Neal Stephenson novels so they could, quote-unquote, "pick my brain." I started making fun of them for liking Lord of the Rings because, I quote myself, "Nobody ever gets laid in Lord of the Rings."

The math major left his big hardcover copy of George R. R. Martin's brand-new novel A Game of Thrones atop my dad's old work computer, and as a counterpoint for the rest of the school year, I didn't read that book until 2011. I was a Song of Ice and Fire poser.

Way back before we could begin earnestly discussing, for example, Gandalf's sexuality, I had to play DOOM episode 4 — "Thy Flesh Consumed" — with three guys standing behind me, arms akimbo. They made me play it on Ultra-Violence. I died about 600 times. They yelled all night until it was Saturday morning.

So, American McGee, if you're watching this: I'm sorry I hated E4M1.

10 years after I first played E4M1, my friend Stabo and I took American McGee out to dinner in Tokyo. We'd met American McGee about a hundred times before this night. Every single time we had ever hung out with American McGee, I told Stabo beforehand, "Don't embarrass me. Don't ask him about DOOM."

That night, finally, Stabo didn't listen. In the middle of a conversation about something else entirely — sumo wrestling, we were talking about sumo wrestling — in the middle of a conversation about sumo wrestling, Stabo asked — and I quote — "Did John Romero personally forbid you from putting a plasma rifle in 'Hell Beneath'?"

And he didn't — he didn't say "Hell," though, if you know what I mean.

American McGee laughed and simply said, "No."

To which Stabo replied, "You should have put a plasma rifle in there."

To which I interjected, "Going into 'Perfect Hatred' with a plasma rifle already would have sucked."

The conversation died into a morose, half-drunk, partial silence. And that, my friends, was the closest I ever got to not being a DOOM poser — until today.

Today I look back on my formative experiences with the early days of three-dimensional first-person murder simulators and declare the battle still winnable. For the past month and a half, I have worked hundreds of hours toward the goal of once and for all fully obliterating from my soul any iota of street cred-lessness re-colon DOOM.

I arrive at the end of my intensive research process knee-deep in degrees mode. Those two, for lack of a better word, "poindexters" forcibly arguing about whether Quake 1 was better than Quake 2 might as well have been undercover FBI agents or people in a TV commercial holding a video game controller upside down compared to me as I am right now.

So, American McGee, if you haven't closed the tab yet, let me say that on Monday, July 6th, 2020, I finally came to terms with what you were trying to accomplish in E4M1. I dare say it's a good level — and not just in the sense that in a game so shimmeringly pure as DOOM, you'd need to be a chimpanzee with a hammer to make a truly bad level.

American McGee, with E4M1 (a.k.a. "Hell Beneath"), you hit on some sort of primordial thrill years ahead of the curve by having enemies instantly begin insipidly teleporting in from no explainable anywhere the second the level begins. You crafted an evil simulation of the terrible experience of walking into an online battle royale deathmatch ambush of infinitely experienced 12-year-olds.

Your level is hateful and fast and stuffy and chaotic and cramped — a claustrophobic single-player simulacrum of a stacked round of 200-against-one Capture the Flag. I can't say I like your level, and I won't, but I certainly respect it.

In a sense, having said that, when later in this review I begin presenting breakdowns of specific level designs, I might forget to mention it.

Well, now that that's out of the way, let's leave 1993 behind for the meanwhile and move on to our next story.

HEY, NOT TOO ROUGH (or, "what does it mean to play ALL of DOOM?")

I began this review's researching process with one goal: to once and for all remove the DOOM poser stain from my hideous flesh. I knew that such a cleansing would require me to play a lot of DOOM. In my continuing quest to go above and beyond even the most unreasonable viewer's expectations, I decided that the only way for me personally to play a lot of DOOM was to play all of DOOM.

The most difficult decision was the first one. One of the key characteristics of DOOM is that it, quote, "runs on everything," unquote. So legendarily is John Carmack's masterpiece of programming optimized that hackers and weirdos have gotten DOOM running on even the most inanely underpowered systems. So inanely underpowered are these systems that to this day, we game touchers continue to joke about getting DOOM running on such-and-such new toaster, blender, coffee maker, or pressure cooker.

I weighed my options and decided that the best way to experience the original DOOM was via Crispy DOOM, which is based on the source port Chocolate DOOM. If we consider optimization a cornerstone of DOOM's legend, then using Crispy DOOM's unlocked frame rate feature on a 240 hertz monitor did not exactly amount to sacrilege.

Crispy DOOM also offers high-resolution textures, which I disabled. Crispy DOOM also allows the player to scale down DOOM's generously large bottom-of-screen heads-up display. I did not utilize this feature. Much as I tend to favor clean user interfaces, I cannot stand for cleaning up DOOM's — it's too iconic.

Crispy DOOM also offers flawless mouse controls, which I eschewed in favor of a keyboard-only experience. Let me just say: you ever want to get hungry looking at a computer mouse? Try playing all the way through DOOM with just a keyboard in the year 2020. Playing DOOM with just a keyboard sucks — until suddenly it totally owns.

Once I'd set my mind on Crispy DOOM and performed my initial experiment (which we'll talk about later), I played through all three original episodes on the middle difficulty level: "Hurt Me Plenty." DOOM episode 4 — "Thy Flesh Consumed" — initially released on April 30th, 1995 as part of The Ultimate DOOM re-release, that's six months after the release of DOOM 2, so I tentatively did not consider "Thy Flesh Consumed" technically a part of DOOM 1.

After playing through DOOM episodes 1-3 on Crispy DOOM, I played through DOOM 2. Then I played through DOOM episode 4 — "Thy Flesh Consumed" — on "Hurt Me Plenty." Once I'd finished "Thy Flesh Consumed," I came to the decision that I had been wrong: "Thy Flesh Consumed" is, in fact, part of DOOM 1. Likewise, DOOM 2 is also part of DOOM 1.

So now I faced a crucial philosophical question: how do we play all of DOOM? Furthermore, how do we play all of any video game?

Completionism makes up its own genre of YouTube video these days. Completionism suffices for some people's entire personal brands. The typical game liker's completionism most often takes the form of commitment to a game's internal metrics. Completionists most often satisfy themselves by obtaining every item, killing every enemy, unlocking every achievement, finishing every side quest, and topping every progress numeral up to 100%.

DOOM presents players only three post-level numbers: kills, items, and secrets. Achieving 100% in any of these numbers ultimately means little. Achieving 100% of a DOOM level's secrets might put your clear time high over par. Achieving a 100% items score might require a play style that is dinkier in the eyes of a spectator.

One might guess that a complete play of DOOM requires intensive exploration of every difficulty level. In my research for this review, I played through all nine levels of each of DOOM's four episodes on each of the game's five difficulty levels. I did this in pursuit of a complete experience. That complete experience has led me to the conclusion that the highest difficulty setting — "Nightmare" — represents what I consider over-completion.

In summary: "Nightmare" is a stupid difficulty level that turns DOOM into an almost-bad video game. I love it.

DOOM's higher difficulty settings differentiate themselves from the lower settings by presenting more enemies and fewer pickups. While playing through the game's higher difficulty settings, I consulted my video footage of the lower difficulty settings. Through careful comparison, I determined that DOOM's individual level designers believed in clearly different definitions of default difficulty.

As I said, a higher DOOM difficulty setting presents the player more enemies and fewer items than a lower difficulty setting. Therefore, a level designer must start designing a level with one particular difficulty setting in mind. John Romero clearly favored "Hurt Me Plenty" — the central of DOOM's five difficulty settings.

On higher difficulty settings, some of John Romero's levels become comical exaggerations. They come to resemble a farcical fake video game meant to implicate DOOM as inspiration for a fictional teenager's murder rampage in an episode of Law & Order. To play John Romero's masterpiece "Perfect Hatred" (E4M2) on the "Hurt Me Plenty" difficulty is to glimpse the mind-work of a level design genius as vital as the technical genius of John Carmack.

On the "Nightmare" difficulty setting, however, "Perfect Hatred" looks about as much like DOOM as that one animated GIF of that Super Mario Maker 2 remake of World 1-1 from Super Mario Brothers with all those fireball chains in it looks like Super Mario Brothers.

Back in 1999, when I first played "Perfect Hatred," Super Mario Maker did not exist. Today, in 2020, Super Mario Maker 2 exists, and it gives me the perfect framework for thinking about 1993's DOOM. To play DOOM on every difficulty setting is to play more DOOM than all of DOOM.

This exercise, however, allowed me a peek behind DOOM's red curtain. DOOM contains more than itself. Where some works of art are more than the sum of their parts, DOOM is more than more than the sum of its parts. DOOM's comically bloated, superfluous difficulty settings thus point the way toward DOOM's true nature: DOOM is bigger than itself.

DOOM is bigger than itself because DOOM speaks for itself. That's a — it's a wildly terrible sentence. I like it. We're leaving it in there.

People ask me all the time: "Do I say really dumb stuff on purpose?" I mean, of course. This is — you see how much fun I'm evidently having right now? That's like the worst sentence in this whole review. It's so good. This is — I mean, I'm genuinely very entertained. This whole review is just full of stuff that I'm just — it's just for me to drop the needle on the YouTube video 10 years later and just go, "LOL." That I'm getting the 10 years later feeling right now with that sentence is really good.

And when DOOM speaks for itself, it turns out that DOOM is a magnificently excellent video game. If you've ever fired DOOM's shotgun, you certainly don't need me to soliloquize about it. And if you've never fired DOOM's shotgun, any soliloquy I could compose could not compete with the shotgun itself.

DOOM runs on everything. You could be firing that shotgun 10 seconds from now on the LCD screen of any appliance in your house — or at least certainly in less time than it would take me to romanticize it. And once you fire that shotgun, you will know that, though it is tactilely beautiful in a vacuum, an infinitude of yet-unmade situations lend kingly context to that beauty.

All games after DOOM are DOOM'd. We can smuggle away from DOOM the experimental impression that the best games are always inspirationally incomplete. The best games are games only an absolutely delusional individual can claim to have played all of: Minecraft, Super Mario Maker, Street Fighter, Tetris, and DOOM.

You can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" unless you've played every WAD, unless you've deathmatch'd with every player who ever lived. Moreover, the tendrils of its legacy stretch mangrove-root-like, inextricable, beneath all of post-1994 game history. We cannot say we've played all of DOOM until we've played most video games that have ever been made.

You can't say you've played all of DOOM unless you've played the single-player campaign of Unreal Tournament, because Tim Sweeney probably would have never made a 3D engine if John Carmack hadn't made it look so hard. Gabe Newell worked on the Windows port of DOOM, so you can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" unless you've played Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, or Half-Life: Alyx.

You can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" if you haven't played every video game made by every studio that ever asked for DOOM maps or Quake maps in a game design job application. You can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" unless you've played every Call of Duty game — and no one has played every Call of Duty game except me.

In order to play, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM," I'm sorry: you're gonna have to also play all of Fortnite.

Ironically, I think you don't need to have played id Software and Bethesda Softworks's 2016 game DOOM or their 2020 game DOOM Eternal in order to have a complete DOOM experience. They're wonderful games. One's a little bit more wonderful than the other — you know what I mean — though I dare say remaking DOOM isn't DOOM. Making a new game and calling it DOOM is not as DOOM as making a new game and not calling it DOOM.

Quake 1 is more DOOM than DOOM 2016. Quake 2 is more DOOM than DOOM 3. You probably perfectly understand what I'm saying, so I don't need to discuss this particular point too much, right?

Right.

In the bottom line on its 2008 review on actionbutton.net, I called Cliff Bleszinski's Gears of War 2 "video games: the video game." What this, quote-unquote, "clever" turn of phrase omitted was that at that point in time, the definition of "video games" was DOOM.

In our original review of DOOM on actionbutton.net, we called DOOM the 15th-best game of all time and awarded it the bottom line: "a vintage Ford truck of a video game." Andrew Toups wrote that review. It was not finished when he sent it to me. It cut off mid-sentence. He said, "This is all I got, man." I don't know what he was doing that day, so I finished it for him. There's some weird sentences in there. I put the bottom line on there: "vintage Ford truck video game."

12 years later, I do not disagree with this bottom line — especially because Ford just announced the 2021 Ford Bronco, which looks to me to be the DOOM of vehicles.

At the time I oversaw Andrew Toups's feverish screed on DOOM, I myself was employed in daily producing gray boxes of video game levels in the Unreal Engine for a game I would — to be perfectly honest — never play. As a video game developer, I knew DOOM more and more deeply than I knew any other game. Anyone you talked to in a AAA studio had DOOM all over them.

There was a 3D artist in the studio where I worked who told me he liked such-and-such level I'd sketched up because of the way I'd mixed areas with orthogonal walls with areas with non-orthogonal walls. We were speaking English, by the way. I was in Japan. This was a fellow English native speaker. He was Dutch. He'd literally just used the word "orthogonal" twice in a casual conversation.

I told him, "I love that word: 'orthogonal.'"

And he said, "Yeah, dude. I learned it from DOOM."

As I read a DOOM game FAQ from 1994 — 1994! — on GameFAQs.com during the research phase of this review, I saw the phrase "non-orthogonal walls" in the overview section, and I remembered that guy, that 3D artist, that Dutch 3D artist, quite fondly. Then I remembered every other time DOOM came up during my career in game development — a career that continues even now as my colleagues and I at Action Button continue to develop our game Truck Heck for PC and next-generation consoles and the Nintendo Switch.

Numerous times in my life, I have collaborated temporarily with game developers who regularly invoke the names Carmack and Romero like a sort of prayer. I have at times joined in the invocation. Masters of DOOM describes the men as drinking Diet Coke and eating pizza and playing F-Zero and Street Fighter II for Super Nintendo while working on literally DOOM all hours of the night.

These men eschewed what their contemporary age-group peers might have considered a normal social life in order to live what future generations would consider a normal social life — except we drink Coke Zero.

I realized that people of my generation and my profession's mythologizing of Carmack and Romero's Diet Coca-Cola workaholism has resulted in a complicated culture of crunch. I won't lie: I myself crunch. I work on each of these videos for 300 or more hours deep into the night every night. These videos hurt my head and my eyes and my neck. And yes, I often scream the way I did back in my college dorm in 1999, addicted to Quake deathmatch.

I wouldn't wish this game addiction-like crunch mentality on anyone else. Maybe we'll talk about this more in a future video.

I'm 41 years old, and I still think about DOOM's Romero and Carmack every day of my life whenever I consider the video game I myself am trying to make. Truck Heck almost belongs more to DOOM than it belongs to me. For going on most of my career, I've heard Carmack and Romero's names capstoning sentences which in their ends collapse in defeatism — easily as many times as, if not more times than, I've heard that Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix both died at age 27 — I have heard that DOOM came out when John Romero was 26 and John Carmack was 23.

I know a movie that came out when its writer-director and star was just 26.

In summary: for all the reasons I've encoded and embedded into the length of this presentation, I declare unequivocally that DOOM is the Citizen Kane of video games.

Apropos of this conclusion, I pray that whatever eventually causes my inevitable death leaves me at least an interval of conscious time sufficient to think to utter a single DOOM demon death impression in lieu of last words. Save the investigative journalists of that future day their time. The story, my friends, has been right here all along.

Well, that's all I have time for today. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that video games were created awesome; that I was born stupid; however, I will not die hungry.

Seeing as it runs on everything amounts to a core pillar of DOOM's legacy, I committed myself to playing at least episode one of every port of DOOM. I ended up playing all of every port of DOOM. Illegally and ill-obtained, every version of DOOM ever made.

Suffice it to say: every non-PC version of DOOM sucks in a unique way. The Super Nintendo version is a particular nightmare. The Atari Jaguar version is mostly okay if you pre-possess an interest in software engineering. The Sega 32X version interested me primarily because while I was staring at its Japanese and North American box arts during the pre-production phase of this review, I fell into an imagination of what creative direction which executive gave the graphic designer of the North American Sega 32X logo.

I mean, clearly the mission was to use the same font that they'd used for the words "Genesis" and "Sega CD" on the Sega Genesis and Sega CD game box art templates. Though on the other hand, why?

The 32X version of DOOM, unfortunately, was not as interesting as the graphic designer job interview I had imagined. You know what's more interesting than the 32X version of DOOM is the fact that the 2003 book Masters of DOOM refers to the 32X as, quote, "the new console from Sega," unquote.

Likewise, the 3DO version of DOOM offered me little of interest aside from the experience of downloading a 3DO emulator for the first time in my life. Maybe I'll look for an ISO of Way of the Warrior one of these days.

Actually, you know what 3DO game I really want to play? I want to play Lucienne's Quest. I remember reading about it in an issue of GameFan a long time ago. I've had it on this "games to play someday" list in my head since literally 1996. All I can remember about it as I type this — not as I sit in front of the prompter reading this — is that Lucienne's Quest was made by Microcabin and the developers of Mystaria: The Realms of Lore for Sega Saturn. That's a pretty good game.

You know what Sega Saturn game is not pretty good, though? DOOM.

It turns out that "runs on everything" doesn't always mean it runs well on everything. DOOM for Sega Saturn is a port of DOOM for the Sony PlayStation. I love DOOM for the Sony PlayStation. I've loved DOOM for the Sony PlayStation ever since my friend Liz Ryerson said on the internet many years ago that DOOM for the Sony PlayStation is an extremely interesting version of DOOM.

After she said that, I watched a bunch of Let's Plays of DOOM for the PlayStation, played a little bit of it in an emulator, and started telling people I loved it. Yes, I admit: I've been a poser about DOOM for the Sony PlayStation for several years now. However, today I come to you having played all the way through DOOM and Final DOOM for the Sony PlayStation.

DOOM for the PlayStation fascinates me. Unlike the PC original, DOOM's PlayStation versions feature colored lighting and an oppressively dark ambient musical soundtrack by Aubrey Hodges, who composed the music for DOOM 64 as well. Playing DOOM for the PlayStation renews one's perspective on the original DOOM. The original DOOM for PC comes across as rinky-dinky in some aspects compared to its PlayStation remake.

The original PC DOOM's brighter white lights and bouncy music give one clownish whiplash upon returning to it from having just spent many hours knee-deep in the PlayStation remake. The PlayStation version of DOOM might, in fact, represent a purer realization of DOOM's harder-striking mission statement than the PC original accomplished.

That's not to say the PC original of DOOM is a failure in any regard. I'll go ahead and say it in so many words: the PC original DOOM is better than the PlayStation version of DOOM because of Bobby Prince's sometimes-clowny blooping music — not in spite of it. DOOM is goofy. Elevating it to cinematic horror balloons the goofishness toward a perhaps unintended effect.

You know what version of DOOM is a failure, though? The Game Boy Advance one. I played it in an emulator on my 15-inch laptop screen, and I've got to say: if I'd had to squint at that on an original Game Boy Advance screen when it released in 2001, I'd have given up video games forever. I'd be working in a law office right now if I'd played DOOM on Game Boy Advance.

The story of DOOM's development famously mythologized the division of roles of programmer and designer. Given the endurance of the Carmack and Romero archetypes, DOOM embodies one of the first colloquial instances of a game engine. With DOOM, Carmack turned id's previous game — Wolfenstein 3D — into a factory for making itself. Powered by Romero's tinkering, making levels in DOOM was so user-friendly in comparison to all games that came before it that today, in 2020, I dare say you can't say you've played DOOM — much less played all of DOOM — if you haven't waded into the modding community.

User-created mods (a.k.a. WADs) were and are DOOM as much as John Romero and Sandy Petersen's levels were DOOM. So to play all of DOOM is to play every WAD. When we consider that many WADs might sit unfinished on their makers' computer hard drives, we realize that one can't actually play all of DOOM without committing a few breakings and enterings.

Since I was short on time, I dedicated myself to playing only the number-one WAD from each single-year top-10 list on DoomWorld.com's top 100 WADs of all time. The DOOM modding community's dedication to the game over those 10 years of its history amazed me. The adaptability of John Carmack's DOOM engine unfolded before me as I played WAD after WAD. I thought to myself: "Some of these WADs make the original DOOM look like Wolfenstein."

So to test my gut feeling, I had to boot up Wolfenstein and play through its first two episodes. My hunch hadn't been far off. DOOM community designers with a decade of DOOM experience had proven that the DOOM engine's very limits were malleable at the hands of a good designer.

As I reflected on DOOM WADs, I recalled an anecdote from David Kushner's 2003 book Masters of DOOM, which chronicles the rise and plateau of id Software between 1990 and 2003. When John Romero left id Software in 1996 after the release of the original Quake, he based his new company — Ion Storm — on the dream of creating a game development studio where game design was king.

I recalled that the book had painted a portrait of Romero as creatively stifled, exasperated with the pressure of designing a game around technology that was still being invented. To make sure I'd gotten the anecdote right, I then re-read David Kushner's book Masters of DOOM. So as to better grasp John Romero's 24-years-ago notion of "design as king," I then played the opening chapter of his 2000 game Daikatana, then played his 2019 DOOM WAD SIGIL.

In fairness, I then decided to play through all of Quake 2 — the game that most directly competed with John Romero's Daikatana. I figured it would be proper to replay Quake 1 prior to replaying Quake 2, so of course I did that, using Vanilla Quake with Trent Reznor's original soundtrack.

While replaying Quake 1, I formulated one of the hypotheses we'll touch on toward the end of this review: that game likers have deified Carmack and Romero both for going on these decades. And clearly Carmack is a smart enough guy to transcend video game development and become a literal rocket scientist in his spare time, while Romero, on the other hand, left id Software to make a highfalutin game company that burned money in the penthouse of a big skyscraper.

Today we generally understand that both Johns were essential to DOOM's success, though without John Carmack's technology, John Romero's game design would have had no room to breathe. Though in replaying Quake 2 before re-re-replaying DOOM 1, I became burningly desirous of an answer to one question: exactly, mathematically, how essential was John Romero to DOOM's success?

To answer this question, I knew I had to perform a deep analysis on each of DOOM's level designs. I replayed all of DOOM once more. Then I replayed DOOM 64, DOOM 3 BFG Edition, and DOOM 2016.

When I had played about three hours into 2020's DOOM Eternal, I had to vacate my apartment because my lease had run out. However, the property manager of our new apartment has yet to review our paperwork despite our starting the process literally last year. So in the middle of my research process, I found myself forced to relocate temporarily to a small room on the top floor of a hotel in Times Square, New York, Manhattan.

Because of a global virus situation that has for the moment extinguished the tourism industry, I ended up paying less for that hotel room than I'd have paid to live in my old apartment. However, for various complex logistical reasons, I was unable to transport my beautiful Alienware Ryzen PC to the hotel room. I figured we'd be out of the hotel room in a week anyway, so I committed myself to researching my review in other ways during my hotel stay.

For example, I read the DOOM novels: Knee-Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky, and Endgame by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. Those books have some really Mormon stuff in them.

Wearing nine-dollar Panasonic Ergo Fit earbuds on my seven-year-old laptop in a king-sized hotel bed while eating an entire eight-dollar Two Bros pizza, I joylessly watched the 2005 Universal Pictures film DOOM, starring Dwayne Johnson — credited as "The Rock" — and Dreads Karl Urban. I have absolutely nothing insightful to say about that film.

When one week in the hotel had ended, the news trickled down to me from the condo board that they were, in fact, absolutely jerking me around. Stuck in the hotel for three more weeks, I replayed DOOM and DOOM 2 on my Nintendo Switch five times each on both "Hurt Me Plenty" and "Ultra-Violence" difficulties.

While I was doing this, I asked my fellow Action Button founders/Truck Heck developers and true DOOM murderheads Brent Porter and Michael Kerwin to send me high-quality captures of each level of DOOM. Michael Kerwin took the John Romero-heavy episodes 1 and 4. Brent Porter captured the Sandy Petersen playgrounds of episodes 2 and 3.

Porter and Kerwin each played their respective levels with keyboard controls only. They Dropboxed me their files, which I then took four days to download on hotel Wi-Fi, analyzed using the Action Button Method against my own playthroughs.

Finally, as my month-long hotel stay came to an end, I watched the 2019 film DOOM: Annihilation on my seven-year-old laptop while wearing nine-dollar Panasonic Ergo Fit earbuds and eating an entire Two Bros pizza. I have nothing insightful at all to say about that movie — except that by this point, these Two Bros meant more to me than my real two bros. And yes, my real two bros are Mario and Luigi.

Halfway through a second replay of DOOM 64 on my Nintendo Switch, I realized that I should start writing this review. I started writing this review six hours and six minutes before typing this exact sentence. Nice. That's true. I actually — I log all my workouts, log your work hours, everybody, especially if you're a freelancer or working for yourself like I do. Log your hours. So when someone asks you, "How long does it take you to do that?" you just know because you've got a spreadsheet that's got 10 years of data in it. Log your hours.

Six hours and six minutes. While playing so much DOOM across so many vintages and versions and remakes and sequels — spiritual or secular — it never occurred to me that I would ever truly experience all of DOOM. It occurred to me at one point, deep into a night playing DOOM 2 on my Nintendo Switch in portable mode, that DOOM is, as Jorge Luis Borges described the 1001 Nights: "that the idea of infinity is consubstantial with it, that the Thousand and One Nights is not something which has died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory."

I know now 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 mountaintops of future game genres.

DOOM is not just a video game. DOOM is the vortex, nexus, nucleus at the center of the idea of video games themselves. I could have perhaps reviewed DOOM more efficiently than I am about to review DOOM now without actually playing DOOM. Therefore, to perfectly review DOOM is to play DOOM and then reflect on how life would have proceeded without your having played DOOM.

You cannot literally play all of DOOM. As I've said, you don't need to play DOOM to have played DOOM. However, I'd recommend you play DOOM. You could play it on your PC via the Crispy DOOM source port. You could play it at 240 frames per second. Or, in the spirit of its immortal optimization and portability, in an act of righteous revenge for the censorship Nintendo perpetrated on Wolfenstein 3D — they made the blood green and they turned the attack dogs into rats — you could purchase DOOM for five dollars and play it on your Nintendo Switch in a hotel bed with imperfect yet relatively historically acceptable frame rate.

If you find yourself transforming into a DOOM connoisseur, I'd furthermore encourage you to experience DOOM for the Sony PlayStation for its colored lighting, its ambient music, and its aggressive leaning toward DOOM's erstwhile subtle insinuations of horror.

Or, if you want to get weird with it, I'd recommend you just play DOOM 64. Night Dive Studios recently remastered DOOM 64 for all consoles and PC. It's $4.99 on every platform. It runs at 240 frames per second in widescreen on my PC. Thanks, Stephen Kick.

DOOM 64 was originally developed at Midway in 1997. It features no levels designed by any id Software designers. Therefore, it is the closest thing we have to an officially sanctioned WAD encompassing the spirit of DOOM — perhaps as succinctly as is scientifically possible. And they released it on the same day as DOOM Eternal, which I don't like.

In summary: the complete DOOM experience does not require you to play any DOOM at all, though you might as well, because — as we'll explore in the next chapter — DOOM is good.

HURT ME PLENTY (in which Action Button Reviews DOOM)

DOOM is and always has been one of the best video games ever made. As I said earlier, I knew this before I even played the game. I knew this when I first played the game in 1994. I knew it deeper when I played the full game in 1996. I knew it in quadruplicate when I replayed the entire game in the summer of 2010. And when I replayed The Last of Us last month for the purpose of reviewing it on this same channel, I knew DOOM's greatness again.

Now that I have completed my research process, my knowledge of DOOM's greatness is as total as DOOM's greatness itself. DOOM's greatness encompasses its technological historical significance, the story of its development and design process, the dubious political ramifications and repercussions of its violence, and the experience of playing the game itself.

For the moment, let's review DOOM as a video game one plays as one might have played it shortly after its eruption in December of 1993. DOOM is a simple game. To summarize DOOM in terms 1993 would understand: DOOM is Asteroids + Pac-Man + Zelda dungeons with F-Zero speed in a first-person 3D perspective.

I will, for the remainder of this section, presume the player is playing on the "Ultra-Violence" difficulty setting, because "Ultra-Violence" sits directly beneath the obviously central default choice, "Hurt Me Plenty." It's 1993, so we're assuming our first-time player is a young male who considers video game difficulty a badge certifying masculinity.

In DOOM, you play the part of a marine stationed on Mars — a clever wordplay on the first three letters of the name of that particular branch of the United States military. On online message boards or dot-matrix-printed on a slip of paper in the Ziploc bag containing your shareware disk, you might encounter a scrap of story.

As the book Masters of DOOM tells us, John Carmack said of DOOM: "Story in a game like DOOM is like story in a porn movie. One expects its presence even if one does not engage with it intellectually."

As DOOM begins, something has happened on this military base, and our hero is alone, pointing a pistol into a room with a blue-floored portion in its center. Turn left, and we see some men. We need not the game designers' sketchy fiction that demons have possessed these men to diagnose that these men have problems. We line them up in our gun path and press the kill button. We watch blood spray.

One of them has a shotgun. We kill him and take the shotgun. We point the shotgun toward a man, and he dies as well. In DOOM, we didn't need a mouse to aim upward. In DOOM, we aimed upward automatically.

Ascend the stairs to find some armor surrounded by windows outside of which we see mountains. We take the luxurious body armor. We descend the stairs back to the room with the blue-floored portion. Already we have experienced what will become a core feature of later DOOM levels: a backtrack. This is the game's first test of our sense of direction. Some of our brains in 1993 flipped a coin. Others remembered that we'd started to the right and progress lurked to the left.

As we approach the hallway on the left-hand side of the room with the blue-floored portion, we see a wall of windows — a sky and mountains outside. Should we stop to contemplate the view, DOOM rewards us with a foreshadow. In the courtyard below, we can very clearly see another armor pickup similar to the one we already collected — except it's not green; it's blue.

We know it's different from the one we've already collected. We surmise from its distance that it's better than the one we already collected. And it's outside. We're inside here. DOOM has impressed upon us another vital lesson: we now possess a forever-undying, immortal expectation of secrets.

We turn left now. We enter the first of DOOM's many long, narrow hallways. At the end of the hallway, we see a door. In front of the door, we see a bloody dead man. DOOM, in 1993, has here committed an act of environmental storytelling. Behind this door, we see three dirty men in a blue box in the middle of a charcoal-gray military room. We kill them because we now, through experience, know that they don't want to hug us.

Even without stepping out of the continuous hallway, we sense that the bigness of the room before us exceeds our narrow view. We step forward into the mouth of the doorway and into the large room. Immediately we acquire the soldier's instinct to check our corners. We rotate 90 degrees to the right, and surely enough, a filthy, depraved soldier approaches us with a shotgun. We kill him.

Let's review what's happened so far. In less than one minute — in its first 38 seconds, by my reading inside Adobe Premiere — DOOM has taught us its controls. It has calibrated our spatial perception. It has enticed us to always hunger for secret bonuses. And it has implied heavily the value of situational awareness as seamlessly as it has showcased its graphical engine.

Then it keeps going. Now we step backward and aim to the left as another shotgun soldier approaches us from the opposite corner. We kill him as well, and DOOM has imparted its final elementary lesson: always expect more where that came from.

Now we proceed. Behind the blue box in the center of the room awaits another corpseable military freak. We proceed through an already-open door into an odd-angled hallway. Here the level designer, John Romero, eagerly demonstrated to us early the DOOM engine's advantage over the Wolfenstein 3D engine: non-orthogonal walls.

Soldiers come flowing through the wide mouth at the end of the non-orthogonal hallway. We palpate grandeur here. From inside one room with a landmark feature and texture personality, we see through a hallway of quirky shape into a cavernous other room. The level now impresses us with the continuity of its geometry.

Now we pass through the hall and into a room teeming with impressive nightmares: a non-orthogonally ostentatious zigzagging pathway spans a pit of visibly hazardous glowing green liquid. Hateable freaks parade across this bridge. We contend ballistically with the enemies while two more gruesome opponents linger, apparently on a raised, distant ledge yet inaccessible to our ground-bound avatar.

These more contemptible contenders are imps — the first and weakest of DOOM's demon enemies. Weakest demons though they may be, they express themselves audaciously enough to impress even the first-time player. From their inaccessible-to-us, high-up perch, they project fireballs. We can track the fireballs as movement from their instantiation right up until their impact — either harmlessly against a wall or armfully against our point of view.

In the space of this one encounter fragment, DOOM wires into our brain a higher capacity for situational awareness. We know these spiky brown enemies — imps — can threaten us from a distance because the level designer, John Romero, placed them at a considerable distance from our entry into this room. And because John Romero has blocked our line of sight to the imps with a corner of wall so that we must enter the room completely in order to see and thus shoot them, we will likely, on our first-ever play of this level, witness the imps' attack.

From our very first encounter with imps, we learn how they attack and how quickly their attack projectile moves.

We battle the enemies until we've cleared the room. We gingerly step across the zigzagging path. We enter a hallway. We see a door. We open the door. If we shoot the glowing green barrel therein, we learn that explosions can kill nearby enemies.

Now we see some walls with holes in them. We can't walk through these walls, though we can shoot the enemies behind them, and those enemies can shoot us. At the end, we open a momentous-feeling door between two candlesticks and underneath a sign clearly labeled "EXIT." An imp demon lunges forward to confront us from the tiny room within. We kill it, internalizing the final lesson that DOOM will never stop trying to get us.

Thus ends the first-time player's first traversal through Episode One, Mission One (a.k.a. E1M1, a.k.a. "The Hangar").

Maybe our first time through this mission, we walk right past the odd-colored wall on the right-hand side of that final hallway past the zigzag bridge. Maybe we need to see a kid in the computer lab at school open it up before we know that it was there all along — like that first one-up block before the first deadly bottomless pit in Super Mario Bros. 1. It was there. It is there. It's been there all along.

We press the space bar, and that wall slides up like a door. We enter a basement hallway crawling with jerks, and we blast our way out into the courtyard we saw earlier, and we take the prize that was foreshadowed to us. We have to step across a green waste pit that hurts us in order to get that armor, so that's how we learn that some floors can hurt us.

I didn't write that in my script, though I just thought: that's pretty smart, right? Now — smart level design, that. Good job, John Romero.

Likewise, maybe the first time we play through E1M1, we don't realize we can go back after opening the exit door and now run across the hurt pit in the zigzag bridge room and into a trove of armor bonuses. We ride an elevator to the top of a secret alcove, and now we can see down onto the zigzag bridge room as we occupy the vantage point of our slain enemies from before.

We now understand every word of the language DOOM will go on to speak across 35 more levels of increasing complexity. Just as the blue armor waits for us in the middle of a hurt pit in a courtyard outside the first window we encounter, all of DOOM sleeps, lurks, and crouches here within E1M1.

I've heard the melodious phrase "E1M1" 1,001 times in my career as a video game scrutinizer. The video game internet positively teems with hagiographies of E1M1. A level designer at a studio at which I once worked declared it "the Super Mario Brothers 1-1 of first-person shooters," to which I, back then, retorted, "No, Super Mario Brothers 1-1 is the E1M1 of 2D platformers."

I was a DOOM poser even then. When I announced my intention to review DOOM, many of my viewers asked, "Are you going to talk about E1M1?" And I immediately felt a suspicion that many, many YouTube videos must talk about E1M1. I imagined a Game Maker's Toolkit video about E1M1. There's got to be a Game Maker's Toolkit video about E1M1.

I've seen several of Game Maker's Toolkit's videos picking apart Zelda dungeons, though I've never seen a video about E1M1 from them. When people asked me if I was going to talk about E1M1, I immediately imagined they were asking me to regurgitate a Game Maker's Toolkit video.

So here's what I did: without checking to see if Game Maker's Toolkit did an E1M1 video, without even revisiting my video footage of E1M1, I wrote my description of E1M1 off the top of my head. I filled in the part about an exact Adobe Premiere timestamp in my second draft.

After uploading this video to YouTube, I will search "Game Maker's Toolkit DOOM E1M1" on YouTube and watch whatever video tops the search results. To answer my viewers' question as to whether I'm going to talk about E1M1: I just did.

Though what the heck — let's talk about it some more. E1M1 is the Rosetta Stone of DOOM. As we'll go on to explore later in this review, DOOM is the Rosetta Stone of modern video games. So E1M1 embodies a tiny Rosetta Stone sitting next to a bigger Rosetta Stone.

Like all good Rosetta Stones, the Rosetta Stone of E1M1 is incomplete. E1M1 introduces every element of a DOOM level except card keys. E1M2 (a.k.a. "Nuclear Plant") promptly introduces this mechanic. Close to the entrance of the level, the player encounters a door. E1M1 taught players how to open doors with the use button. When the player tries to open the red door early in E1M2, they encounter a dialog message: "The red card key is required to open this door."

In the classic fashion of good game design, this level of DOOM has shown the player something they cannot do shortly before showing them how to do it. The first half of E1M2 sees the player navigating a labyrinth and encountering the red card key. The second half of the level, as it were, sees the player returning to the entrance via a different route than they took to the key.

Here DOOM imparts a quieter, more final lesson: that despite the simplicity of its design, progress involves more than mere forward motion. In DOOM, you don't just pass through a level — you must explore and master every corner.

What impressed me most when I first played DOOM in 1994 still impresses me most now: that DOOM itself seems to enjoy the very idea of its 3D first-person perspective's bewildering effect on the human sense of direction. Littered amid samey corridors of gray and brown are sometimes-red, sometimes-blue, sometimes-green landmarks of indescribable geometry.

Memorizing every twist and turn in DOOM's mazes taxes our sense of direction miles beyond any naturally occurring structure. We get lost in DOOM much more easily than we'd get lost in real life — both because in real life we have the benefit of a space actually existing and informing our spatial memory with a million intangible cues and clues, and also we get lost easily in DOOM because the spaces in DOOM present us absolute deadpan parodies of bureaucratic nonsense architecture.

Earning familiarity with any of DOOM's level designs thus amounts to a sort of shaggy dog puzzle. We must earn this familiarity whilst contending with action monsters. Though once that contending is done and we're alone with the geometry, we might glimpse the trick.

More than any other sensation, this is what I remember about my first experience with DOOM episode 1 back in 1994: by the end of one level, I'd killed all the monsters and now had to wander the halls alone, seeking whatever arcane mechanism I needed to activate in order to unlock the exit.

I talk a lot about game flavors here on Action Button Reviews, so here in this review of DOOM, I'd like to add a new tidbit of lore to the game flavors mythos: the fewest flavors a game can have is two. A game with one flavor is not a game.

DOOM has two flavors. Think of them as meat and potatoes. Usually these two flavors intertwine like red and white stripes on a meat-and-potato candy cane, though occasionally one encounters a spurt of one flavor that for the moment erases the memory of the other.

DOOM's two flavors are, simply put: search and destroy.

Searching entails traversing hallways between action encounters. On the largest scale, the player searches to find keys and unlock doors, and the player needs to unlock doors to complete the level. On the medium scale, the player searches to access areas of the map they have not yet entered, bristling with the joy of discovery when they happen, for example, upon a group of yet-unkilled enemies. These enemies present evidence that the player has not yet entered this particular room.

And on the smallest scale, the player searches for items to replenish their stock of gun ammunition, health, or armor. On harder difficulties, players will find themselves taking "scrounge breaks" after every other encounter. Here DOOM tests the player's mastery of its architectural geometry.

If a player is at full health or ammo, they can't pick up items. However, the items remain persistently where they fell. A DOOM player soon acquires the skill of micro-memorization: use a pistol to kill a shotgun zombie who drops shotgun ammo — your shotgun ammo is full. Use your shotgun to kill a room full of demons later. Now remember the location of that fallen shotgun ammo from earlier. Now navigate back there without getting lost.

In this way, DOOM encourages players to master its levels as architecture for both large and small reasons — all while moving at blazing high speeds.

Most ingeniously, on an even smaller scale, DOOM's search flavor also encompasses secrets. In a game already obsessed with taxing a player's ability to retain three-dimensional spatial information, secrets break the elephant's back. Wolfenstein 3D had introduced players like me to the idea of pressing the space bar in front of every suspicious segment of wall until finally we were pressing the space bar in front of even the most unassuming of walls.

DOOM vitalizes this behavior. Players seeking to enjoy a straight run through each mission of an episode need all the item-accumulation momentum they can get, and that means finding and memorizing the locations of all the secret troves.

Battle encounters punctuate DOOM's search cycles like pepperoni on a pizza. You fight in hallways. You fight in rooms. You fight in wide-open chambers. Sometimes you fight in courtyards. You contend with imps launching visible projectiles from ledges and shelves. You grow wary of invisible specters looming in the darkness of flickering lights. You anticipate a shotgun jerk around every corner. You come to expect Pinky demons to come winking and stomping out of every door you're about to open.

You battle with a pistol, shotgun, chaingun, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, or BFG 9000. Generally, each of these weapons is stronger than the last, with increasingly rare ammunition. Conservation of ammo for more valuable weapons becomes the first-time player's primary psychological burden during battle.

The first-time player repeatedly asks themselves: "Should I use the strong weapon on this guy, or is there going to be a harder encounter later in this level?" The repeat player knows the flow of encounters and can budget accordingly, turning the item economy and restock acquisition into a fast-paced puzzle.

So it is that even during moments of destroy, search jockeys for real estate in the player's mind.

While I was researching for my review of The Last of Us — which compartmentalizes story-heavy item scrounges and horror-style action conflicts into their own separate bubbles — I couldn't stop thinking about DOOM. I find The Last of Us's structure wonderful for what it is, though I couldn't help thought-experimenting: what would The Last of Us look like if it lifted DOOM 1993's structure?

To be perfectly honest, I figured it'd look real bad, though I enjoyed the thought experiment anyway.

To better understand DOOM's structure, I performed an analysis of each level of the first three episodes of DOOM. Primarily I wanted to determine the search-destroy balance. I found that Sandy Petersen's levels in episodes 2 and 3 leaned slightly more towards search than destroy, though John Romero's episode 1 levels present players an almost perfect 50-50 search-destroy ratio.

I should note: I performed this analysis on game footage captured by my Action Button co-founders and Truck Heck co-developers Brent Porter and Michael Kerwin. They're DOOM veterans and captured the footage on "Ultra-Violence" difficulty using keyboard controls. In their playthroughs, I asked them to collect 100% of the secrets.

Porter and Kerwin are not DOOM speedrunners. They're simply fans of the game who had, at the time of their game-capturing, not played through the campaign in several years — at least not all the way through. They — what true DOOM murderhead is going to open up DOOM and play a level every now and again, every once in a while? You think, while you're working on a video game or thinking about video games, you remember a DOOM level and you pop DOOM open? That's why you keep it on your Windows desktop at all times. You always — no icons on your desktop, just DOOM.

I determined: setting the difficulty on "Ultra-Violence" and asking the players to collect 100% of the secrets would allow me the purest numbers. "Ultra-Violence" difficulty features sort of an explosion's worth more monsters than "Hurt Me Plenty," the medium difficulty, though even so, we ended up with traversal accounting for a hefty percentage of the game time.

I replayed each mission of DOOM on "Ultra-Violence" difficulty and then "Hurt Me Plenty" difficulty an additional once-through. During this research process, I did so on my Nintendo Switch in a hotel room while repeat-looping the 2005 film DOOM on my television, accompanied by a tiny wolf, while suffering a bout of shingles.

Speaking of which: wow, shingles is the worst pain I've ever felt in my life. And I've had a root canal without anesthetic before. Literally. That's not even —

Though these last two playthroughs represented my sixth and seventh time through the game's missions, even though by this time I possessed the intimate familiarity that comes with John Madden-ing my way through video game tape video footage of expert-level playthroughs, I still felt the friction of DOOM's maze-running aspect.

My repeat playthroughs and my scientific scrutinizing approach had represented my attempt to desensitize myself from the maze-running. That desensitization did not happen. Charging down those halls to pick up left-behind armor, health, and ammo never stopped feeling like a video game.

Game likers from time immemorial have bristled at the mere mention of the term "backtracking." Heck, some prehistoric individuals living in future Aztec country or the Amazon or Mesopotamia probably busted out all the cuneiform yet invented in haterism of all the back-and-forth field-crossing necessitated by their primitive version of soccer.

Game likers are all about that forward progress. DOOM, especially at high levels of difficulty, encourages frequent backtracking to acquire items. As the game goes on, the levels get generally bigger, so those backtracks become more lengthy.

Every time I played through Sandy Petersen's level "Limbo" (E3M7), I wound up killing every monster on the map before collecting the final key. After that, I practically owned the place. The only thing that could still hurt me were those stupid lava floors. Every time through episode 3, I wandered the empty mansion of "Limbo," as it were, topping my DOOM guy up with collectibles before heading to the exit. I started to think of that level like a street in an old neighborhood — or at least like a town in an old role-playing game.

DOOM requires such circuitous crochet-style knitting in and around its level designs. Yet in my recollection, not nearly as many people criticized DOOM for its backtracking like they accused, for example, Super Metroid — released that same year. Heck, I was talking to a co-worker about Super Metroid last year, and you're never going to believe this: the guy said he never beat it because — and I quote — "I can't stand games with backtracking."

I'd argue that in Super Metroid, backtracking is integrated incredibly well. You get items, abilities, and weapons that allow you to re-traverse previous areas in fresh new ways, from new angles, in new entrances and out new exits. To summarily dismiss action-adventure game backtracking in Super Metroid because of backtracking constitutes a lack of imagination big enough to sail a T. rex through.

We'll revisit this topic at great length in my eventual review of Dark Souls.

We don't exactly need to wear any protective equipment to spelunk into an investigation of why DOOM doesn't land high up in the list of backtrack-complaint-worthy video games. For one thing, DOOM has levels — not a persistent Metroid-style world. DOOM's levels are big, though not so big that you can't hold a sketch of their complete geometries in your head at all times while playing.

Likewise, remembering where you left ammo to pick up later turns backtracking into a delightful spectral conversation with your past self. And that feels like a video game.

Most importantly, however: we don't mind backtracking all the heck of the way across a vast DOOM map on a moment's whim because movement in DOOM is brisk and delicious.

In fact, the briskness and deliciousness of DOOM's locomotion might account for 60% of the game's initial sales appeal. On the one hand, as of late 1993, every 3D video game not made by id Software involved either stopping to look at menus every four seconds or putting the player in control of a boat or a space boat.

DOOM's emphasis on visceral speed set it apart. It got people's attention. The ubiquity of DOOM's shareware availability ensured that millions of people saw DOOM. And seeing DOOM meant seeing how fast DOOM was. Seeing how fast DOOM was immediately impressed upon one the fullest realization yet of the novelty: graphics.

We have to thank John Carmack for what must have amounted to hundreds of joyless hours sanding down the edges of his floppy-disk-optimized 3D engine until it was capable of displaying blistering speeds even on a 486. Though we have to equally thank John Romero for the exact frictive texture of that speed.

The top speed impresses the casual over-the-shoulder observer, though it's the accelerations from sticky zero and the ballroom dancing and changes in direction between firearm blasts that sell the game hardest to the player. In DOOM's player movement, we feel the weight of all John Romero's childhood expertise in the classic game Asteroids.

The acceleration on the player's rotation speed, the hefty bump that begins and ends every strafe, and the cuisine-perfect magnitude of palpable momentum as the player slidingly slows to a stop from a sprint all evoke tactile remembrances of Romero's evident influences — namely Asteroids and Super Mario Bros. 3.

Let's also not forget that the book Masters of DOOM points out that John Carmack and John Romero played F-Zero on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System during breaks while developing DOOM. This perhaps also influenced the sheer speed of DOOM guy's Olympic-level sprinting prowess — a tendency toward speed that has infested modern shooting games with even the most hyper-realistic graphics.

Can I just pause here for a moment and say that when I read Masters of DOOM in 2003, it shocked me to hear about how much John Romero referenced Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. 3, Asteroids, and F-Zero while working on DOOM? Because I'd always thought of DOOM as like some ancient video game, even though I knew DOOM came out when I was 14 years old. I saw it come out. I was there. And I — I was 100% there, and I was very — I was self-aware at age 14, believe it or not. I mean, maybe you were too.

I had somehow believed it to be some kind of monumental pillar. Then when I read Masters of DOOM again in 2020, it shocked me again to read about Carmack and Romero playing F-Zero and Street Fighter II every day. I'd somehow forgotten that tidbit again.

That is how conceptually powerful DOOM is. In 2020, though, I was like: "Wow, these two guys loved Super Mario Bros. 3, Asteroids, Pac-Man, and F-Zero, and somehow they wound up making something new." I mean, they made Commander Keen first, and that was a 2D platformer with pixel art and some graphics ripped right clean off of Super Mario Bros. 3. It had exact Super Mario Bros. 3 stuff in there.

I mean, in an alternate universe, they would have just kept making platformers. Maybe they would have — I don't know — maybe they would have thought to add some slow-paced physics puzzles or time-travel puzzles to those platformers. I bet John Romero and Tom Hall could have designed some pretty decent puzzles for a platform game. They didn't do that, though. They made DOOM after making Hovertank, Catacomb 3-D, and Wolfenstein 3D — those other 3D games. Clearly 3D was their thing.

DOOM has all the motion joy of a Super Mario Brothers. And John Romero's episode 1 levels emanate all the sage level design wisdom evident in Shigeru Miyamoto's once-upon-a-timely advice that a game designer should design the first level of their game last.

John Romero's first few DOOM levels offered players a perfect venue for showcasing DOOM's movement. John Romero's first few DOOM levels created the first-person shooter genre as we continue to know it.

In summary: movement in DOOM thrills the player because it's fast and it's heavy. In the heft lies the masterstroke: the sickeningly relentless up-and-down bob of our viewpoint and his gun lords over every frame of motion.

With Wolfenstein 3D, id Software had eschewed every theoretical nuance of game-designerly baroqueness in pursuit of sickening speed. With DOOM, id faced an early choice: would they build systems and depth atop Wolfenstein's foundation, or would they polish the engine and make more or less the same game again — only louder, bigger, harder, wilder, and faster?

Again, id chose speed. Speed anchors every other design decision in DOOM.

I'm not 100% sure of my math here, though I wouldn't put it past John Romero and John Carmack to have made the player character in DOOM exactly as fast as they could get him before the graphics exploded. Maybe Romero's thirst for speed informed Carmack's pursuit of a cleaner, more optimized engine. I scoured interviews. I reread Masters of DOOM. I could not find a single anecdote insinuating that DOOM had ever, at any point, been too fast for John Romero.

I found no sound bites wherein Romero said, "Okay, guys, let's slow it down a bit." The heaviness and the speed of the player character informed every other design decision: enemy speed, enemy firing frequency, enemy quantity, enemy behavior, player weapon firing rate, and — perhaps most importantly — battle encounter level geometry.

Every DOOM battle encounter presents a spiderweb tug-of-war hoedown dance between these chess-piecely elements. All frictions fire flawlessly alone or in compound concert. Simply strafe-sidestepping an accelerating fireball shot by a distant, visible imp, feeling the thump as you change direction at the end of the sidestep, and then blasting someone with a shotgun releases a Niagara Falls of brain chemicals — and it happens at least every three seconds.

You don't have to reload your weapons in DOOM. As long as you have a supply of ammo, you can keep firing. This is clearly by design — not because the designers didn't know how a gun works. They clearly did. They chose to do it this way because all the different guns possess unique rates of firing with sometimes-unnoticeably tiny cooldowns after every shot. They have these cooldowns because that makes fights interesting, whereas reload animations would make the fights slow.

DOOM's fights aren't slow. Even when you're hammering a Baron of Hell 50 times with your pistol because you're out of ammo for everything else, throughout the simple dance of dodging, shooting — it's dodging, moving backward, moving in a circle, moving away, dodging, shooting, dodging, contending with the threat of other chess-piecely monsters interloping on the fringes — your brain remains engaged and entertained.

Heft and speed express themselves even on the micro level of each action encounter. The shotgun's visual and sonic presentation scream power. Enemies fly backward as the player bobbingly recoils. DOOM enjoys the weight of its objects as much as Asteroids does.

In each of these granules, I recognize the voice of an author.

As you may know, DOOM often encourages the player to circle around a group of enemies so as to befuddle their aiming behaviors. This technique — called circle-strafing — has become a subconsciously fundamental element of all modern 3D action video games. It's a pleasant motion to perform in a vacuum, and more pleasant to perform in practice. Groups of enemies and level design geometry situations present texturally unique circle-strafe opportunities.

In the process of researching for this review, as I've already pointed out, I took it upon myself to play through the entirety of DOOM's campaign using only my beautiful Filco Majestouch 2 Ninja keyboard with Cherry MX Blue switches. Performing DOOM's famed circle-strafe maneuver without the aid of a mouse or even a modern analog stick requires the player to rely on the character's momentum.

Using comma and period to strafe and the arrow keys to turn and the Control key to shoot produces a cacophonous rhythm from clacky mechanical keys. In this rhythm, I hear the heartbeat of an author.

Sure, we wouldn't love DOOM if it wasn't 3D. We wouldn't love DOOM if it didn't have big, labyrinthine level designs and non-orthogonal geometry. We wouldn't love DOOM so much if we couldn't look out of windows onto yet-unreachable places or down from ledges into rooms teeming with enemy activity.

However, we also wouldn't love DOOM if it weren't so fast. And we definitely wouldn't love DOOM if the actions and weapons weren't so perfectly tuned to balance heft and speed.

To that end, I say: congratulations, John Romero, for your contributions to DOOM. I have ascertained that you represent, pound for pound, at least as talented a game designer as Shigeru Miyamoto.

Of course, we also wouldn't love DOOM if it weren't so excruciatingly violent.

ULTRA-VIOLENCE (The Point: "Dirtbag Nation" (or, "Hard-Hooked On Digital Red")

Back then — 1994 — kids were pulling the fire alarm all the time. It was as much fun as watching Beavis and Butt-Head. Just pull the fire alarm. Somebody lit the gym on fire, and the gym did not blow up. The kid did not get caught. And then a few months later, he lit the gym on fire again.

I'm saying "he" because — let's face it — 1994, Beavis and Butt-Head on the television, you know, grunge, DOOM, Mortal Kombat — it was a boy who lit the gym on fire. It wasn't me.

So I was actually on this lawn, and I exited that door there the day there was a fire. I exited that very door, and I was standing — I believe I was standing right here, though. Yeah, I saw it: a column of smoke just erupted. Column of black smoke. It was on the evening news. It was on the national news. It was a nationally newsworthy moment of school-place violence perpetrated by — the authorities were convinced — by a student.

And there was this investigative journalist who was this guy on WTHR Channel 13 News. He always had a shot where he was walking toward the camera at the beginning of the investigation, and then he would like stop and like touch something. Like, you see them everywhere — you think they're perfectly safe. Then he puts his hand on top of like a gumball machine, and he goes, "Gumball machines might be giving your kids rabies."

And then he was in front of this school. "Weeks ago, a fire destroyed the $17 million gymnasium at North Central High School here on the north side of Indianapolis. Authorities say it was a student who lit the blaze. With violent video games such as DOOM all the rage..."

Does it even matter where he went from there? Does it even matter? There weren't even any guns involved. It wasn't even any personal harm involved. Nobody was injured or killed. And these people went straight to video games in 1994.

In December of 1994, a kid who never got caught burns down my high school's gymnasium — then the biggest and most expensive high school gymnasium in all of the state of Indiana. Someone on the local TV news blamed DOOM.

Five years later, on April 20th, 1999, two teenagers committed mass murder at a high school in Columbine, Colorado. The children — one of whom had a last name that sounded like a Dungeons & Dragons monster — wore trench coats and killed 13 of their classmates and then themselves with automatic weapons. People on television found evidence that at least one of the killers had played DOOM. He'd created his own DOOM WADs even.

Because the internet, like me, remembers everything, as research for this project I played his DOOM WADs. All due respect: they're worse than American McGee's levels.

At the time the Columbine massacre happened, I was in college enjoying several healthy friendships and even a nuanced romantic relationship with a woman much more interesting than myself. I played video games almost daily and made straight A's. I had six-pack abs, and I was starting to learn what self-confidence was.

Years earlier, as a dirtbag idiot teenager, I'd never once imagined that I'd ever have any kind of social life at all. I hated myself for a long time — for many reasons. One of those reasons was maybe that I thought video games were stupid and that playing video games qualified me as an idiot.

Way back in 1993, some of the video game magazines I'd regularly read at the supermarket — such as Electronic Gaming Monthly — reported venomously on the attempts by one Senator Joseph Lieberman to regulate sales of violent video games. We didn't have YouTube back then or even the internet, so I only perceived the ongoing battle against video game violence in snippets and blurbs in the pages of magazines.

For people who, like me, already knew video games were awesome, this Senator Joseph Lieberman and his best friend, First Lady Hillary Clinton, were talking like a bunch of nimrods. And my favorite video game blurb scribes — full of proto-Shawn-Babyish boldface vigorousness — lampooned these poindexters into smoking dust.

What Lieberman had wanted, exactly, 14-year-old me never knew. Clearly, though, by 1999, when the Columbine massacre happened, I'd read up enough on the subject to know what I know now: Lieberman had wanted the video game industry to voluntarily adopt a video game ratings system to warn parents of potentially harmful content. If the video game industry failed to unanimously do so, he wanted the government to step in.

Ultimately, a couple of hobos in a basement threw together the ESRB — those dirtbags — so the government never had to intervene and take it. Joseph Lieberman, 1993, got exactly what he wanted: which was to make enough easy noise for someone (i.e., me) to learn and then subsequently never forget his name, though he didn't want to make so much noise that he had to do anything afterward.

I'm 41 years old right now, myself, and I gotta say: I respect that.

In 1999, I had constant, unfettered internet access, and I was majoring in journalism at Indiana University. I could not escape a torrential stream of media knowledge of the Columbine massacre. I read everything I could about it — even before the media started chasing its tail about the DOOM connection.

Once the ambulance chasers dragged video games into it, though, the story bled into the websites I read for fun. The minor media circus around video games as inspiration for Columbine gave us such goldmine pre-century-turn proto-memes as the term "murder simulator."

I witnessed the expression of many hilarious jokes and articulate opinions on forums I frequented. I formulated several articulate opinions of my own. Back then, studying journalism, studying writing, studying linguistics and politics and sociology and statistics and so many other important things, I felt for a fleeting moment that I had information that could possibly help solve a problem.

Though when Senator Joseph Lieberman showed up on television to criticize DOOM and evidenced to us articulate opinion-havers that he was, in fact, not actually paying attention, I — in a process that continues to snowball today — started to wonder what, in any case, the point was of paying attention and knowing stuff when those in power take pride in not knowing anything.

For example, Joseph Lieberman had said of DOOM's influence on the Columbine killers that — and I quote — "The school gunmen murderously mimicked DOOM down to the choice of weapons and apparel."

As a player of DOOM episodes 1-3 at that point in time, I found this insinuation paper-thin and ignorant. The Columbine killers wore trench coats. The main character of DOOM does not wear a trench coat. Lots of people thought the player character of DOOM wore a trench coat.

When Bill Gates appeared in an internal Microsoft promotion for the Windows port of DOOM, he was wearing a trench coat. Remember that? Anyone who'd ever played deathmatch or looked at the game's box art would know that the player character of DOOM did not wear a trench coat. Player character: DOOM is masked.

Did Senator Joseph Lieberman know he was wrong, or did he think he was right? Was he confusing DOOM and The Matrix? Whatever the case may have been, this made me think: if this clown is going to get a detail like this completely wrong just so he gives off the appearance of proving a point, what's the point of getting the details right?

I use the trench coat mention as a single example, though the 1999 reignition of high-level social interest in video game violence overflowed with such distortions and generalizations.

Here I'd just like to point out that as a journalism major in college at the point this all happened, this was not exactly my first philosophical crisis regarding the nature of truth. I don't talk much of my experience getting a college degree in journalism — probably because I never ended up becoming a journalist. Sure, I wrote a few magazine columns. Sure, I've contributed secretly to several large pieces of mainstream investigative journalism, one of which I think should have won a Pulitzer.

Though I myself have never been able to claw my head up above the rim of the nihilistic pit into which I'd gradually fallen over four years studying journalism, I maintained an interest in exploring the corruption and pollution of information over the next two decades of my life.

During those two decades, information became complicated. We might say reality twisted. Facts have slowly lost their mainstream appeal. Throughout this twisting process, I've struggled to straighten and keep straight my own understanding of my own relationship to the truth.

Over the past 21 years, I've slowly acquired a list of subjects I want to be able to speak truly about. As I fill the list, the world spirals more and more toward complication. In this complicating world, the list of requirements for satisfying myself that I now know enough about such-and-such topic to finally arrange my thoughts and speak plainly grows too long to understand.

I realize that my perfectionism is the result of a privilege. I might never be ready to say something perfectly helpful. With your permission, however, today I would like to try.

Oh yes. Here today — 21 years late — is my contribution to the "does video game violence cause real-life violence?" debate.

You might wonder, dear viewer, why I'm bothering to speak at all on a subject so old. First of all, let me squash your faint hope: no, I'm not going to present an answer at the end of this. I wish I had an answer. I'm speaking only so that I might inspire maybe the person who inspires the person who does find an answer.

I find it important to speak on this subject because while you and I and everyone else who knows video games are harmless has long since walked away from the debate, other people — idiots, mostly — have continued to have it.

During my research process, I became aware of a particular individual. He's a retired US Army lieutenant colonel. He's become the go-to guy for fools to book on their sensationalist news programs whenever a mass shooting happens and the NRA would prefer it if we blamed video games again.

This man is a professor of psychology at West Point, and after watching him on many archived Fox News appearances on YouTube and reading two of his books, I say with some conviction that anyone studying psychology at West Point is probably going to wind up needing to see a therapist immediately after graduation.

This man is one of the most interestingly unintelligent individuals I have ever encountered in my entire media-consuming life — and I've looked at Twitter. I feel like if this squinty weirdo can get on TV and spray this half-baked diarrhea, maybe I — a squinty weirdo — can spray some half-baked diarrhea of my own on YouTube.

Also, for what it's worth: my dad is a retired US Army lieutenant colonel too, and he told me when I was nine years old that I was already smarter than him. So let's see how this goes.

Here is what I know: mass shootings perpetrated by individuals under the age of 21 in America have, since the 1990s, grown in both frequency and magnitude. DOOM was released six years before Columbine, six years after RoboCop, two years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and eight months after Mortal Kombat 2 — which was released six months after Mortal Kombat 1, which was released five months after Wolfenstein 3D.

Prior to this cluster of games, violence had never caught my eye quite the way it did in Wolfenstein 3D. I'd committed many virtual murders as of my entrance into the 13th year of life, though I'd never seen results quite so graphic. Wolfenstein 3D's Nazis' blood was as red as its floors were blue. Dead bodies in games never lingered on the floor in hamburgery piles quite so persistently as they did in Wolfenstein 3D.

Then Mortal Kombat happened.

I first saw Mortal Kombat in a dark arcade in the Glen Burnie Mall in Maryland. I didn't even know about fatalities when the game first spoke to me. I merely saw one guy playing Scorpion uppercut another guy playing Liu Kang and watched that stark red Play-Doh-like shooting star of blood eject, ascend, spread, and fall back to speckle the earth.

My immediate internal monologue reaction to this was: "This is bad." "Bad" in the parlance of the day meant "good."

I'd seen RoboCop at this point five years earlier — quite traumatizingly at age eight. Even they'd advertised RoboCop during cartoons, for God's sake. My aunt apologized to my mom for an hour afterward. Since that day, something began to build in me. Eventually, I joined the droves of dirtbag young white boys who didn't realize they were dressing like John Connor in Terminator 2 on purpose.

I'd played NARC in other arcades. I'd made drug dealers bleed for a dollar an hour in pizza parlors on US military bases, though the killing always felt so frivolous and flimsy. When you gave me this power in first person, when you let me with a single keystroke hamburger-eyes a Wolfenstein Nazi, you had my attention.

When you showed me this geyser-y uppercut blood in Mortal Kombat's intimate, photorealistic, digitized one-on-one setting, and then a kid who was in high school showed us Sub-Zero's spine-ripping fatality, the damage was done.

I'd seen the T-1000 impale a guy's head through a milk carton and through his mouth a dozen times at this point, though when you told me I could control/perpetrate such creatively gruesome violence without anyone explicitly asking me kindly or unkindly, I — like so many other aspiring dirtbags — found myself hard-hooked on digital red.

Why were all us jagoff chubby white boys with uncut hair and dirty jeans and Megadeth mixtapes lining up back then to slobber all over digital red? Video game violence as a trend happened because we enabled it. We enabled it because it spoke to us.

Curiously, no mega-million-dollar marketing machine had previously sold us this exact brand of violence. We engaged with it as a — let's say — a fashion choice. We were expressing ourselves by electing to engage in extreme entertainments.

As you may or may not know about me, I suffer a somewhat rare neurological condition that requires me to remember just about everything in my life all the time. On the one hand, this condition has never been useful outside of the odd party trick involving years-old gas station receipt dollar values — and even then, the money won on bets is negligible and usually spent more frivolously than even the rest of my money.

On the other hand, this condition allows me a perhaps unique opportunity to channel exact mind-states from any lived experience of my life. It's for this purpose, of course, that I've tried to keep my life uninteresting, because trust me: there's nothing worse than being trapped in a remembrance of an interesting experience.

For the purpose of this review of the 1993 video game DOOM, I allowed myself to pore over the entirety of the first five years of the 1990s in search of the exact countercultural spark that made me personally its target audience.

I've written a novella-length personal essay about this experience centered on the game Final Fantasy VI. I posted this essay somewhere on the internet immediately before setting this video to live. Feel free to find it if you want. I'll warn you right now: it's not funny at all, and it goes into some pretty dark personal places.

If you're watching this video maybe more than a couple months after it was posted, there's a chance I might have deleted the essay, in which case: no, I will not send it to you if you find my email address and email me. Posting essays in mysterious locations on the internet and then deleting them later on a whim has been one of my favorite pastimes over the last two decades.

One of the principal characters of my early 1990s reverie is my only friend at the time. My only friend in 1994 was the only kid I knew who owned all of DOOM. Coincidentally, he was the only person I knew who owned a Sega CD. He'd received that Sega CD for Christmas 1992. I watched him play Sewer Shark on that Sega CD. He would not let me touch the controller or the console — and God forbid I touch even the cases of the CDs.

While I watched him play Sewer Shark, he told me his mom was a, quote-unquote, "bitch" for buying him Night Trap — a game that totally, quote, "had boobs in it," unquote. Which it didn't.

He asked his parents for a 3DO for Christmas 1993. He received that 3DO. When I went to his house three days after Christmas 1993, I had hoped he'd show me DOOM on his fancy PC. Instead, I had to watch him play Gex. While he played Gex, he told me three things: firstly, that Dana Gould could suck a shotgun barrel for all he cared; secondly, that they should have gotten Dennis Leary to voice Gex, dude; and third, that DOOM was "a game for homosexuals."

Just to clarify: that's not my language there. That's his. That's literally what he said. Well, except he didn't say "homosexuals." He said the much worse word. I didn't want to sugarcoat it. I guess I sugarcoated it a tiny bit. That was his definition of DOOM. And I point this out because it's going to be important a little bit later.

Eight months previous, as the school year wound down, this boy's mom drove him and I to the Putt-Putt Mini-Golf by Washington Square Mall in Indianapolis, Indiana, every Saturday. We stopped at the Liberty Bell flea market on the way. Where, on the day we'd first see Mortal Kombat 2, I purchased a loose cartridge of Final Fantasy II for the Super Nintendo for $9.

This kid and I had spectated every Mortal Kombat 2 fatality as the bigger teenagers discovered them. When Mortal Kombat 1 came out on Sega Genesis on Mortal Monday — September 13th, 1993 (five months after we'd first seen Mortal Kombat 2 in the arcade) — he invited me over to his house to control Player 2 so he could practice every character's fatalities.

At his insistence, I chose Sonya Blade — the only girl in the game — and yielded my controller every time I won so he could practice Sonya's fatalities. Eventually, we'd seen Sonya's fatalities a lot. To this day, I'm pretty good at playing Sonya, though I couldn't do one of her Mortal Kombat 1 fatalities if you put a gun to my head.

Four months before this, at the beginning of the summer vacation, we'd gone to Putt-Putt and had our routine birthday party experience without it being either of our birthdays. His mom funded him 100 Mortal Kombat 2 losses' worth of tokens, and my mom had funded me 10 victorious games of NBA Jam. I'm real good at NBA Jam. Grand Poohbear, if you ever want to play sometime, I could probably — I don't know if I could beat you because you're just preternaturally gifted at video games, so we could probably have a competition one time.

During the car ride to Putt-Putt, my little friend had told me he'd heard whispered rumors that instead of a fatality, players could perform a, quote-unquote, "friendship" at the end of a Mortal Kombat 2 match. My little friend told me that Johnny Cage could sign an autographed photo instead of kicking a guy's head off, for example.

My little friend asked me if I could believe that. I neither believed it nor disbelieved it.

Later that afternoon, one teenager announced he was going to do the friendship. My friend yelled me over to the cabinet, and we watched. The teenager, as promised, did the friendship. Johnny Cage did, in fact, autograph a photograph and give it to the loser in lieu of kicking his head off.

My little friend was uncharacteristically speechless, though only for a moment. When he finally spoke, he said — and I quote — "Dude, that's so gay."

Told you that that would be important. It's going to be important a little bit more even later, so hold on.

We did not play Mortal Kombat 2 again after that. Yet when Mortal Kombat 1 later released on the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, he commanded his mom to buy him the Sega Genesis version. He invited me over to control Player 2 in a joyless exposition of fatalities perpetrated against the game's only female character.

Numerous times throughout this funerally grim exercise, he commented that — and I quote — "The Genesis version is so much better than the Super Nintendo version."

The next time I went over to his house, he made me watch him play Silpheed for Sega CD. He told me that a guy in the game says, "I got a big one — give me another," when you shoot down a particular type of ship. He kept trying to get that voice clip to play. He never got that voice clip to play. If he did, he'd been talking over it by repeating the line he was trying.

Two months after this, he played Gex while repeatedly insisting that I not sit too close to his 3DO. During this experience, I heard him once comment on DOOM — a game he perfunctorially owned as an owner of every game-playing device on the market at the moment. He had accused DOOM of homosexuality in the exact same manner he had done for Mortal Kombat 2's friendships.

It occurs to me now that the fatality practice day two months earlier had held more importance than I'd given it credit for at the time. Why did he need me to control Player 2? Couldn't he have done what every other player did when they practiced fatalities and just plugged the second controller in and let the other player stand inert?

I realized that he most likely wanted simply to demonstrate to me a game he owned that I did not — for no reason more complicated than that. His mom had bought it for him because he asked her to. He'd probably asked her to just to see if she would buy it.

Or perhaps he wanted the superficial veneer of competition. Perhaps deep beneath his dirtbag boy habit's exterior lurked a rules-loving stickler. Whatever the case may be, this set of memories of the dark bedroom in a rich boy's house touches me today in this year of hindsight: where did all this murderous rage come from, and where did it go?

My acquaintanceship with this particular boy ended shortly after this experience when his family moved away. While writing this script, I looked him up on every public database I could find. I got absolutely nothing. That doesn't mean he hasn't committed any murders — it just means that if he did, he was never caught.

Yet something tells me — and seeing his interests shift from repeated joyless executions of creative digital murders to debating a video game publisher's choice of stand-up comedian to voice a cartoon gecko — that he grew up in the space of those two months, at least a little bit. I dare say he's probably happier and more successful than I am by a long shot.

I mean, I have a couple more stories about this kid that might be important. For example: the weekend after Kurt Cobain died, this kid and aspiring comic artist drew a picture of Kurt Cobain killing himself. He'd scrawled the words "I hate myself and I want to die" on the wall behind Kurt Cobain's corpse.

And one of the first times I ever went to this kid's house, he had shown me Mario Paint. He had meticulously recreated a sprite of Sonic the Hedgehog in Mario Paint, and he'd animated a short sequence in which Sonic performs a spin dash into Mario, slicing Mario's head off — red airbrushed tuna blood spraying out of Mario's empty neck. He didn't laugh. He said, "Mario Paint's badass, dude." Except he didn't say "badass" — you know what I mean.

And a year later, he was grumbling about the finer points of Gex — a game whose developers didn't grumble about any of its finer points while making it.

What happened to his relationship with shockingly violent entertainment over the course of the next 26 years? I developed many theories. I come to you today a lifetime removed from this experience. I worked for a while in the advertising industry. I've developed video games. I've written several bad, unpublished novels. And I've thought a great deal about the world.

I have a theory.

While researching this project, I looped a playlist of early 1990s toy and cereal commercial compilations on YouTube for six hours. I let myself distinctly recall the emotions I felt when encountering these commercials during regular television viewing with my older brother and younger brother during that time period.

Specifically, my older brother and I hated commercials. I was also a weird savant with a perfect sense of timing, so eventually I hated commercials so much I got the idea to turn the television off as soon as the commercials started and turn it back on as soon as they ended. It was a marvelous trick. It unnerved my mother.

Before I learned that trick, I osmosed many bad feelings from those television commercials of DOOM's era. From my experience in the advertising industry — and let's be honest, from my experience watching all of Mad Men four times — I know that advertising's goal is to make the viewer feel inadequate without the precious product.

Young boy-targeting television advertisements of the early 1990s did more than make us feel inadequate. They made us feel uncool. So many commercials placed heavy bets on a young boy's disdain for adults and for girls. Cereal commercials are the most obvious example. Why did cereal commercials almost universally depict children depriving the cereal's mascot of the cereal?

The kids in the commercial just — they just don't want — Tony the Tiger is like a gym teacher. They let him have the cereal because it's his, and also they have like a friendly relationship with him. Lucky from Lucky Charms — like, his leprechaun pot of gold, it's like — leprechauns are supposed to be notoriously protective of their pot of gold. Why does Lucky — it's like he's very ineffectual at keeping his pot of gold close because the kids just go wild on it.

Trix Rabbit? Trix is for kids. These kids are dirtbags. I think he's the mascot of the cereal — shouldn't he be the one who eats it? Captain Crunch: kind of just — what is he? They eat the cereal with him. Kids hang out — Captain Crunch he like Van Candies them into singing sea shanties on his boat, which exists just to eat Captain Crunch and fight creatures made of milk.

Cookie Crisp: no, they're trying to steal the cereal. Pretty much every cereal just won't let the cereal mascot eat the goddamn cereal. There was like a poll at one point: should the Trix Rabbit be allowed to have Trix? And the kids voted yes. Do you all remember that? Remember that? Does anybody remember this? Yeah, you remember. Remember the Trix Rabbit — they had a poll. They had a poll being like: should the Trix Rabbit be allowed to eat Trix?

The fact that that was the advertising campaign — the advertising agency or whoever came up with — kind of says something. Like, the kids are gonna say no, goddammit.

I got myself worked up about a point I'm going to more articulate than making in a minute, so I should continue. I should continue reading my script. Thanks for enjoying my improvisational segment, everybody.

One commercial that I put on the television in my hotel room in Times Square while I sat with my tiny wolf suffering the gunshot wound-like pain of shingles was for Bubble Tape — a product so stupidly frivolous its advertisers had no other strategy in mind at all than to show us a bunch of caricaturize-dly ugly adults and insist they hated the product.

José, you don't know what Bubble Tape is? It was a little plastic — is it still around? It's still around. I ain't seen it. It's a little plastic can that has a roll of six feet of bubble gum sweetened with sugar, and you roll it out and you cut it like tape. Somebody patented that — probably just to feel the thrill of patenting something.

Now, as of 1993, I personally had yet to meet and engage in conversation with a single advertising industry executive. Yet I had lived in Kansas, and thus I had seen The Wizard of Oz. Every time a teacher fell ill, I knew what the man behind the curtain looked like: old, white, out of touch — a professional second-guesser whose first guess clearly wasn't good enough, because if his first guess had been good enough, he'd be doing something else.

In us children of the late '80s and early '90s, a conflict ensued. Humans naturally dislike authority figures. That's why so many people kick cops in the nuts just every day. It took advertisers until the 1990s to try to weaponize that for dollars from children.

By the 1990s, advertisements so ubiquitously and cynically patronized us children/teenagers — slapping us in the face repeatedly with our supposed disdain for authority — that even the dumbest of us (many of us) had by that point already built a house of cards of an identity around our contempt for authority.

To see, for example, a Bubble Tape commercial with the slogan "for you, not them" amounted to a rug pulled out from under us simultaneously with a wool being pulled off of our eyes. "For you, not them" — might as well translate that into Latin and put it on the back of the quarter.

Simply put: I can tell you with absolute autobiographical memorial certainty that mainstream culture's patronizing tone alienated me hardcore in the early 1990s. I already had no friends at school because my family moved every three months for several of my most formative years. Television made me feel like a freak.

So, like many other Generation X youth, I gravitated toward counterculture. Video games were not mainstream. Video games were not on TV. Video games were not cool. Video games were what I wanted. I listened to metal. I watched Ren & Stimpy and Beavis and Butt-Head. I owned every Nirvana album before Kurt Cobain died. I was 13, so I think that's pretty decent taste.

Kurt Cobain's evident discomfort with the mainstream felt friendly to me. When I, in middle school, discovered Megadeth's 1985 album Killing Is My Business, I thought: "Cool, this album cover has a skull on it." When I heard the cover of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" — a song I knew at that point because my dad had the record — I realized that jokes don't have to be, quote-unquote, "funny."

I realized that skulls can be part of jokes. Right? Right?

Someday my skull will be part of a joke. Yours too.

When I first saw a Nazi explode into blood in Wolfenstein 3D, I thought it was funny. When I saw Sub-Zero rip a dude's head off and spine out in Mortal Kombat, I thought that was hilarious. I never stopped thinking it's hilarious. Horror movies are hilarious. The funniest people I've ever met have been in metal bands — and I'm talking about the metal bands that play like three notes for like an hour.

The fatalities in Mortal Kombat 11 are hysterical.

I guess until my little friend with the Sega CD and the 3DO and the PC and Mortal Kombat on Genesis — I guess until he saw Johnny Cage's autograph-signing friendship — he hadn't noticed that Mortal Kombat didn't just have a sense of humor: it was a sense of humor.

John Romero and John Carmack didn't make violent video games because there was something wrong with them. They didn't even make violent video games because, quote, "violence sells," unquote. They made violent video games because violence was and is loud.

They had the newest, fanciest, fastest graphics engine video games had ever seen. They had the power that science fiction readers and idiots like my friend with the Sega CD had dreamed of. They had the power to put people inside a video game. They had the speed to make the experience feel realer than a two-dimensional video game.

One of id's founders, Tom Hall, wanted to use that 3D immersion to make a slower, more thoughtful game abounding with exploration and conversation. John Romero's brilliance was emptying the game design of any filler. They made DOOM fast, and they made it violent because most all of us would never see that kind of violence in real life.

They made DOOM violent for the same reason that DMA Design made Grand Theft Auto a game about stealing cars and killing cops: because virtually none of us would ever do that, and it's funny to think about doing that in a video game. That's one way to grill some bacon, I suppose.

Violence didn't sell DOOM — immersion sold DOOM. Violence dialed that immersion up to the max. The hilarity of the violence got us in DOOM's door. The game's pristine quiet-loud, search-destroy dynamics kept us there and keep us remembering the game decades later.

I could smother you with anecdotes about how, for example, I've never killed anybody or even thought about killing anybody — even a cop. I'm having a good time killing cops in this game. Those cops were "defunded" of the currency of their life.

I could fuzzily emphasize that I personally don't play games to escape reality. I play games to — I don't know — just hang out, man. Just hanging out and yelling, "Mao!" most of the time. Two American pastimes, for God's sake.

I could drag out all the old, half-baked arguments I've overheard over the years about DOOM and Wolfenstein: that the bad guys are literally Nazis and demons, and that if you think any death is too grotesque for a Nazi, you haven't read enough history books. And if you think any shotgun blast is too brutal for a demon, then what kind of Christian are you, Dad?

I could, for example, tell you that I watched every TED Talk on YouTube about video games just so I could say I watched every TED Talk on YouTube about video games. And I did. I watched every TED Talk on YouTube about video games. I could tell you about how cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier says in her TED Talk "Your Brain on Video Games" that action games — particularly first-person shooters like DOOM — expand the brain's problem-solving centers and train our brain-eye pattern recognition coordination skills in ways that make us provably better suited to everyday functioning.

I could beseech you to believe me when I tell you that 3D shooting action video games impart such spatial recognition skills onto their players that ever since I finished designing my first Quake level 20 years ago, I have never once had to ask a member of a restaurant's staff where the bathroom is. I just feel it.

When I wrote this script, that was true. I had never asked someone where the restaurant bathroom was — or the gas station, for that matter. However, I wanted to sound humble in the paragraph, so I didn't say "gas station."

However, last night on route to South Bend, Indiana — burning down State Road 31 (is it State Road?), the State Road — burning down State Road 30 — had to go to the bathroom real, real bad. Stopped at a gas station. It was goddamn closed. Stopped at a second gas station. It was open. I burst in about as quickly as one can burst while bursting with the need to use the bathroom.

The two individuals at the counter — teenagers — they were feeling each other up. Not figuratively — literally. They were figure — they were feeling each other up. They quickly snapped to attention to behold me, this strange individual wearing sunglasses and a mask — a surgical mask. Wasn't a doctor. There's just a COVID — I was out there, and I felt the need to say something, so I said, "Uh, is there a bathroom in here?"

I said the "uh" to make myself sound colloquial, to sound approachable, to make myself sound like a normal person — not whatever it is I am. And they directed me to the bathroom.

Now, I could have found the bathroom on my own. I could have race-tracked my way like a Call of Duty player until I found it, and I would have found it in less than half a circuit. So I felt like I should say something. Also, I did wanna — in hindsight, I did want to conserve my steps.

Anyway, that's the end of my story. Thanks for paying attention.

Thanks furthermore. I could present some original research and insist that violent action video games can also teach us the mathematical value of teamwork. For example, suppressing fire in Gears of War's co-op campaign presents a scenario that scientifically proves having someone who agrees with your definition of right and wrong can save your life.

Yet, as Joe says at the end of David Mamet's film House of Games: "You can't bluff someone who isn't paying attention."

None of my arguments would sway someone who's not paying attention, and most of the people who aren't paying attention don't want to pay attention. You don't even need to know what a tinfoil hat is to know that video games have only ever been a deflection — that gun lobbyists and the like know that they can trust people who aren't paying attention anyway to not care to learn anything at all about video games.

Pundits who target video games do so because it's easy to point at something they can trust their audience to never investigate on their own. Persons of certain political alignments, viewers of specific news networks, love acquiring and then immediately installing pre-baked opinions concerning subjects they had until that moment lived completely in ignorance of. To many of them, it feels almost like learning something might feel to you or me.

In reinvestigating Senator Joseph Lieberman's 1993 interrogation of video games and various politicians' 1999 comments after Columbine, I came to feel that political pundits — like my TV news network after that fire in 1994 — name-dropped DOOM because they'd heard of it. They'd judged it as humorless, and they'd disrespectfully presumed its creators were, unlike for example the NRA, too lowbrow to fight back.

For my first replay of DOOM for the purpose of this review, I decided to mind-palace roleplay a circa-1994 teenager who within 10 years would be arrested for homicide. I thought: "How would such a teenager play?" I thought of my little friend from middle school, and I decided that once he'd played on God mode.

For the first of the six replays of DOOM's entire campaign I performed for this game review, I played on God mode on "Nightmare" difficulty. This lent me the experience of being perfectly proficient at DOOM's combat despite rusty familiarity with its level map layouts. I thought this experiment would perhaps lead me to some conclusions on how a future killer's brain-flower might bloom in the wake of experiencing DOOM's violence unshackled.

I placed a bet going in that at some point I'd experience some epiphany or another. I didn't. I had a generally pleasant time. Even on God mode, budgeting ammunition amounts to a thoughtful challenge. Even without death, DOOM is still DOOM.

The only epiphany-like sensation I take away from this part of my research process is the distinct impression that DOOM — this exact game right here, on December 3rd, 1993, with its violence and Macho Man grimacing in the center of its omnipresent heads-up display — represents the camel's back-breaker of no return: the moment where video games finally, from a demographic marketer's perspective anyway, crossed the threshold separating "for everybody, maybe" from "boys club" territory.

As I later learned in my marketing industry experience, if you want to sell something, first you got to decide who it's for. Doesn't matter who it's for. Doesn't matter what it is. Connect something to something else. If you put a song in a movie: song is more popular than it would be without being in the movie; the movie's more popular than it would be if it didn't have the song in it. It's magic. Just gotta decide who something's for, what goes with what. Doesn't matter what — just make the choice.

Let me squash your faint hope: no, I'm not going to present an answer at the end of this. I wish I had an answer. I'm speaking only so that I might inspire maybe the person who inspires the person who does find an answer.

Hello. Hello. It's me. I normally would not do this, though I would like to make a couple of comments here real quick. It is Monday, September 7th, 2020. A lot has happened since I filmed this — this video that you're watching now — on July 31st, 2020, in South Bend, Indiana. I've moved twice. I've lost 20 pounds. Taken my glasses off. Grown a sort of hoax beard. Got a haircut. That's — that's how I lost the 20 pounds.

I'm recording this little interjection here as I watch the video for the first time, which is as I edit it. I mean, I really — I just suddenly I saw myself say that I'm not ready to say something important, and it just suddenly just hit me like — like — "Oh God," this huge déjà vu. Because I'm like: I definitely did not succeed. I was not kidding when I said I was not going to present a solution.

Would totally — definitely not kidding. I took a chance. I tried to do something with these videos — the sort of thing that I want to do with these videos. I want to do this sort of thing all the time, but I mean — I mean, it's — again, it's a big topic. I don't want to make light of it. I don't want to — there's jokes in here. I mean, maybe that doesn't mean I'm making jokes about this. There's just jokes.

I feel just kind of exhaustedly stupid watching myself say all this stuff and editing in all these Beavis and Butt-Head references. I really do care about a lot of this stuff, and it didn't perfectly come out perfect. I'm sorry that I didn't solve any problems with whatever this is I wrote. And I hope you appreciate it — somebody appreciates it.

Anyway, I'm gonna try again to do something again, and I hope it goes just a little bit better — just a little bit — a little bit better every time. And maybe someday — someday — I want to do something good. And I've been working on it for a while.

That's all I have for now. I'm gonna finish editing this video.

DOOM wasn't the first man's man's video game — not by a long shot, though it's certainly the most important one because immediately after DOOM, every game became DOOM.

NIGHTMARE! (in which Action Button Reviews EDGE Magazine's April 1994 Seven Out Of Ten Review Of DOOM)

In their seventh-ever issue, dated April 1994, the United Kingdom's Edge magazine gave DOOM a seven out of ten. The Edge review of DOOM remains a cult legend to this day. Some hold it up as a brilliant example of point-missing. Some people — fools, mostly — accuse the review of being ahead of its time. I say: why not a little bit of both and a little bit of neither?

Edge gave DOOM a 7 out of 10 probably because they were only seven issues old, and their recently scribbled battle plan evidently required them to position themselves as some sort of critical authority.

For example, a not-insignificant bulk of Edge's 1994 review of DOOM focuses on what other critics and other publications were saying about DOOM. In fact, it starts with a question inviting the reader to behold other critics with incredulity and follows immediately with the most reductive description of DOOM possible. Maybe it'd be easier for me to just quote it, or maybe it would be easier for me to get somebody else to quote it for us.

"DOOM: evil unleashed. It doesn't seem rational, does it? Along comes a fairly simple 3D perspective maze adventure/shoot-'em-up, and suddenly hundreds of grown men start acting like they've never seen a video game before."

I've got to admit: the cleanly plain-spokenness of that prose delights me, even 26 years later. Yet I now, more so than I'd have done then, find the reasoning behind the writing a little grody.

In the process of researching this review of the 1993 video game DOOM, I acquired PDFs of and read the first eight issues of Edge magazine cover to cover in an attempt to better understand the man behind the curtain of the issue-seven review of DOOM. Instead, I found myself better understanding myself.

I know from the personal experience of building my own video game critique website — actionbutton.net, which I modeled on Edge, by the way — that engaging in a little inflammatory, opinionistic contrarianism is a good, fast way to build an audience. And the easiest way to employ contrarianism is to stuff thyself a straw man and refer to the dreaded "other critics" with such shadowed, pejorative phraseology as "grown men."

Edge, listen to me: you were hating. I liked your magazine back then because the local Barnes & Noble at Clearwater Crossing in Indianapolis, Indiana, stocked it. They charged $10 for it, however, so I couldn't afford it. However, yours was the only British video game magazine at the Barnes & Noble in Indianapolis, Indiana, not wrapped in crinkly plastic. It was also the only British video game magazine too small for my only friend at the time to hide an issue of Penthouse inside of. Yes, I'm talking about the guy from the previous segment, by the way.

So I am ashamed to admit: I never bought your magazine. I did, however, look at it every time I saw a new issue. I appreciated the clean graphic design. I felt like I was reading a lifestyle magazine. I read every review. I let the language wash over me. Some of that language ended up wriggling its way into the skull beneath my skin.

Then I went home where I had my issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Die Hard GameFan and, of course, whatever pile of books — fiction and nonfiction — I had checked out from the school library. I know my intellect is a bit of a salad bar second-helping.

In the same issue where Edge gave DOOM a seven out of ten, they also gave Mega Man X a seven out of ten. They said the music was bland and did — and I quote — "little to add to the atmosphere of the game."

Actually, that's kind of a bad example because I don't like Mega Man X. I don't — I don't like Mega Man at all. You know why? Mega Man has a gun because they couldn't figure out how to just make him moving and jumping feel good. That's why. We'll talk about Mega Man at some other point in the future.

On the pages immediately following Edge's review of DOOM, Edge reviewed the arcade version of Ridge Racer. They gave Ridge Racer an 8 out of 10. Yet as I sit here hindsighting 26 years to Edge's back-to-back reviews of DOOM and Ridge Racer, I dare say DOOM and Ridge Racer possessed more aspirational similarities than differences. They were both all about fast 3D graphics.

[Long instrumental segment of E1M1 music plays]

Ridge Racer was an arcade game and — let's face it — a relatively bare-bones one. Ridge Racer for the arcade had one track. Just one. The first Ridge Racer was just virtually a demo for future Ridge Racers. DOOM, on the other hand, was an enormously, hugely full video game.

Speaking of fast graphics: one month later, Edge gave the fast-shooting Atari Jaguar game Tempest 2000 a 9 out of 10. They gave the fast 3D racing game Virtua Racing for the Sega Mega Drive 8 out of 10. And they gave the admittedly excellent Sega Mega Drive 2D spaceship shooting and exploration game Subterrania a 9 out of 10. I love Subterrania. However, I dare say it's only about as good at doing what it does as DOOM is.

Having said that, let me give you a full disclosure: I have written reviews for Edge magazine. I never got paid for any of them, by the way. Give me my money. Actually, don't — don't give me my money. I don't want it. I don't want it at this point. It's been like 17 years. It's been a long time. Don't.

Get me wrong: I know from this experience that Edge takes critical voice quite seriously. That's why their reviews never featured bylines. In all the years that I read Edge — if they feature bylines now, I wouldn't know, because I haven't seen a magazine in years. In other words, whether multiple different writers or not reviewed DOOM, Virtua Racing, Subterrania, and Ridge Racer, all those numbers represent the opinion of Edge more than of any individual human.

I can't pretend to have listened in to the editorial meeting when Edge decided to review DOOM four months after its release, though I can say as an amateur detective that I sense the 7-out-of-10 score resulted from a committee decision to take DOOM down a peg in a gamble that would pay off big-time if it later turned out that the Windows personal computer died as a game-playing platform.

I mean, this is just a hunch. I don't know where I get this hunch. Either it's from my own experience running a one-out-of-four-stars review of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, written by Heather Anne Campbell — who you can hear now on the podcast How Did This Get Played? — on my brand-new video game review website, actionbutton.net, in 2007, or it's the fact that Edge ran a five-page feature on the reasons the Windows PC could not compete performance-wise with the Amiga or the Mac in the pages immediately before their review of DOOM.

If indeed Edge did make a strategic decision to smack-talk DOOM for dramatic effect, at the very least they did do their philosophical homework after making that decision. As a former contrarian of perhaps similar professional success, I can attest to the importance of this step above all others. Any good devil's advocatarian begins the composition process with a statement they do not agree with and then researches deeply until they muster some fragmentary angle toward that statement that they do agree with.

In the case of their DOOM review, Edge landed a couple good ones. In three separate locations in their review — once in the body text and twice in the screenshot captions — Edge praises the parallax action on the mountains visible outside the windows of the first mission of the first episode of DOOM. Complementary hyperfocus so calculatedly petty that it serves as the perfect lead-in to a barrage of criticism so knuckle-headed it knocks the wind out of me even today.

Here and there throughout my career as a video game designer and a critic, I thought I was good at infuriating contrarianism. Then I just recently looked back on Edge's DOOM review, and I could barely breathe. Maybe it was because I did have that — I had pneumonia from that. The doctor said my lungs looked like pulled pork. She said, "I don't know whether to prescribe you steroids or make a sandwich out of this."

A wise man once said to rub your hands together and lick your lips immediately after you hear any variation of the words "having said that." Let's listen.

"That said, though, there are problems with the game. Edge has no intention of joining the rabble mindlessly praising DOOM beyond its worth. Yes, it is good — in fact, it's a very, very technically impressive piece of programming." God, imagine saying "very" twice in a row and then writing it again like a paragraph later. Who wrote this?

"But where's the genuine 3D — look up and down — of Ultima Underworld? Where's the variety in the gameplay? It's all just kill, kill, kill. And looking at it coldly, what is there really in DOOM, apart from the graphics, to set it above even the most average, most highly repetitive and tedious 2D shoot-'em-up?"

This paragraph takes my breath. I don't even know where to start. I feel like I'm looking at Mount Everest and I've got a plastic fork in my hand.

Edge literally called every other critic — even those writing for magazines under their own same publishing umbrella — a "mindless rabble." They have the gall to ask where the variety is in the gameplay. It's all over the place. DOOM is filthy with variety in its level designs. DOOM is not, quote, "all kill, kill, kill," unquote. A lot of it actually is searching for keys or running across lava.

Though the definite richest nitpick lies in the name-drop of Ultima Underworld. Edge's critic asks why DOOM lacks, quote, "genuine 3D," unquote. They ask why you can't look up and down in DOOM the way you can in Ultima Underworld — to which I ask into a time tunnel reaching 26 years into the past: "Have you played Ultima Underworld?" More like Ultima Underwater.

By mentioning Ultima Underworld in their DOOM review, Edge is perhaps on purpose missing the point with the virtuosity of an Olympic gold-medal gymnast. Edge critic of 1994, I know you'd played Ultima Underworld. I know that you, like me, had also paid whatever the 1994 quid equivalent of $5 was to feel confused and bad for three minutes in the primitive virtual reality experience Dactyl Nightmare.

You know why DOOM does not have look-up-and-down in it, mate? I know you know this, because you gave Ridge Racer an 8 out of 10 despite its only having one track. You gave Ridge Racer an 8 out of 10 because it was fast, and you likey da fasta graphics — just like me, buddy. Join the club.

You can't look up and down in Ridge Racer, either, Yignaramus.

For what DOOM has to set it apart from "the most average, repetitive, and tedious 2D shoot-'em-ups" — well, as I explored in an earlier chapter of this review, DOOM feels perfect. Most average, repetitive, tedious 2D shoot-'em-ups circa 1994 did not. Trust me: I was there.

To this day, game likers lampoon the final point of Edge's DOOM review, in which the writer imagines — and we quote — "If only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances. Now that would be interesting."

That Edge decided to close out their groundbreakingly petty 7-out-of-10 review of the hottest video game phenomenon of the moment with such a knuckle-headedly petty musing continues to entertain me to the core of my soul even today. Like most DOOM enjoyers, I've laughed at the phrase "talk to these creatures" for a kaleidoscope of reasons for most of my life at this point.

For one, it's a funny phrase. "Creature" is a funny word. I call my dog a creature sometimes. Do you know the word "critter" is a British English shortening of the word "creature"? That's the origin of that word. It's great.

For another: Shin Megami Tensei had come out in Japan two years earlier. Games where you could talk to the creatures already existed.

For another supremely hilarious reason — either out of hubristic ignorance or in a wildly high-level troll — Edge's review had numerous times referred to DOOM's demons as being "green" and "lizards." They didn't even know what creatures they were talking about.

Maybe the most interesting reason I find "talk to these creatures" hilarious is that I don't want to talk to the creatures in DOOM. Shooting them is good. Their simple behaviors are interesting. Tricking them into shooting each other and then watching them fight is pretty much the same thing as talking to them in some languages.

If we take Edge's closing comments at face value, we can conclude that they wanted DOOM to be a 3D first-person real-time strategy game or a 3D first-person real-time graphical adventure game or a 3D first-person role-playing game. Edge wanted DOOM to be something else, so they gave it a 7 out of 10.

And that 7 out of 10 is absolutely, philosophically, profoundly, actually a 10 out of 10. Let me explain.

Elsewhere in their review of DOOM, Edge had broken down id Software's execution of the shareware distribution model. They described the installation of DOOM's free first episode on millions of PCs like it was a bad thing — like it was corrupting the youth, or like it was corrupting the adults' hard disks. They described DOOM's legendary optimization like the game suffered a dearth of creativity for targeting lower-end systems.

Get behind this prickly cynicism: I see real, true love. As I often found myself saying in response to angry readers after I wrote a negative review of a video game on my website, actionbutton.net: "If nobody complained about anything, nothing would ever get any better."

I had the infinite word count of the internet at my fingertips, so I didn't need the sort of brevity Henry Ford, for example, exhibited when he said what he said about faster horses. Edge, as of issue number seven, had poured a lot of money into publishing on the fanciest paper. Their decidedly sophisticated tiny font and wide margins left little room for rumination.

For our YouTube video reviews of games didn't exist yet, so Edge's writers needed to write with economy. Some game likers today point to Edge's 7-out-of-10 review of DOOM as a cautionary tale. They consider Edge to have failed completely to predict the success of the first-person shooter as a genre that has endured longer today than, for example, the 2D platformer had at the time of DOOM's release.

I see it as something else. Behind the bewildered, awkward musing of the economical phrase "if only we could talk to these creatures," I see a 10,000-word love letter to the then-past and then-future of video games. Finally, a 3D video game had arrived that inspired this self-appointed intelligentsia of video game critics to dream.

DOOM was fast. DOOM was smooth. DOOM was popular. DOOM was everywhere. DOOM ran on everything. DOOM loudly meant more like it was definitely coming. Edge could see that. By the time the reviewer finished DOOM, I bet they thought that all the yet-nonexistent games bubbling around in their head were their own ideas. They weren't. They were DOOM's ideas.

As the book Masters of DOOM famously points out, id Software co-founder Tom Hall originally planned for DOOM to possess myriad complex systems and cinematic story moments. Yet John Romero insisted on trimming the fat and letting the fast 3D engine speak for itself as loudly and quickly as it could. The fat thus trimmed, many of DOOM's level designs — begun by Tom Hall and finished by Sandy Petersen — represent fascinatingly skeletal forebodings of upcoming groundbreaking video games.

The fact is: Edge critic of 1994, DOOM made you imagine all those imaginary games. It made you imagine them with its speed, its simplicity, and its confidence.

For example: "Mt. Erebus" (E3M6), with its weird shortcuts and passages and ramps and clumsy jumps, is basically a Super Mario 64 prototype. "Limbo" (E3M7), with its big central chamber, its multiple puzzle rooms, and its non-linear structure, is practically a prototypical The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time dungeon.

Masters of DOOM describes the id boys' shrieking delight upon discovering a fan-made Star Wars reskin of Wolfenstein. For DOOM, John Carmack — in a hacker's mindset — insisted on making robust level-designing tools freely available and easy to understand. This resulted in an avalanche of mods of a vast range. DOOM made players become amateur level designers. DOOM made professional designers obsessed with 3D first-person and shooting. DOOM inspired big-budget developers to tweak its formula as slightly as many players were tweaking its levels.

3D Realms wondered: "What if the main character had a personality and spoke garbled one-liners ripped clean off of Evil Dead?" The answer was Duke Nukem 3D and money-making.

DOOM made John Romero obsessed with the types of possibilities the Edge review of DOOM would wispily insinuate. Meanwhile, DOOM got John Carmack hooked on optimizing and advancing his technology. Ironically, John Carmack's technology advancements and John Romero's game design imagination fed one another so intertwinedly that the two men would never match DOOM's genius ever again.

As John Carmack beefed the Quake engine harder and harder, John Romero's hunger for innovation blimped. Ultimately, as Masters of DOOM tells it, id had an engine without a plot. In desperation for Quake, the developers stuck to what they knew: a silent protagonist, no more plot than a porn movie, guns and monsters.

Quake is a work of its own kind of genius, in the way a street food stall in Thailand can deservedly earn a Michelin star. I love Quake. It's DOOM's little brother. I even love Quake 2, which John Romero didn't even work on. I sort of even loved Daikatana, though I reckon not a high enough percentage of the viewers of this video are psychologists for me to legally continue this sentence.

Love, however, is just that: an irrational, prickly mass, inextricable from our memories of college. Speaking from a viewpoint of wisdom and hindsight, no — nothing anyone from id Software ever worked on after DOOM was as good as DOOM. Not even DOOM 2. And not even DOOM 1, episode 4, "Thy Flesh Consumed." Definitely not the first level of "Thy Flesh Consumed," though definitely the second level, "Perfect Hatred," is as good as DOOM just on a whole. And by itself, that episode is not as good as DOOM. Just the John Romero parts are as good as DOOM.

At any rate, from the outside looking in, id Software's DOOM appeared to the at-large game world like the splitting of the atom and the invention of cold fusion at the same time. To glimpse DOOM — whether as a player or as a critic or as a developer — was to feel the lightning strike of inspiration. Here was an exciting new template within which even the most simplistically skeletal expressions could sufficiently and blockbustingly capture the minds and money of millions.

Immediately after DOOM, every game was DOOM'd. And when I say "every game was DOOM," I don't just mean in the sense that Super 3D Noah's Ark was Wolfenstein or in the sense that Chex Quest was literally DOOM. I mean: every game embraced or at the very least understood DOOM's speed, its immersion, and the cleanliness of its design mechanics. Every game after DOOM was aware of DOOM. Every game after DOOM built on DOOM's memory.

Would we have Super Mario 64, Zelda games, or Elder Scrolls games without DOOM? Maybe. Though would they be as good? I don't know. Why am I asking these questions? I don't know. Maybe I'm just trying to make you think, because making you think is a shortcut to artistic profundity.

Similarly, the greatest trick DOOM ever pulled was making us — the players — think. Maybe more than its makers thought about it, we hungered for and expected more and more. Developers answered us. Eventually, though, many of us didn't wait.

To this day, fan-created DOOM WADs and Quake levels are a video game genre unto themselves. I played a lot of DOOM WADs in my research for this review. I adore many of them. Though if I had to pick one favorite level from amidst all the WADs I played, I'd have to go the iconoclastic route and pick The Ultimate DOOM's episode 4, "Thy Flesh Consumed's" sixth map, "Against Thee Wickedly," designed by John Romero.

I don't even really like it. It's got too many mandatory situations wherein you have to traverse hurt floors. I don't even like it. However, I love it. I adore the straight-faced brazenness wherein 33 levels into a video game campaign, John Romero introduces a new mechanic wherein the single central teleporter takes you to a different location in the level based on which puzzle you most recently solved.

I love the cold-hearted gumption with which Romero forces the player to fight a Cyberdemon blocking the exit on a narrow walkway. "Against Thee Wickedly" is an official level, though it feels like a fan level in the best possible ways. By the time id sat down, way post-release, and made episode four, John Romero was unabashedly and shamelessly such a huge fan of his own game that this level genuinely qualifies as fan-made. And that is beautiful.

You know what else I like about "Against Thee Wickedly"? That when I first played it in 1999 on a computer science major's high-powered PC, I distinctly remember wishing aloud: "Dude, there should be a DOOM like Castlevania. I wonder why there's never been a DOOM like Castlevania."

Oh wait — that's just Demon's Souls.

Seven months after they gave DOOM a 7 out of 10, Edge gave DOOM 2 a 9 out of 10. They praised DOOM 2 for its speed and its immersive 3D. They claimed that the level designs had gotten more interesting and the game structure more varied. Sure, DOOM 2 does certainly have scientifically provable more interesting level designs than DOOM 1, such as its several outdoor big-city maps.

Nevertheless, it feels to me now — 26 years later — that Edge were covering their tracks by giving DOOM 2 a 9 out of 10 after giving DOOM 1 a 7 out of 10. Because I just played DOOM 1 and DOOM 2 back-to-back, all the way through, multiple times, in a hotel bed on a Nintendo Switch while suffering a bout of shingles with my tiny wolf by my side. And I've gotta say: it's never been clearer to me that DOOM 1 and DOOM 2 are just two halves of one game.

So if you give DOOM 2 a 9 out of 10 in 1994, you're giving DOOM 1 a 10 out of 10. And that's the straight dope.

If indeed Edge did make a strategic decision to smack-talk DOOM for dramatic effect, at the very least they did do their philosophical homework after making that decision. As a former contrarian of perhaps similar professional success, I can attest to the importance of this step above all others. Any good devil's advocatarian begins the composition process with a statement they do not agree with and then researches deeply until they muster some fragmentary angle toward that statement that they do agree with.

THE BOTTOM LINE

And now it's time for the bottom line.

DOOM speaks for itself. DOOM, with its immersive 3D visuals, shocking bloody violence, and addictive high-speed competitive play action, caused many mainstream television personalities to independently settle upon the declaration that "video games have come a long way since Pac-Man."

We hear this phrase in the mainstream media even today: "Video games have come a long way since Pac-Man." Yes — though only if you're looking at the numbers on a treadmill. The fact is, in 1993, as of DOOM, video games had not come too long of a way since Pac-Man. DOOM even practically has Pac-Man in it. It's a joke about the Cacodemon — the big spherical guy with the mouth.

Video games have — and video games haven't — come a long way since Pac-Man. Yet at the same time, video games haven't come a long way at all since DOOM. Sure, DOOM and its loud guns and idiot pig demons inflated masculinity to cartoon proportions, though ultimately the conversations that began around its technical triumphs informed the greater game design conversation that continues today.

In addition to teaching other game developers that making your own 3D engine could be quite hideously lucrative, DOOM and its readily available level editor taught millions of players that level design was game design and that game design was video games and thus that anyone with a computer could make video games.

DOOM's perfectly pleasantly playable, yet at times so spartan, its cryptic skeletality amounts firstly to a great work that says just as much as it has to and secondly to an invitation to the world to do better. DOOM's incompleteness inspired innovating imitators. Thus, due to the inspiration it represented for so many modders, DOOM is ultimately more than itself — whether on the macro scale by big ideas left unfinished within skeletal level designs or by bigger genres sketched casually in fleeting moments, or on the intermediate scale by structural or atmospheric differences between ports and versions, or on the less-than-micro scale by taking novelizations and films into account — by being a game so bare it begs fools to novelize and film-adapt it.

We can confidently declare that DOOM is bigger than itself. DOOM is bigger than itself because DOOM speaks for itself. That's a — it's a wildly terrible sentence. I like it. We're leaving it in there.

People ask me all the time: "Do I say really dumb stuff on purpose?" I mean, of course. This is — you see how much fun I'm evidently having right now? That's like the worst sentence in this whole review. It's so good. This is — I mean, I'm genuinely very entertained. This whole review is just full of stuff that I'm just — it's just for me to drop the needle on the YouTube video 10 years later and just go, "LOL." That I'm getting the 10-years-later feeling right now with that sentence — that's really good.

And when DOOM speaks for itself, it turns out that DOOM is a magnificently excellent video game. If you've ever fired DOOM's shotgun, you certainly don't need me to soliloquize about it. And if you've never fired DOOM's shotgun, any soliloquy I could compose could not compete with the shotgun itself. DOOM runs on everything. You could be firing that shotgun 10 seconds from now on the LCD screen of any appliance in your house — or at least certainly in less time than it would take me to romanticize it. And once you fire that shotgun, you will know that, though it is tactilely beautiful in a vacuum, an infinitude of yet-unmade situations lend kingly context to that beauty.

All games after DOOM are DOOM'd. We can smuggle away from DOOM the experimental impression that the best games are always inspirationally incomplete. The best games are games only an absolutely delusional individual can claim to have played all of: Minecraft, Super Mario Maker, Street Fighter, Tetris, and DOOM.

You can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" unless you've played every WAD, unless you've deathmatch'd with every player who ever lived. Moreover, the tendrils of its legacy stretch mangrove-root-like, inextricable, beneath all of post-1994 game history. We cannot say we've played all of DOOM until we've played most video games that have ever been made.

You can't say you've played all of DOOM unless you've played the single-player campaign of Unreal Tournament, because Tim Sweeney probably would have never made a 3D engine if John Carmack hadn't made it look so hard. Gabe Newell worked on the Windows port of DOOM, so you can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" unless you've played Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, or Half-Life: Alyx.

You can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" if you haven't played every video game made by every studio that ever asked for DOOM maps or Quake maps in a game design job application. You can't say you've played, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM" unless you've played every Call of Duty game — and no one has played every Call of Duty game except me.

In order to play, quote-unquote, "all of DOOM," I'm sorry: you're gonna have to also play all of Fortnite.

Ironically, I think you don't need to have played id Software and Bethesda Softworks's 2016 game DOOM or their 2020 game DOOM Eternal in order to have a complete DOOM experience. They're wonderful games. One's a little bit more wonderful than the other — you know what I mean — though I dare say remaking DOOM isn't DOOM. Making a new game and calling it DOOM is not as DOOM as making a new game and not calling it DOOM.

Quake 1 is more DOOM than DOOM 2016. Quake 2 is more DOOM than DOOM 3. You probably perfectly understand what I'm saying, so I don't need to discuss this particular point too much. Right? Right.

In the bottom line on its 2008 review on actionbutton.net, I called Cliff Bleszinski's Gears of War 2 "video games: the video game." What this, quote-unquote, "clever" turn of phrase omitted was that at that point in time, the definition of "video games" was DOOM.

In our original review of DOOM on actionbutton.net, we called DOOM the 15th-best game of all time and awarded it the bottom line: "a vintage Ford truck of a video game." Andrew Toups wrote that review. It was not finished when he sent it to me. It cut off mid-sentence. He said, "This is all I got, man." I don't know what he was doing that day, so I finished it for him. There's some weird sentences in there. I put the bottom line on there: "vintage Ford truck video game."

12 years later, I do not disagree with this bottom line — especially because Ford just announced the 2021 Ford Bronco, which looks to me to be the DOOM of vehicles.

At the time I oversaw Andrew Toups's feverish screed on DOOM, I myself was employed in daily producing gray boxes of video game levels in the Unreal Engine for a game I would — to be perfectly honest — never play. As a video game developer, I knew DOOM more and more deeply than I knew any other game. Anyone you talked to in a AAA studio had DOOM all over them.

There was a 3D artist in the studio where I worked who told me he liked such-and-such level I'd sketched up because of the way I'd mixed areas with orthogonal walls with areas with non-orthogonal walls. We were speaking English, by the way. I was in Japan. This was a fellow English native speaker. He was Dutch. He'd literally just used the word "orthogonal" twice in a casual conversation.

I told him, "I love that word: 'orthogonal.'"

And he said, "Yeah, dude. I learned it from DOOM."

As I read a DOOM game FAQ from 1994 — 1994! — on GameFAQs.com during the research phase of this review, I saw the phrase "non-orthogonal walls" in the overview section, and I remembered that guy, that 3D artist, that Dutch 3D artist, quite fondly. Then I remembered every other time DOOM came up during my career in game development — a career that continues even now as my colleagues and I at Action Button continue to develop our game Truck Heck for PC and next-generation consoles and the Nintendo Switch.

Numerous times in my life, I have collaborated temporarily with game developers who regularly invoke the names Carmack and Romero like a sort of prayer. I have at times joined in the invocation. Masters of DOOM describes the men as drinking Diet Coke and eating pizza and playing F-Zero and Street Fighter II for Super Nintendo while working on literally DOOM all hours of the night.

These men eschewed what their contemporary age-group peers might have considered a normal social life in order to live what future generations would consider a normal social life — except we drink Coke Zero.

I realized that people of my generation and my profession's mythologizing of Carmack and Romero's Diet Coca-Cola workaholism has resulted in a complicated culture of crunch. I won't lie: I myself crunch. I work on each of these videos for 300 or more hours deep into the night every night. These videos hurt my head and my eyes and my neck. And yes, I often scream the way I did back in my college dorm in 1999, addicted to Quake deathmatch.

I wouldn't wish this game addiction-like crunch mentality on anyone else. Maybe we'll talk about this more in a future video.

I'm 41 years old, and I still think about DOOM's Romero and Carmack every day of my life whenever I consider the video game I myself am trying to make. Truck Heck almost belongs more to DOOM than it belongs to me. For going on most of my career, I've heard Carmack and Romero's names capstoning sentences which in their ends collapse in defeatism — easily as many times as, if not more times than, I've heard that Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix both died at age 27 — I have heard that DOOM came out when John Romero was 26 and John Carmack was 23.

I know a movie that came out when its writer-director and star was just 26.

In summary: for all the reasons I've encoded and embedded into the length of this presentation, I declare unequivocally that DOOM is the Citizen Kane of video games.

Apropos of this conclusion, I pray that whatever eventually causes my inevitable death leaves me at least an interval of conscious time sufficient to think to utter a single DOOM demon death impression in lieu of last words. Save the investigative journalists of that future day their time. The story, my friends, has been right here all along.

Well, that's all I have time for today. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that video games were created awesome; that I was born stupid; however, I will not die hungry.

epilogue video games forever - action button

Well, that's the end of the video.

Hello. It took kind of a long time to make this video. I think it took like three months. No, it's not three months. Okay, it's definitely not three months — almost. It's like two and a half or so months. So during the time I spent making this video — I'm, as you probably heard if you watched the whole video (you skipped to the end — hello, you can go back and watch more of it later) — if you watched all the video, you know that during the time that I was researching and writing the script, I ended up moving two times.

I got the coronavirus again. I gained 40 pounds because of the steroids prescribed for the lung damage and because of Two Bros pizza. I got a haircut. I lost 20 pounds. I grew a kind of fraudulent beard — like a trickster's beard. I shaved it off shortly before filming this. We can't use the bathtub here yet. We're waiting for somebody to re-glaze the bathtub.

I want to thank everybody for waiting this long to watch this video. I know that if you're a fan — a viewer of this channel — if you're a viewer of this channel, you'll likely appreciate quality. You're likely here because I'm not a guy yelling, reacting to insipid news for 10 minutes twice a day, three times a day, whatever it is the typical YouTuber — I don't think of myself as a YouTuber. I'm just a guy.

I'm really glad that people pay me to do this, and I promise you your money is going some pretty good places right now. As you can see, while I am recording this epilogue — while you're watching the epilogue — and I'm gonna overlay it over myself when I throw this into Adobe Premiere and just ripple-trim a million things — you're seeing Ryan Taylor and Josh Watson just kind of — they're riffing around on the E1M1 theme music from DOOM.

Those are my two editors for these videos. So we've got Josh Watson — just like with the last two videos — was a champion of getting me video game footage when I needed it. And Michael Kerwin is — as you can see, he's the one who helped film this thing in South Bend, Indiana — beautiful South Bend, Indiana, home of the Crooked Ewe, wonderful restaurant. He helped film this. He helped — I mean, I don't know — I didn't have those cameras, so he filmed it on 8K RED cameras. That's Hobbit cameras, Jerry.

I want to thank Ryan Taylor's mom in South Bend, Indiana, for ending a sentence in "Jerry" in my presence without knowing that two days earlier, I — now a resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan — had started ending sentences in "Jerry." This is my new apartment, by the way. I should take these — Sunday, I'm going to take these sunglasses off. I didn't want to do this in sunglasses. I'm going to try to make this epilogue — I'm going to try to edit this epilogue down to the length of their E1M1 jam session, so let's see how this goes. We're going to do a slightly faster pace than usual.

Since I've been displaced from my workplace and I've only recently come back into the possession of all my boxes, plugged my computer in, sat down, hunkered, edited this whole thing in one disgusting sitting — just stewing in my own juices — since I've only recently come back into this experience and I was spending two months on the road, as it were — various hotels (we're in New Hampshire for a while) — the writing process of this script was bonkers.

Luckily, DOOM runs on everything, so I was able to play it on a wide variety of devices in order to assemble all of the thoughts that went into this review. During that, I also went ahead and — sticking with the "runs on everything" theme — and also on the other hand, trying to trailblaze toward a review of Cyberpunk 2077 that I can hopefully deliver around Christmas time (it'll be my Christmas present; we're going five hours on that one) — I found two more games that I would like to review, and I went ahead and played the heck out of them. Played them until their wheels fell off. Watched a lot of longplays, superplays. Researched as thoroughly as is probably humanly possible given the coronavirus situation and whatnot.

I went ahead and wrote the scripts for those reviews, and those games are Pac-Man and Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with You for the Sony PlayStation and/or Sega Saturn. I played both versions. You play the game multiple times. I played through that game about eight times, so I might play through it a couple more times in the editing process, though my thoughts are complete as far as the writing goes.

I think those two videos are going to be pretty good. They're going to be a little bit shorter than this one was. They're going to come out a little bit sooner than this one did. In the Patreon description, I did promise you one hour of densely scripted video content per month. I have at this point delivered literally nine hours of densely scripted video content, so I'm working my way up to a two-year vacation. We'll see how we do.

We are also — goddammit — we're building a website. I want to thank Nick Splendorr for helping us build this website. This website's going to be wild. I also want to thank — well, I can't — I'm not going to thank anybody else on the merch front. I'm not going to thank anybody on the merch front because then you're gonna be able to guess what the merch is.

Oh, and also I've got — I actually took notes for this epilogue, which is fun. Second — no, I don't actually think it's very good.

On a completely unrelated note: if you're a graphic designer with page-layout experience and if you have a high tolerance for busy work, just try to get in touch with me. My business email address is at the top of my Twitter profile. You should be able to find it there. Most people can find it there. If you can't find it up there, then you've kind of disqualified yourself as a layout expert.

A lot of people have been asking if we're going to be producing any text-only reviews for the website. The answer to that is: we're thinking of something. I've got something in the planning stages. I don't want to speak too much about it. I don't want to spoil it too much.

Oh, I'm also — on an unrelated note — I'm looking for — if you're like a computer programmer who knows how to make PDFs, I'm just — I'm just here reading these notes in Sublime Text. And I got to say: I want to thank Sublime Text for being the best text-editing software I've ever used. Been using them for years. I want to thank — might as well, while I'm here — thank Filco for making my keyboard, Zowie for making my mouse. Getting a spam call right now. I'm waiting for the bathtub reglazer to call, so I have it off of Do Not Disturb mode for the first time in eight years. If you saw that bathtub, you'd know why.

Sublime Text, Filco, Zowie — these — they're not actually my sponsors, and I don't want them to be. They have never given me a cent, and I hope to keep it that way.

Oh man, I almost forgot: that for this video, I tracked down a pair of the American Optical Z87 gold tall glasses that John Carmack is wearing in the sword photo, and I thought that I wouldn't be able to get my hands — back on the music or in my storage unit. However, I have my boxes right here, so let me see if I can find them.

[Rustling sounds]

Yeah, I got them. Got them in this bag. Hold on. These are them. What do you think?

Anyway, I have a list of people I want to thank, so let's go through this real quick. I feel like this is going to be longer than their seven-minute-whatever-number-of-seconds jam session, so I'll just loop it. I'll loop the jam session in the background. If you see it twice, don't freak out.

I want to thank University of California at Berkeley's own Lauren Miller, PhD, for replying almost instantly to a text message that I sent her asking for a translation of the Bubble Tape slogan from English into Latin. She replied immediately with a reasonably long, well-structured explanation of why she translated it in the multiple ways she translated it. Thank you for that.

I want to thank my Action Button co-founders and Truck Heck brothers Michael Kerwin and Brent Porter for capturing all the DOOM footage that was used in this video — pristine DOOM footage. Now, I can play DOOM pretty well myself at this point. However, I lacked perfectly clean captures when we had to hurry out of our old apartment because the situation got weird. Thanks for stepping up, guys. I hope to work with you again on Truck Heck in a couple of minutes.

I wanna thank Mobygames for having all this game box art on there for free to use that I just download hundreds of them for every one of these projects. I want to thank my buddy Delicious McCune — not for any particular reason, just because you sent me a text message the other day and it was funny. I didn't reply to it immediately, though it was a good text.

I want to thank Adam Tarwacki at the Granger Community Church in Granger, Indiana, for letting me talk to him about some ridiculously stupid thing that I was thinking about before I went and filmed the hard part of this video.

Of course, I want to thank Mimsy and my tiny wolf, Baby Babis. Where's Bibby Baptist? Baby Babis, come here. I want to thank Mimsy and my tiny wolf, Bibby Baptist, for being my best friend and my beast friend, respectively. I'm going to put him down. He needs a wash.

I want to thank John Romero for designing so many levels in a video game that every time I play them, they're still incredibly — ridiculously good — kind of just a whole bunch of home-run level designs, just universally enjoyable, exciting, good video game levels to play through. I gladly played through DOOM seven or eight times in the course of compiling the resources necessary to make this review. I sure did just have myself a real good time every time a John Romero level started up. I was just like, "Heck yeah." So thanks for making those levels that inspired me too. Long time ago — back in 2000 — I didn't get into this in the review. That really kind of just got me really thinking about level design and really thinking about making video games, and I ended up actually sort of doing that later. So thanks for that.

Oh, and I have some backer shout-outs. Tried to memorize all these names. I don't know if I did it right. I'm going to try to do it. I know it's number one is Justin Skormarovsky, Golock, Jacob Gillespie. I actually owe everybody two shout-outs, so I'll do them all twice. Justin Skormarovsky, Justin Skormarovsky, Golock, Golock, Jacob Gillespie, Jacob Gillespie, Tess Smith, Tess Smith, Woody Jang, Woody Jang, John H., John H., Astro Ladda, Astro Ladda, Bernard Kinchius, Bernard Kinchius. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I've met you in real life several times. Red Muffler Man, Red Muffler Man, Reza Sarrinotai — I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I'm sorry. The Laser Girls, The Laser Girls, Joshua Jarvis, Joshua Jarvis, Antinomous, Antinomous, Matthew, Matthew, Dumont, Dumont — a little bit of a twist on that one. Dave Brown, Brown Dave, Sam G, Sam G, James Schrader, James Schrader — pronounced it two different ways. Christopher Lopez, Christopher Lopez, Trance 1215, Trance 1215, Jacob — Jacob, I technically already — you got included in the Jacob Gillespie wonderfully. Oh, now Jacob Gillespie's got three. Oh, now Jacob Gillespie's got four. Now Jacob Gillespie's got five. David Shaw, David Shaw, Nate & Nate, Mimsy & Mimsy — I've actually shouted out Mimsy earlier. Ryan Lang, Ryan Lang, Keith Miller, Keith Miller, Stephen Taylor — not Steven Tyler — Stephen Taylor, The Coconut Kid and The Coconut Kid, Jonathan Longnecker, Jonathan Longnecker, Scott Olson Morales, Scott Olson Morales, Dario Britannia, Dario Britannia, Kenny Carranza, Kenny Carranza, Ranger Mankin, Ranger Mankin, Seth Carlson, Seth Carlson, Charles Schultz, Charles Schultz, Sarah Sophia, Sarah Sophia.

Did it. As always, thank you for backing us on Patreon. If you don't back us on Patreon and you don't want to, that's okay. If you don't back us on Patreon and you do want to, you can do that. Go to patreon.com/actionbutton. If you want to join our Discord, go to discord.gg/actionbutton. If you want to just subscribe to the YouTube channel, that's youtube.com/actionbutton. And if you want to follow us on Twitch, that's twitch.tv/actionbutton. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, that's twitter.com/actionbutton.

I got them all. Pretty good branding purposes. Also, I think I might buy one of these two skull jackets soon, so let me know which one you think I should buy.

I just want to reiterate that these videos are — as you might have noticed if you've watched them, which I hopefully you have — they are horribly hard to make. There is a lot of work involved in these. There's three of us making them now, and it's — I've only been making it harder for myself. I could show you my Premiere timeline again. I'll throw up a .png of that, though I think I've exhausted that joke at least for the rest of this year. And just — just take my word for it. You could not believe how much my head hurts right now. It's why my glasses are off. That's why I was wearing sunglasses earlier, because my head hurts that bad because of this video that you just watched.

Usually I prepare some kind of little surprise to put at the end of the video. Usually there's been two videos. This is the third one. Usually I provide a surprise at the end. I decided to work the surprises into this video, so that's why there's no surprises. Sorry about that.

I want to thank our friend hbomberguy for recording a full reading of that Edge magazine 1994 review of DOOM. We only used a little bit of it, though I think it was pretty good.

Anyway, you can subscribe, like, comment — whatever it is you want to do. If you want to do any of those things, if you don't, that's okay. I'm not the cops. I will never be the cops.

I mean, that's it. That's all I got. I'll see you next time.

Goodbye.

[Music continues]

Did you hear about this — this DOOM thing? The YouTube kept blocking the video. We just uploaded it. I uploaded it like two nights ago. I was up till like 4 in the morning. I had to upload it like 14 times. Like five times — I think it was five. Five times we did five final exports with like a million hilarious names. It kept blocking it because some robot thought it owned a copyright to Beethoven's Pathétique. Kept flagging it, blocking it. Was like, "This video was blocked in some territories." And I clicked on the "some territories," and it said "United States and the United Kingdom." And I was like, "I know those guys."

Yeah, so right at the end, the bureaucracy making me look like a liar.

Are we ready? Are we rolling? Are we rolling? Okay. Well.

Hello and welcome back to video games. I'm Tim Rogers. You are watching the Action Button review of Pac-Man, a video game designed by Toru Iwatani —

Oh man, I just thought of something. There was a line in the Pac — the DOOM review. I was — I'm looking at this prompter. I said — to Iwatani, I knew it was missing, and I didn't say anything about it. I forgot. There was a line at the end of the Edge section where I reviewed the Edge 7-out-of-10 review of DOOM. There was a line that was in there, and I'm hearing "Toru Iwatani" because I know — did you know Toru — I met Toru Iwatani — played one of my games and he recommended it to somebody. Like, there's a story about that in this Pac-Man thing.

There was a line that was like the end — right before I said "and that's the straight dope" — was supposed to be: "Also, in 2012, Edge magazine gave Action Button's game Ziggurat for iOS a 9 out of 10. So when I say that they meant to give DOOM a 10 out of 10, I know what I'm talking about."

And that's the straight dope.

I wanted that to be in the DOOM video because it's very important to what I say in the Pac-Man video. Do we have time to like reshoot the whole DOOM thing?

I'm not the cops.