No One Had More School Spirit in 2016 Than the Doom Slayer

Header Illustration by Gavin Spence. Welcome to the Waypoint High School Class of 2016 Yearbook. We're giving out senior superlatives to our favorite games, digging into the year's biggest stories via extracurriculars, and following our favorite characters through their adventures together in fanfic. See you in 2017! 

When people were talking about games to get excited about in 2016, Doom wasn't on many lists. Only days before Doom came out, in fact, people were already throwing shade. The game's publisher didn't send early copies to critics, which is often a sign a game won't be worth your time.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, though, and if anything, lowered expectations made the whiplash that much stronger. Doom isn't only good, it's one of the best games released this year, and a pitch-perfect example of how you revive a classic.

Few games mean as much to me as Doom. As I wrote earlier this year, not only did it cement my interest in first-person-shooters, but Doom 2 helped me understand how to use computers:

Doom 2 introduced me to the concept of software. I'd never installed anything before! Prior to id Software's shooter hellscape, my experience was flipping on pre-loaded Pong and shoving dusty cartridges into Nintendo consoles. Installation meant mulling over hardware requirements—"What's RAM?"—and other head-scratchers. A family friend came by the house to walk me through it, though not much stuck. But hey, at least the game was running? Thing is, when that person didn't answer the phone, I had to figure things out on my own.

That didn't, uh, always work out; I busted my computer (and my friends' computers) more than a handful of times trying to do weird shit. I learned what formatting does to a computer the hard way. It really does straight up delete everything from the hard drive! I learned Windows and OS X are different operating systems, meaning you can't shove a Doom 2 CD-ROM into your friend's Mac, drag a bunch of files over, and try a bunch of experiments to get it running "because you swear you saw someone say they did it on a message board." But each crash was a learning experience, and every time, what brought me back was playing more games.

And that's the big problem with nostalgia: expectations. A game can be great on its own, but when slapped with a familiar property, it becomes something else entirely. You could see how id Software struggled with this question during the course of Doom's lengthy development process. When faced with the question of "What is Doom in the modern era?" the originally pivoted to a Call of Duty-style game, something more grounded, gritty. It was later cancelled.

Doom was not "gritty." Doom was goofy, weird, and flashed a dark sense of humor. It was a game about manic, sweaty combat. There was never time to think about what you were doing in Doom—you shot things on instinct, asking questions after the corpses piled up. That's what the new Doom got so beautifully right; it captures the spirit of Doom, its core essence. When you manage to keep that part alive, nobody's going to fuss when you start changing things.

While modern shooters have generally slowed down, Doom sped things up because, again, Doom was fast . That speed allowed players to zip around the environment quickly. But in old Doom, those environments were mostly horizontal. If old Doom could have had more complicated spaces, it would have. New Doom does have that, and to make the most of it, players can climb over objects and jump incredible distances. Is it ridiculous? Yep. Does it help maintain that sense of speed, despite the increased complexity of the combat arenas? Yep.

And in a year that mostly sucked ass, Doom's irreverence was welcome. In the opening moments, a voice blares over the speaker, setting up the reason you're going to be fighting demons. This is what we've come to expect from games these days; even in the absurdist of situations, there's a deeply considered narrative justification for your actions. In response to this, the main character rips the screen down, tosses it against a wall, and moves on. This Doom, like the old Doom, exists because "Fuck it, blowing up demons is fun." That doesn't mean it's shallow—far from it, as I'd put Doom's layered combat against just about anything else this year—but it exists without pretension and without apology. What more can you ask?