I’ve now completed and 100%’ed every DOOM (and Quake, Heretic & Hexen) game on Steam. Bring on the next ones!
The amazing old-school DOOM artwork by Don Ivan Punchatz from 1993.
DOOM: Eternal was the last one left to complete, and I finally finished it up last night. Since its release back in 2020, I’ve made several attempts to play it, but it never really clicked, and I would abandon it each time around level 2. However, after finishing DOOM: The Dark Ages recently (which I really loved), I decided to give Eternal another shot.
DOOM 3 is my favorite in the series, closely followed by DOOM (2016) and The Dark Ages. The original ones are still great, but I’ve played them so much that I’m a bit burned out on them. Eternal is still the odd one out for me, much more frustrating than any of the other games (even more so than DOOM 3 on Nightmare), and DOOM 64 is hands down the worst. I think we can all agree about that part.
The first time I played DOOM was probably around 1994 or 1995, on our family’s Intel 386 DOS/Win 3.1 computer, which was too slow to run it properly, so the resolution was set way down. Nevertheless, I was hooked.
Little me, playing DOOM on my Pentium 133.
Another year later, I got my very own Intel Pentium 133 MHz Windows 95 computer, and set it up in my room. So I played the heck out DOOM I & II, and many other games. It was then that I started making my own levels using the original DOOM editing utilities, too. I still have a bunch of old WADs from those days.
The original DOOM editing utilities in action.
I get pretty nostalgic about this stuff as I get older. I miss the simplicity of those tools, like the DOOM utilities, Quake & Half-Life’s WorldCraft, and UnrealEd. They were so much more straightforward than modern tools, and you could just jump in and start creating stuff without tutorials, complex interfaces or scripting languages. However, the rose-tinted glasses make us forget how often these things would crash, losing days of work, and hour long compile times. :)