Why Doom is still the best FPS

[jaybird3rd]

In mid-1996, when I was starting college and working part-time at Staples, a couple of us employees surreptitiously set up null modem cables between some of the desktop computers that were on display on the sales floor so we could sneak in a few games of multiplayer Doom. These would have been either Packard Bell or Gateway machines, probably 166MHz Pentiums with 32MB of RAM, running Windows 95. I seem to recall that one of the guys had somehow modified the levels to reproduce the internal layout of our store, complete with shelves and hordes of wandering imps as customers. Some of us got caught one day and had to tear it all down, but it was fun while it lasted.

I still enjoy the original Doom. I've got the Doom trilogy for the PC (Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom), and I also have it for the Atari Jaguar. It was mind-blowing at the time to see how they were able to create such a strikingly vivid and nightmarish game world, without lots of complicated rules or expensive hardware. The controls were relatively simple compared to later FPS games: they scaled well to the Jaguar keypad and to the keyboard and mouse combo on the PC, and to me, they struck the perfect balance: enough richness to enable fun gameplay, but not complex enough to require fancy "gaming-grade" peripherals. Best of all, you didn't need a $500 video card to play it! I can play all of the Doom games at full speed today on a 500MHz Celeron processor, even with crappy 1990s Intel integrated graphics.