Doom Review

Doom is the asteroid strike of PC gaming, the event everything after is dated from. John Carmack's engine conjured textured 3D spaces with variable light and height on ordinary 1993 hardware, a feat of programming that made the whole genre physically possible, while John Romero's levels turned that technology into play: looping, secret-riddled arenas built for momentum rather than corridors built for walking.

The combat still teaches modern shooters lessons, a bestiary whose fireballs are dodgeable so that speed is armor, a shotgun that may be the single most satisfying weapon ever tuned, and infighting demons you can turn against each other. The story is one angry paragraph in a readme, hence its D, and matters not at all. Distributed as shareware and left open to WAD-making, it invented deathmatch by name and seeded a mod community that runs it on pregnancy tests to this day. Few artifacts of the medium remain this alive.