Here are some facts about the DOOM shotgun: it’s 3D design is modeled after Remington’s classic 870 model, while the one you see in first-person view is made to resemble a toy shotgun made by the Stormbecker Corporation known as the TootsieToy Dakota. Though you did not know it in that moment, this weapon was about to blast open the doors of your perception. That is until you stumbled upon a wood stock, pump-action shotgun lying innocently in a corridor. Indeed, the early moments of DOOM suggest that persistence would again be the strongest weapon of all. The armies of hell were descending upon you, and your only real means of defense were a pair of clenched fists and a pistol that seemed to annoy your enemies more than damage them. You were a nameless soldier thrust into a seemingly impossible situation. Though it presented the action genre from a perspective that few others games at the time did, 1993’s DOOM began much like its 2D action predecessors. Though there were always instances of games that simply tried to exploit the player through extreme difficulty, the best arcade games, like Pac-Man or Galaga, achieved much of their brilliance through a perfectly implemented “easy to learn, tough to master” system that turned persistence into a reward. If this sounds defaming to developers of that era, let me assure you that it is not.
Though the exact method on how to accomplish this varied, the general rule was to make the game as difficult as possible in order to ensure that players continued to feed quarters into the machine. This wasn’t because developers thought that gamers back then were more capable of completing greater challenges, but rather because the arcade had established a game design philosophy built around great difficulty (and lots of extra quarters) that carried over to personal computers and consoles.Īrcade games were designed to deprive you of your quarters through any means necessary. At the risk of launching into a “back in my day” tangent, I feel comfortable saying that the average title from that era was more difficult than the average game today.
This crisis of confidence was a direct result of the popular game design of that era. As a gamer in the 80s, I knew one indisputable truth.
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