I can’t remember ever being more excited for an upcoming video game release than I was for Doom 3. August 3, 2004 — the day that I got my grubby hands on a boxed copy of Doom 3 from Best Buy — was one of the best days of my life.
You see, my first true gaming love was the original, three-episode release of Doom. As a kid, I spent countless hours playing through it, exploring every nook and cranny until I could mentally conjure up any level of the game and “play” it. Everything about the game was perfect. The colorful, maze-like maps, the weapons, the iconic monsters, and even the face of the Doom protagonist, rendered in its pixelated glory in the game’s status bar.
Doom wasn’t just a game; it was an obsession.
In fact, I played Doom (as well as its sequel, Doom 2) so much as a kid, my mother — who believed that computer games would rot away my young mind — offered me $100 to never play Doom again. I promptly refused, because the only use I had for $100 would be to buy another copy of Doom — something that I already had!
So, in the early 2000’s when id Software announced that their next game would be Doom 3, I couldn’t contain my excitement. I eagerly consumed every last bit of online and print media pertaining to the upcoming game. Finding that id Software had released a new screenshot of the game felt like finding buried treasure. And, of course, when I got my hands on the leaked build of the E3 2002 Doom 3 demo (the one and only time during my childhood that I felt the need to torrent anything), I played it over and over again — even though it ran surprisingly horribly on my powerful computer, which packed a powerful combination of a Pentium 4 processor and a GeForce4 Ti 4400 graphics card.
Although I was primarily interested in Doom 3 the game, I couldn’t help but be enamored with its visuals. My excitement for Doom 3 inspired me to gain a basic understanding of 3D graphics so that when id Software founder and technology guru John Carmack would speak about Doom 3’s rendering engine, I could at least hope to have a chance of understanding what he had to say. (Sadly, this hope was misguided.)
Eventually, after a ton of hype and a number of delays, Doom 3 made it out into the world, and I got my first copy of it. (I’ve purchased the game numerous times since then.)
After returning home from Best Buy, I wasted no time starting in on Doom 3. I closed the door to my bedroom, installed the game, and fired it up. To experience it in its full glory, I made sure the lights were out when I began to play. And, ahead of time, I made sure to beg my dad for the cash to go upgrade my computer so that I could play the game with the quality settings maxed out.
At this point in the story, you might think that this is the part where things go downhill. Maybe the game wasn’t all that great, or maybe it was great, but my expectations had become so impossibly great that reality could not possibly live up to the hype.
Nope!
Doom 3 was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be — and probably better. It was a truly magical experience. Very little of Doom 3’s content was shown off in pre-release screenshots or even the launch trailer itself, so virtually everything about the game — the monsters, weapons, environments and the game’s story itself — felt fresh right out of the box.
Seeing many of the Doom franchise’s iconic monsters and weapons re-imagined in a state-of-the-art game engine with breathtaking dynamic lighting (seriously, Doom 3 changed the way I thought about video game lighting and shadowing), high resolution bump-mapped textures, and realistic animations was truly breathtaking.
The powerful game engine also gave id Software’s level designers the creative license to really bring the UAC Mars base — where the bulk of the game is set — to life. Doom 3 also incorporated a superbly crafted and perfectly eerie rendition of Hell itself (the setting of the entire third episode of the original Doom).
Doom 3, like all id Software games, got the gun-play just right. The arsenal — consisting largely of re-made versions of the original Doom weapons — was balanced and I absolutely enjoyed using every single weapon. The shotgun, in true Doom fashion, became my workhorse against typical zombies and imps. The chaingun was a great workhorse for dealing with some of the bigger baddies, such as the Hell Knight, when they got too close. The Plasma Rife was fantastic for taking out hordes of spider monsters as well as the flying lost souls. And, of course, the BFG was great at clearing entire rooms of brutish beasts.
Okay, maybe the grenades were a bit too bouncy and given the relatively close-quarters nature of the combat, I might have accidentally blown myself up a few too many times with the rocket launcher. But, still, I loved all of Doom 3’s guns.
But it wasn’t just the graphics, the monsters, the weapons or the world. Doom 3 actually attempted to bring and honest-to-goodness story to life in game rather than just as a few paragraphs of text in the user manual as well as in some end-of-episode intermission screens. There were in-game cut-scenes, complete with voice acting that was more than competent. You could even interact with other, simulated human beings in the game (although they didn’t have much to say other than to express their frustration with you or their fear of ending up dead like so many of their companions.)
I also later discovered that the story that was brought to life in the shipping game was a heavily abridged and modified version of the story that Matthew Costello had originally written for the game. I eventually read the full story in the book “The Making of Doom 3,” and found myself wishing that id Software had actually implemented that story. But, had I not known of the existence of that “original" story, I would have no problem with the story that was actually told.
Doom 3 is one of my all-time favorite games and I will maintain until my dying breath that it is one of the best games ever made. This proclamation is likely to be highly controversial.
Upon release, many Doom fans were disappointed that Doom 3 wasn’t, well, more like the original Doom. Doom 3 was slower paced, the environments were dark, metallic and oppressive, and many Doom fans took issue with Doom 3’s horror-action focus in comparison to the pure action of the original Doom.
I get it. Doom 3 wasn’t more Doom and a lot of people wanted more Doom. Instead, it felt more like a game in the vein of Half Life, but crafted from the elements of Doom and finished with id Software’s signature polish. I had not played Half Life — a game that was critically acclaimed at launch and still maintains “legend” status to this time — before playing Doom 3. So, perhaps, part of the reason that I enjoy Doom 3 so much is that it took elements from a franchise that I held dear to my heart and used them to introduce me to a new and exciting variation on the first person shooter theme. (And, for the record, I eventually played the Half Life games and adore them all.)
It’s also probably worth noting that I replay Doom 3 a lot. As in, I play through the game and its expansion pack, Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, at least once per year.
Writing this post has me excited to fire up Doom 3 yet again, something that I fully intend to do in the coming weeks.
—Ashraf