Hell awaits: 20 years of Doom.

Sure, there were first person games—and even first person shooters—before Doom. Nerds will point out Maze War or whatever, and grizzled Mac loyalists who remember the dark ages before the iPod will curse your name forever if you don't accord proper respect to Marathon. (The harsh truth: by today's standards Marathon is about as fun to play as a rousing game of "poop your pants at work.")

But in the final analysis, Doom is the ur-shooter, the primordial ancestor from which all modern day virtual gunplay evolved. It is the Sistine Chapel of blood splatter and shell casings, the Mona Lisa of circle-stafing. Doom is a symphony of crisp, frictive mechanics working in lockstep to create an experience that remains unmatched even today, two decades later. (Doom came out on December 10, 1993. Happy birthday, Doomguy.)

Booting up Doom now is a revelation. All evidence seems to suggest that a PC game from 1993 should be like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, out of place and struggling to adapt to a world it cannot understand. But Doom feels speedy, rewarding, and infinitely playable. In many ways, today's market colossi remain pale imitations, their small refinements taking place in the shadow of a towering, nonplussed Cyberdemon. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, Doom is the ultimate game, awaiting the ultimate player: Homo fraggus.

This is my Doomguy. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

The story of Doom is flimsy, but no more so than most games of its era. (Or today, frankly.) You are a space marine, stationed at a Martian outpost that has been overrun by demons thanks to reckless scientists opening a portal to hell. There are distinct shades of Evil Dead and Aliens (id's chief inspirations, according to David Kushner's Masters of Doom), but it all coheres into a unique vision that combines the tension and suspense of a horror movie with the nervy, twitch action of classic arcade games like Robotron 2084.

Over the course of the game's campaign—which is broken up into three episodes, the first made available via shareware—the player traversed a series of increasingly nightmarish stages, battling the forces of hell with a growing arsenal of powerful weapons, from the buzzing chainsaw to the fearsome BFG. But much like his forefathers Ash and Corporal Hicks, Doomguy would often be seen wielding the shotgun. You know, for close encounters.

Doom features one of the most iconic casts of enemies to ever grace a video game. The monsters are unforgettable, from the Cheshire grin of the Cacodemon to the purposeful, menacing stride of the Baron of Hell. (Countless players will still feel their hackles rise upon hearing the lo-fi sound of a Baron's intimidating howl.)

And then there are the weapons. The weapons! Every booming shotgun or rattling automatic heard in today's online arenas represents an iteration of Doom's simple, timeless archetypes. Call of Duty's myriad of subtly different assault rifles? All variations on Doom's classic chaingun, just like the one Jessie Ventura shredded foliage with in Predator.

They should've sent a poet.

This is to say nothing of the maps themselves, which mostly succeed thanks to John Romero's keen sense of pacing and balance. (Like countless tragic heroes, his brilliance would eventually turn to hubris—and like Icarus, he would plunge back to earth.) But one of the game's finest moments came from Romero's co-designers Sandy Petersen and Tom Hall: in "Phobos Anomaly", the final level of the initial shareware episode, our heroic marine comes to an enormous stone pentagram, where a set of doors slide open to reveal not one, but two Barons of Hell.

It remains one of the best boss encounters ever, and a perfect capstone to the first episode. After playing this, how could you not purchase the full version?

Unfortunately, as with so many shareware games of the era, id never really topped that first episode. This definitely doesn't mean that episodes two and three are bad, although you can probably find some grizzled veterans lurking on message boards who are willing to go that far (and seriously, fuck "Halls of the Damned"). It's just that id led with their best material: the first episode has a crackling sense of tension and logic to its levels, which still remain imprinted on the minds of a whole generation of players.

Gaming's greatest ever "oh shit" moment—at least until the first time you see the Cyberdemon. Or the Spider Mastermind. Or an Archvile. Lot of "oh shit" moments in the Doom games.

A term that's bandied about a lot these days in upper-level video game discussion is "ludonarrative dissonance." It refers to how the increasingly ambitious storytelling aspirations of games can clash with the act of playing them; it's when the game part gets in the way of (or is itself disrupted by) the part that's aspiring to the status of film or literature. Even the recent, critically acclaimed GTAV struggles with this, as it attempts to present a classic American crime saga on the order of Goodfellas or Heat—but at the end of the day it's still the game where you can blow up old ladies with a rocket launcher.

Although many gamers are probably loathe to admit it, this is what Roger Ebert was talking about when he denied that games could ever be art. For Ebert, art is still bound by a version of the auteur theory: it is the product of a singular, Promethean vision, and nothing disrupts that vision like allowing the viewer/reader to play a game inside of it.

Some games have acknowledged this problem: towards the end of Uncharted 2, a villainous mercenary asks Nathan Drake how many men he killed to reach this point. It's a fair question, since the wise-cracking, pulp adventure tone of the Uncharted games sometimes feels terribly at odds with the fact that you spend most of your time shooting hundreds of guys in the face. (One of my favorite Penny Arcade strips makes light of the game's genocidal body count.)

Or consider the recent Far Cry 3, which tells a story about a tender-footed, first-world college student who manages to become the most feared gunman on an island full of ruthless pirates and guerilla fighters. Although the game is at pains to continually refer to your dramatic transformation, the truth is that under the auspices of the player, the character takes to bloodshed like a fish to water. He seems like a natural born killer from the moment he picks up a gun—because you are.

Fortunately, they later made an improved version of Far Cry 3 where they replaced the undergraduate hero with Michael Biehn, and everything else with neon. Doomguy would approve.

But Doom, unlike so many of its progeny, suffers from absolutely zero ludonarrative dissonance. Some would contend that Doom is not trying to tell a particularly complex story, and of course they're right—but maybe that's sort of the point. Doom's plot may be rudimentary, but it's a perfect match for the way the game actually plays. A lot of modern game developers fail to understand that "complex" is not always better; most folktales are pretty simple too, but they get the job done.

Doom presents the player with a world in which there are only two possible responses: kill or be killed. There is no dialogue, no stealth, no "hacking" minigames, no friendly NPCs, no moral choices—there is only a threat, and the tools for an appropriate response. You are the last surviving human, surrounded by hideous ghouls, demons, and monsters from the abyss. There is no non-violent remedy to your situation, no "speech skill" to be used when negotiating with a Cyberdemon. There is only force; you negotiate with a rocket launcher. It is a Hobbesian world: nasty, brutish, and short.

I mean really, how much context do you need to know that you're supposed to shoot this thing? (Then again, good monster design is something of a lost art these days too.)

Doom's violence was sensational and controversial at the time of its release, and its brutal (if primitive) death animations retain a queasy power even today. But viewed another way, it's a little hard to see what the fuss was all about—not just because games since have upped the ante in so many ways, but because of what the violence is targeting.

Mapmaker Sandy Petersen, a Mormon, made this same point to John Romero, who worried that the hellish imagery would offend him. But why, Petersen countered, would he would be offended by a game about fighting demons?

Doom is much like Black Sabbath, whose piously Christian, resolutely antiwar lyrics are often overlooked: it's a game about combating the devil, by any means necessary. (Of course, Romero and artist Adrian Carmack—no relation to John—reveled in the game's demonic aesthetics, like any good headbanger.)

Before DLC and microtransactions, there was only huge guts. (From the one-issue Doom comic, which is totally as ridiculous and deranged as this excerpt suggests.)

Despite the simplicity of its plot, Doom still tells stories. It mostly does this through the maps themselves, many of which have small arcs of their own. Doom II in particular does this, and sometimes at its own peril—but when it works, it really works.

A good example is "Tricks and Traps" by the aforementioned Sandy Petersen, which begins in a circular room with eight doors. Each one leads to a setpiece monster encounter, such as an enormous and seemingly empty hall filled with alcoves that house Cacodemons. In another, you encounter a horde of dormant Hell Barons with their back to you, and one angry Cyberdemon at the far end. Your natural impulse is, as always, to start shooting—but this is the worst thing you can do, since the best option is to let infighting weed out some of the demons first.

As with any Doom map, your mileage may vary; some Doomers hate "Tricks and Traps" with a passion. But plenty of others love it—and to me, it's a grisly setpiece as memorable as anything in Uncharted or Mass Effect.

(Despite triumphs like "Tricks and Traps", Petersen is a controversial figure in the Doom community, mostly because his levels are designed around making you feel like Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, staring at a finger-wagging Nedry, scolding you that "you didn't say the magic word.")

You know that level of Doom 2 where you get sick of its shit and stop playing? Regardless of which one it is, Sandy Petersen probably made it.

Doom's 3D labyrinths, potent weapons, and imposing enemies guaranteed it would be a huge smash. Gone were the interchangeable, right-angled mazes of Wolfenstein, and even though by today's standards Doom's maps only vaguely resemble the locations they're supposed to represent ("Nuclear Plant", "Toxin Refinery"), by 1993's standards it might as well have been virtual reality.

And for those who wanted to create their own maps, Doom has also proven to be one of the most user-friendly games ever—and this, as much as anything else, is the true secret of the game's longevity.

By the time id's newest game came out (be it Doom, Quake, or whatever), graphics wizard John Carmack had typically long since moved on to the next thing—and in 1997, he made the Doom source code freely available. (Carmack's influence on video games and shooters is truly incalculable: although it is certainly distinct at this point, the Call of Duty engine was still built on Carmack's technology.)

Even today, the Doom community continues to crank out new maps and gameplay mods for this infinitely durable, 20-year old game. As recently as 2012, Doomers saw one of their best years ever, with at least three landmark creations: Doom the Way id Did, a fantastic set of levels designed to emulate the style of the original Doom episodes; Winter's Fury, an intense and atmospheric campaign featuring new monsters, textures, and a full-fledged story(!); and Reelism, a madcap, ludicrously entertaining mod that turns Doom into a Smash TV style postmodern slot machine.

Oh yeah, Winter's Fury also has cutscenes. CUTSCENES. And they're actually pretty good!

And the year before that, Doomers saw what may well be one of the biggest, most popular, and most controversial Doom mods ever: Brutal Doom, the work of one Sergeant Mark IV. In his own words:

Brütal Doom takes Doom into a whole new level. It makes the game much more violent than before. There's much more blood, plus it adds unique gibs, death animations, dismemberments, headshots, executions, fire and explosion particles, flares, shadows over all objects, and much more.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg though. Brutal Doom is a version of the game that's been retooled from the ground up, without losing the spirit of what makes id's masterpiece what it is. With new weapons and harder-hitting monsters, it makes Doom feel brand new—gorier, louder, and nastier than ever.

My favorite BD change is that the invisibility orbs become captured Marines; if you liberate them with a swift kick, they become bloodthirsty, AI-controlled buddies who rampage around the map at lightning speed (which just means they move at the same speed you do) firing a randomly generated weapon at any demon in sight. They can and will catch you in the crossfire, although I found it hard to stay mad at them. Still, if one spawns with a rocket launcher—run.

But a YouTube video is worth a thousand words:



Some Doom grognards hate Brutal Doom because its numerous gameplay tweaks (all of the weapons have been redesigned, for example) make classic Doom megaWADs* like Deus Vult or Alien Vendetta virtually unplayable for all but the most superhuman of Doomers. This outrage is actually pretty understandable: Doom has an exquisite sense of gameplay balance, and for Doom fans it's not something to be meddled with lightly. 

(If you've never played a WAD like Deus Vult, watch this video to get an idea of just how frantic these maps can be, even playing with vanilla Doom. Also, marvel at the epic architecture built using the humble Doom engine! And a WAD, in case you're wondering, is a Doom file. A megaWAD is just shorthand for a collection of levels—a full-fledged episode, or a whole campaign. The file still ends in .wad. WAD stands for "Where's All the Data?")

Still, Brutal Doom's sheer scope and Sgt. Mark's unrelenting commitment to turning Doom into a literal reenactment of Slayer's "Raining Blood" can only be described as sick as fuck, and if you like Doom and have never heard of Brutal Doom before, I'll understand if you're frantically rushing to play it after watching that video.

War ensemble, burial to be.

Doom is a lot like Tetris, if Tetris still had a vibrant community cranking out game content that went far beyond anything the original creators could have imagined. From fun and challenging campaigns like Scythe, to mind-boggling "slaughter" WADs like Sunder (where some levels boast a monster count in the thousands), to ridiculous and over-the-top game mods like Brutal Doom and Reelism, there's never been a better time to play Doom than right now, on its 20th birthday.

What are you waiting for? Hell awaits.

Christmasbland: NOS4A2 (2013).

When he was in Big Black, Steve Albini once said something (and I'm paraphrasing here) about how most bands fall back onto little signifiers of brutality, rather than trying to create a genuine sense of physicality and impact. This observation has always stuck with me, because I think it's an eloquent summation of a phenomenon you see absolutely everywhere.

With enough repetition, even the most outlandish aesthetics can become rote; consider how something like death metal—a musical style that would've been inconceivably harsh to earlier generations—can become surprisingly boring in the wrong hands. What once sounded sickeningly brutal becomes irredeemably silly, and vocals that were once frighteningly demonic are refined into the sound of a guy burping.

This is exactly what happens as NOS4A2 goes down the horror checklist: evil children who want to "play"; a serial killer who delivers sing-song rhymes with childlike glee; a stately, old-fashioned gentleman who is actually a predatory vampire; a symbol of joy and innocence (Christmas) warped into terror and bloodshed. It all just grates, because it's trying way, way too hard. It's the horror equivalent of one of those early '90s superhero comics where everyone has huge guns and clothes with a million ammo pouches on them, and every title is something like Bloodhammer or Darkfist or Killblade.

GIS for "90s comics", third result.

The biggest problem with NOS4A2 is very simple: it takes for granted that it's a Modern Horror Classic without ever doing the work necessary to become one. And since it is a horror story, this problem is most glaring when it comes to the villain. From the beginning, the book treats Charles Manx like a horror icon akin to the Joker or Hannibal Lecter, but he never actually rises above monster-of-the-week material.

Hannibal Lecter isn't scary because he eats people: he's scary because he's a well-respected genius with a highly-deveoped sense of culture and etiquette—who also eats people. The Joker isn't scary because he blows things up and kills people with poison gas, but because sometimes the things he says make a terrible kind of sense, leaving us wondering if it's true that the only thing separating him from us is one bad day.

But cardboard cutouts aren't very scary once you get past the initial shock. There's a reason why characters like Freddy Krueger, Jason and Chucky were all eventually played for laughs. People still get worked up over H.P. Lovecraft because the horror in his stories cannot be easily translated into cut-and-paste cliche, which is also why so many strict imitations of Lovecraft are so shitty—the idea of a profoundly indifferent cosmos is hard to fit into a rubber suit. (Of course, this hasn't stopped the Cthulhu plush industry from thriving.)

Unfathomable hate beyond time and space.

NOS4A2 isn't all bad. Vic McQueen is a decent character, largely because she exhibits the kind of complexity so lacking in the book's horror elements. Her combustible mix of decency and self-destruction is very human, and it makes her seem like more than another Final Girl from central casting. And the book's magical bikes and enchanted Scrabble tiles have a warmly nostalgic energy, recalling the way we invest such objects with power and potency as children.

But a lot of the time, NOS4A2 feels like an interesting piece of magical realism that got waylaid by a mediocre horror movie. Some of the early scenes when Vic is young crackle, and when she meets Maggie it seems like a whole new world is about to open up. But it doesn't, because it's been too long since we've been reminded that we're Making Christmas Scary™.

Note: this is not quite as fresh an idea as the book seems to think it is. See also: Black Christmas, Rare Exports, etc.

Did you see Insidious? It's a good movie, with some real standout moments. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that the best part was the ending. For some, the ending is acceptable; for others, it nearly ruins the movie. (This piece only goes so far as to argue that it "makes sense", not that it's good.)

But it's nobody's favorite part, because it tries way too hard and lays on the "creepiness"—again, not real creepiness, but Little Signifiers of creepiness—way too thick. That's exactly what happens in NOS4A2, but it happens constantly throughout the whole book instead of just boiling over at the end. It's never scary, just numbing.

Like any well-articulated genre, horror runs on the clever revision of cliche. This can often tend toward the postmodern (e.g. Scream, The Cabin in the Woods), but it can just as easily be done with great sincerity: Insidious director James Wan has made a career out of creating horror films that pay homage to the classics while adding his own gloss, and doing so with a lot of love for the genre and a lot of heart.

What sucks about NOS4A2 is that Joe Hill can do this, and do it well—but here, he just doesn't.

My favorite scene in Horns involved an encounter with a stray cat at midnight, which is about as stock a horror setup as you can find. But Hill didn't just toss these elements together and call it a day: he carefully and methodically painted a scene with them, and the result was a powerful, almost numinous sense of something dark and terrible irrupting into the everyday world. It's the same feeling you get from "At the Mountains of Madness" or the climactic scene in Ringu—and unfortunately, nothing in NOS4A2 comes close.

In this case, a picture is worth 175,000 words (conservative estimate).

All these problems would still exist if NOS4A2 was a lean, tightly edited novel of the same length as Horns or Heart Shaped Box, both of which are around 400 pages. Unfortunately for the reader, NOS4A2 weighs in at a terminally bloated 700, which just makes all of its faults that much more glaring.

I read that there's even a novella-length segment that was cut from the final draft, and which is restored in the special edition published by Subterranean Press (which admittedly has a really cool cover). As NOS4A2 character Lou Carmody might say: dude, seriously?

But with all that said, I still think Mr. Hill is a great writer who has a long and storied career in front of him. I just think that once all of his books are written, NOS4A2 is going to be like the ending of Insidious: nobody's favorite.