When the original Doom was released for the PC in December of 1993, I was nine-years-old.
It was a time before computers and the internet are what they’ve become now: pervasive and all-inclusive and crucial for every facet of life. In my small town especially, not many of my friends even had a PC let alone knew you could play videogames on them, which only added to the enigmatic, forbidden allure of Doom when my dad’s friend lent me the four floppy disks it took to install it.
Doom wasn’t the first first-person-shooter I’d ever played, but the disclaimer my dad’s friend gave me of, “Doom will blow away any first-person-shooter and any other game you’ve ever played,” had me more than a little intrigued.
Better than Wolfenstein 3D? I wondered how that was even possible, given how revered it was, the grandfather of the genre, released a year earlier in 1992 by the same developers, id Software. I loved Wolfenstein 3D; gunning down pixelated Nazis in brightly-lit, brick-walled war bunkers was the most thrilling, trailblazing gameplay loop I’d experienced up until that point, though I’d soon learn that Doom would be a different demon entirely.
Naturally, as Wolfenstein’s successor, Doom had an improved engine and gameplay – but those weren’t the only elements which made it hit so different. It was also the game’s look and ambiance. Doom was dark. Foreboding. And downright frightening.
Fighting Hitler in a mech suit was an absurdly daunting task but Doom had you descending into the very depths of Hell itself. Gone were the red brick walls and marble columns that seemed almost inviting by comparison, replaced by cold, metal walls, dimly-lit corridors with flickering lights and staircases that led to open-windowed rooms glimpsing the surrounding mountains outside (the latter being groundbreaking at the time); sewers overflowing with rancid green waste; and as you delved deeper, what appeared to be ritualistic summoning rooms replete with pentagrams, goat skulls, and other satanic iconography.
“Everything we’d seen before Doom was 90-degree hallways,” John Romero, co-founder of id Software and Doom‘s lead programmer/designer told Guardian in celebration of the game’s 30th anniversary. “Bard’s Tale, Dungeon Master – all these games did the same kind of thing. I still classify Wolfenstein 3D as a maze game, just like everything that came before it. Doom was the first to combine huge rooms, stairways, dark areas and bright areas, and lava and all that stuff, creating a really elaborate abstract world. That was never possible before.”
And then of course, there were the enemies. Wolfenstein had palette-swapped Nazi guards, zombie soldiers and a Mr. Clean-looking, bald-headed evil scientist in addition to Hitler himself, but Doom took things much further.
Facing an Imp for the first time in Doom/Microsoft
You started off fighting undead soldiers, perhaps because the developers wanted to give you a sense of familiarity early on. That drastically changed when you encountered your first Imp, a leathery-brown skinned demon with remorseless red eyes, Hellraiser spikes sprouting from its shoulders and the ability to spit fireballs.
In Wolfenstein I’d blaze through levels like the Arnold Schwarzenegger analogue that main character BJ Blaskowicz was. In Doom I’d spend countless nights (way past my bedtime), half-frozen in trepidation as I carefully navigated the unnamed space marine (later christened as Doomguy or the Doomslayer) through each labyrinthine locale, sometimes too scared to even round a corner for fear of being mobbed by a pack of demons.
But of all the enemies in Doom, none were even a fraction as terrifying as what would become my nightmare fuel: the Cyberdemon.
You first encounter it in Episode 2, Mission 8 of Doom, AKA the Tower of Babel. As I mentioned earlier, this was a time before the internet spoiled everything for everyone, so I had no idea the soul-snatching horror that the game’s penultimate (and most daunting) boss. You start E2M8 in an underground, octagonal-shaped room; on each wall there lays pinned a number of Barons of Hell, muscular, pink-skinned, goat-legged demons, some missing limbs, all of them with their green guts hanging out. The scene is made especially unnerving and ominous by the fact that the Barons are one of the most powerful creatures you’ve encountered in the game up until that point, and here they are, strung about and disemboweled like ornaments.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this/id Software
In the center of the room is a pillar with a red button on each side, like some enigmatic Skinner Box. When you press all four buttons, you’re able to exit to an outdoor area, a massive, hellish, gladiatoral arena where you’re trapped with it.
The Cyberdemon.
A towering, cybernetic, devil-horned goliath with a rocket launcher for an arm. It stalks after you, relentless, like a demonic terminator, massive goat hooves pounding. One of its goat hooves, replaced entirely by a robotic one, makes a whirring, mechanical sound the entire time too, like a piston.
The Cyberdemon doesn’t only look and sound horrifying – it also shrugs off seemingly every attack you throw at it. I remember frustratedly firing away at it, trying my best to weave behind pillars and watch rocket barrages spiral past my head, looking on with part awe and part disbelief as it lumbered after me even after taking a dozen direct rocket hits. Later I’d come to learn that the Cyberdemon has 4000 HP, the most of any enemy in Doom, but at that point, it might as well have been a million.
The first time I faced the Cyberdemon it wiped the floor with me. Repeatedly. Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say that it reduced me to a pile of boiling meat with its rocket launcher barrage. I emptied what seemed like my entire arsenal into it – plasma gun cells, chaingun barrels, shotgun shells – and yet it remained, a hellforged juggernaut, still charging after me. It was simultaneously the most exhilarating and disheartening boss fight I’d ever experienced.
The Cyberdemon in E2M8 of 1993’s Doom/id Software
Just when all hope seemed lost, a miracle occurred. I’d retreated to the starting area, the small octagonal room I mentioned earlier, trying to find some form of reprieve from the Cyberdemon’s relentless assault; it was there, ironically, among the strung-up corpses of the Barons of Hell (which the Cyberdemon itself presumably tortured), that the Cyberdemon got caught on one of the too-small doorways. I made sure that it wasn’t a ploy on the Cyberdemon’s part by unloading the rest of my shotgun on it. It was still stuck, walking in place against the doorway, free for me to attack without retaliation. Armed with only a pistol at this point, I continued firing.
Finally, after what seemed like 500 consecutive pistol shots, and thanks to the incredible stroke of luck and/or abuse of a glitch, I watched the Cyberdemon let out a pained howl and explode, leaving only a bloodied, oversized goat hoof in its place. 9-year-old me had achieved what few, if any other 9-year-olds in the world had achieved: slaying a Cyberdemon. What a time to be alive.
After that, I didn’t attempt to fight the Cyberdemon again for a long time – whether I was too traumatized or wasn’t confident I could recreate the circumstances in which I finally managed to defeat it – but both the challenge and thrill of facing it for the first time remains one of my most indelible gaming moments to this day.
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