'Doom', the Video Game

Doom is one of the most famous and pioneering first-shooter person video games, creating an immersive atmosphere and entertaining gameplay. There are countless articles, videos game reviews, and let’s play on each Doom game, so I will direct you to those if you are interested in knowing more about this epic game. I am also not a game expert—even though I love playing video games—and I am sure many people can introduce, and analyze the Doom universe much better than me.

I want to talk about this game today, because I loved it as a kid, and spent a lot of time playing. In addition, a dream I had recently strongly reminded of the feeling I had when I impersonated the Doom Guy, the main character, whose actual name is never mentioned.

That’s the power of any good game, movie, or book. They can make you feel as if you were one or any of the characters, and give you the possibility to go on adventures with them. Most importantly, the content of a good and inspiring story can resonate with your past, and stick with you in the future, making you come back to this story, and analyses the impact it had on your life.

Now let me explain why.Doom is certainly a simple game with an original, but uncomplicated backstory for the main character. Doom Guy is a space marine who is sent to Mars to join the Union Aerospace Corporation, and act as a security guard for the organization’s waste management facilities. We quickly discover that the facilities are used to doing experiments on teleportation. These experiments go terribly wrong when a portal to hell is opened, allowing evil creatures to access our world, and infect people. Your comrades get decimated by the monsters, and you find yourself alone to try to survive, and escape the planet.

Throughout the game, you will literally and figuratively descend to hell. The crew you came with to investigate the issue is slaughtered by the monsters, and since you cannot navigate the ship on your own, you have no choice, but to enter the facilities, and fight the creatures alone. You are the last man standing whose duty it is to defend the rest of humanity against an invasion of evil beings. To access the different rooms and levels, you will have to collect colored cardkeys (blue, red, and yellow), which will allow you to move forward in the game, and fight the monsters that will appear in various forms before you.

The game stands out in particular, thanks to the hellish environment depicted in bright colors. It strikes me as an important detail as even the colors—aside from the demonic creatures, and the fact that you are alone—are here to remind you that you are in hell.

The location, planet Mars, equally manifests this situation with dominant red colors that represent the dry and dead lands, but also blood and violence. Mars is a dead and desert planet, and thus the perfect location to unleash hell and devilish creatures.

Since there is no trace of life to be found on this planet, we tend to feel while playing as if there was not much hope for our adventure to have a positive and successful outcome. This setting also heavily hints at the tragic fate possibly awaiting the Doom Guy, and all humanity, if we fail.

I don’t think I would have the same experience in the game if these elements were missing, as they are paramount in creating a unique and stressful environment, which successfully immerses the player by sending him to a very well-known and dreaded place: Hell.

The first version of Doom is the one that left a mark on me. I later played more modern versions of the game that were unfortunately stripped of the elements that made Doom memorable for me in the first place. Of course, the gameplay and graphics improved with time and technological advancements, but all the references to hell, and how the character descends in it were rather absent in the latest versions, turning Doom into a plain and generic action game.

You would think that setting the game in badly lighted facilities with monsters lurking in dark corners would increase the claustrophobic feeling, and anguish you get when you play the original game, but it does not! For instance, Doom 3 is filled with jump scare times, and strobe lights. You cannot see the monsters unless they emerge from the dark areas, and even then, the developers had the brilliant idea to add malfunctioning light fixtures in most parts of the facilities.

This iconic game started so well, and yet the choices made later by developers stripped it from his winning combo (references to Hell, claustrophobic atmosphere, and immersive game experience), and turned it into a forgettable zombie video game with all the clichés that come with the genre.