What the opening level of every mainline Doom game says about its place in FPS history
Video game openings have always been a source of fascination for me. As a player, you’re excited by the prospect of the game to come - the sights you’ll see, the challenges you’ll face - and first impressions can make or break your entire perception of what a game is versus the one you had stored in your head before switching it on. For video game creators, however, a new beginning is often racked with questions. What, exactly, do you choose to show players first? How will you introduce them to something they’ve never seen before? And if that game is successful, how do you keep reinventing that first impression across what could be several decades?
In revisiting every mainlineDoomgame to celebrate its 30th anniversary this month, it’s clear that even id’s iconic shooter has wrestled with how to answer these question, and the ways it’s tried to reinvent itself over the years paints a captivating portrait of a series trying to move with the times. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening levels. Played in close succession, crushing 30 years into not even quite three hours, what emerges isn’t just the evolution of one of the all-time great PC games, but also a potted history of theFPS. So join me as we chart Doom’s rise, fall and rebirth through the lens of its first stages.
I’ve written before about how Doom II was one ofmy formative gaming experiencesgrowing up, but this is the first time I’ve actually gone back to play the original Doom from 1993 - and what I’m most surprised by is the brevity of that initial E1M1 Hangar level. The opening room is completely devoid of enemies until you go through the first door, giving you ample time and space to acclimatise to its controls, and serving as an intake of breath before the slick red pixel butter to come. But for all its initial simplicity, this is still a level that’s packed with secrets and high-level design choices.
Switches are tucked away in corners that seemingly do nothing unless you’re tearing about the place at 100mph and glimpse the brief new doorways they’ve opened up. There are patches of wall with slightly different texture work to them, opening up even more new paths with a tap of your space bar. It also teaches you that bullets will land even if you’re not on the same horizontal plane as the enemy you’re firing at, and if you’re smart, you might just be able to get more powerful guns out of sequence. It packs a lot into a level that, by its own par time estimation, should only take 30 seconds to complete, and it sets the template for what’s to come just a year later inDoom II: Hell On Earth.
Doom II’s opening level is similarly brief and short-lived, coming with another 30 second par time. As before, the simple S shape of its corridors looks simple at first glance, but this, too, has a lot more going on behind the curtain. For starters, you don’t have to even engage with the two zombiemen standing there in front of you, at ease and unaware. You can turn around and go backwards round the corner to find the humble chainsaw, an essential back-up weapon that doesn’t require any ammo. Indeed, the fact that those zombiemen are oblivious to your presence at first also heralds a vital new lesson - that it’s possible to get the jump on these bozos to get the upperhand.
It also still amazes me you can get over half of Doom II’s entire arsenal in this first level if you know where to look, but Doom II gives and it takes. Even this early on, it’s not afraid to turn some of its secrets against you, preventing a perfect 100% completion rate if you mess up. Hit the switches in its second main enemy room in the wrong order, for example, and they’ll both sink into the floor as enemies platforms are brought down to eye level, forever sealing off the one that would have opened a secret cavity in the wall. It’s the kind of ‘learning by doing’ attitude that many of its contemporary NES games had in spades back then, but it also instils the idea that, hey, there are rules to be broken here, and you’ll be rewarded for it if you’re good enough.
Skip forward a few years to 1997 andDoom 64arrives on the scene to bring its unique flavour of first-person shooting to consoles. This is another first-time playthrough for me, and oh god, I hate it already. It tries to pull the same trick as Doom II by giving you a second weapon instantly, but it makes the mistake of giving you the usually hard-earned shotgun instead of the chainsaw, instantly making your pistol redundant. Even firing it feels yucky. There’s no kick, no oomph, and every zombieman goes down with a single, uninspiring thud because you’ve given me the shotgun too early, goddamnit, and now everything is insultingly easy. Worse, it’s easy by design. And the Pinkys! Pinkys come in their droves, mowed down by the limp nose of your shotgun, and it doesn’t feel right. The hierarchy of enemy types feels weird and out of wack.
It does a goodBerserkpunch blood splatter, I’ll give it that, but it’s not enough to save what’s otherwise quite a disorienting maze of beige and yellow walls. There’s no clean throughline from start to finish. There are too many rooms, too many dead-ends that loop you back through empty, corpse-strewn corridors, and too many lifts (and crikey, they do love a lift in this game). Its secrets don’t feel like secrets either, as half of them emerge within your direct eyeline, no dashing or thought required. To me, this feels like a game that’s simply pandering to its player base. We know you love the shotgun, we know you love the Pinkys, new custodians Midway cry, so here they are right up front. But it loses all sense of drama and build-up in the process. It’s probably just as well this came out a few months beforeGoldenEye 007did in 1997, otherwise I suspect it would have been absolutely savaged.
It suddenly seems embarrassed to even hand you a gun before it’s explained its story, its lore, what the UAC are and all the nasty experiments they’ve been conducting somewhere deep inside the facility you’ve just arrived on. From the moment you start a new game file, it takes approximately ten minutes (ten!) before you get your first gun, and another nine (NINE!) before you have anything to actually shoot. That’s almost 20 minutes of story exposition, listening to grumpy NPCs giving you orders to go to this place then that place, managing an ever-dwindling flashlight bulb, and collecting audio logs and PDA diaries that now tell you the secret to opening its locked supply caches instead of just letting you figure it out on your own. “What the heck am I playing?” I wrote in my notes. “Dead Space?”
Dead Space, of course, didn’t exist yet. That would come four years later, but holy Cacodemons on a stick Batman, this ain’t the same Doom I’ve just been spit-balling through for the last 15 minutes! This is more like aResident Evilgame prancing around in a Doom skin suit, because when the demons do finally pitch up, there’s barely any room to shoot or move out the way of incoming fire. I’m doing the unthinkable - standing still - to gun down zombiemen and imps because that’s all I can do in these tiny, narrow, linear corridors. This is a serious, grown-up demonic invasion happening in real time now, you dummy. There’s no running off to find ‘secrets’ and cheat your way to bigger and better guns anymore. Your cries of idclip are meaningless here!
There are still secrets dotted about, with enough time having passed that they’re now mostly retro nods to its source material (see above right) than actual secret rooms and compartments. But the bulk of its exploration is geared around more mundane things like weapon mod upgrades, map stations, and finding the bodies of elite guards with Praetor token USB keys on them you can use to upgrade your suit - things that old Doom had no need for. But in this age of genre pilfering, where everything is sort of anRPGnow whether it likes it or not, Doom joins the fray with gusto. The crucial difference between this and Doom 3, however, is that it doesn’t lose its own identity in the process.
It’s the same kind of confidence that Doom (1993) and Doom II had in spades all those decades ago with their snake-like secret passageways, deliberate blackouts when you so much as sneezed on a key and doors that only opened when glanced right with a southeasterly wind behind you, and it’s heartening to see the current id Software team manage to rekindle that same playfulness 30 years later. It might be cliched to say that Doom has been to hell and back during the intervening decades, but it’s clear right from that very first level of Doom Eternal that this is a series that’s finally found its feet again. It’s successfully spun a new beginning for itself, and I can’t wait to see where it takes us next over the next 30 years.
