Hey this is super long. No judgements from me if you're just not man enough to read the whole thing. There's a tl;dr at the bottom.   A while back I wrote a few Reddit posts trying to pick at the weird relationship Doom 3 has as a sequel and my particular perspective on this as a newcomer to the series. I'm not really as much of a newcomer as I was before, obviously, but looking back at those posts and particularly the reaction to them, I made a few critical errors in both explaining my opinions sufficiently and in being perfectly honest with myself. This post is essentially a sequel to those posts, but I won't bother linking them because it honestly doesn't matter if you've read them before reading this. If by some obscure chance you have read them, you might remember, they were named something to the effect of 'Can someone explain why Doom is so highly regarded?'   I have a larger point to make about Doom but first, I have some points about my perspective I need to clarify right off the bat.    Point number one: I love the hell out of Doom and its sequels. I've loved each game the moment I started playing them, aside from Final Doom which I haven't finished. Excluding that, there hasn't been any official Doom release I had to 'grow into,' I was pretty much into them from the word go, each time. I think the mechanics of Classic Doom and its constituents are solid, and I think the tone implied by the music, level design, and spritework is engrossing.    Point number two: I don't really prefer Doom 3 to Doom 1 or 2. It's a sentiment that seems to be lurking in the background of my previous two stabs at this, but it's not really one I have. I think Doom 3 is a unique game just like Doom 4, and for that matter, Doom 64, are unique games.    Point number three: I played the games pretty much in order. I skipped Doom 64 until last because I hadn't heard about it, and like I said I still haven't finished Final Doom before, but other than that my experience of the series started at Doom 1 and continued chronologically until Doom 4.    Point number four, and this is important: I do not care about "story" in my video games. I think it's neat and all, but I don't care about whether a game has it or not.   I'll avoid making any large generalizations here. That being said, a few generalizations are necessary for my overall point, and it is very possible that I'm wrong about these statements. I've tried to do my homework, as well as think critically about original-release Doom and its culture, and I feel pretty confident in what I have to say, but I didn't grow up with these games, so it's possible I've missed the mark. If I'm off-base, please correct me.   Generalization 1) Doom 1 was, at release, a horror-action game with a horror-aesthetic but a heavy mechanical bent towards action.    Generalization 2) Most die-hard fans of Doom 1 don't consider Doom 3 a proper sequel to Doom 2.    Geez that's a lot of clarification out of the way. Sorry if you clicked off to go read something else. I think it's important to be transparent about my actual perspective so I don't have to hash that all out in the comments. Let's get onto the main point.   Doom 1, the first game, doesn't hold up anymore. It's also severely underrated.   I haven't found many deeper analyses of Doom, as an experience. There's a book called ScaryDarkFast which goes beat for beat analyzing the game from a level design standpoint. There's Masters of Doom, a making-of/biography about Romero and Carmack. There are plenty of video essays and think pieces about the impact of Doom and its history. Not much discussion on the peculiar Doom soup, when it comes to player experience on a first-time playthrough, which isn't surprising. You tend to see stuff like that for games like Super Metroid or Ocarina of Time or Portal or Inside or any number of landmark tone-driven video games. You don't see it for stuff like Doom.   Why would you? Doom 1, the first game, is a tough-as-nails shooter game -- it's not your grandfathers Wolfenstein 3D, enough said. You run around dodging projectiles in a minimum plot death-maze hunting down keys and 'munnitions for your massive arsenal of totally powerful guns. Its experiential makeup is completely mechanical; a pure power fantasy of one badass space marine. There's not any 'meat' to Doom. There's nothing interesting to dive into for a long-form discussion of its individual working parts. It's a simple action-fest with crazy demons and one dude crazy enough to slaughter them all. It's as simple as that. Right?   I really don't agree. Doom 1 is all those things, yeah, but at release, it was so much more. No pc game had ever looked quite like it. The 3D visuals and more grounded realistic settings (military bases, research labs, etc) lent itself to a certain level of immersion that was aided by the occult-like visuals and the stereo sound. That level of immersion and tension was then undercut by the rollicking fast-paced gunplay, resulting in an empowering, aggressive experience, for the time. It was a rising powerful journey built on blood and steel, edged into rust painted over in pentagrams with a rocking metal soundtrack and a lengthy campaign. The mechanics were solid, the secrets were devilish, the monsters were scary and blowing them up felt awesome. It was dangerous, edgy, and provocative. It was the type of game you wouldn't want your mom to see you playing, and that's something special. The people who made Doom were like rock stars, only their albums were shareware and those riffs were oh so killer. Doom for a newcomer was a video-game experience worth cherishing. Certainly worth analyzing.   But how do people analyze it nowadays?   Well, Doom 1, the first game, is a tough-as-nails shooter game. You run around dodging projectiles in a minimum plot death-maze hunting down keys and 'munnitions for your massive arsenal of totally powerful guns. It is completely mechanical; a basic power fantasy. There's not much 'meat' to Doom. There's nothing interesting to dive into. No long-form discussion of its individual working parts. It's a simple action-fest with crazy demons and one dude crazy enough to slaughter them all. It's as simple as that.   And the worst part is, they're right. Because nowadays, that's all Doom is.    Doom lost it's tone, almost completely. Nobody is afraid of Doom anymore, and nobody feels like a badass when they play it, not really. You feel powerful because you've overcome a tremendous mechanical challenge and mastered a digital video game's systems. But it never really feels like the cards were stacked against you. You don't believe you're fighting a genuine sinister force that outnumbers you and would overpower any other mere human. You're fighting simple videogame monsters. Nothing special. Doom has absolutely no immersion anymore, and that's a shame because for its time it must have been one of the most immersive games you could buy. It's an adventure lost to time.    I wish people talked about that.   I remember when I first played Doom 1. I played the shareware of it on some source port or another, I'm not sure which. I must have been in middle school or something? I'll never forget a little moment in E1M3 where you go to grab a key next to a window into an adjacent room. As you get closer to the key, a pinky demon runs into the adjacent room, but can't hurt you. Holy shit. I was terrified of that thing when I first saw it. It took so many more hits than everything else, and gah look at it! It was weird as balls and had a flat man face on a strange fleshy apelike running stance which moved faster than any other enemy I'd seen so far. I dreaded the moment I'd have to actually fight it in combat, and when I did I nearly stopped playing the game.   But nowadays, the pinky's just the pinky. He's not even particularly interesting as an enemy. I don't think twice when I encounter one. Just a tool to be utilized in the Doom combat dance. A purely utilitarian function that I have to outmaneuver and shoot. Same goes for the archvile. And listen, there's nothing wrong with a purely mechanical game. A metal action shooting game is still awesome, and I love mazes, actually. But it's so vanilla now, so nothing. It's just a fun experience to sink my teeth into and then back out.   So when I played Doom 3, I loved it, same as the other games. I didn't even know that a lot of Doom fans didn't like it, because it seemed to have gotten good reviews, and that was natural to me. Awesome atmosphere, fun action, clever horror, great tension, fantastic visuals, spooky monster designs. Mwah I loved it. What a game. What an adventure. To me, Doom 3 was everything Doom was supposed to be -- what it was at release, even. It was immersive, cutting edge, spooky, but exhilarating. I loved exploring the levels and finding my way through. Every monster encounter felt like a big deal and I felt like it was my skill that led me to victory over a truly demonic force, and the pinky demon freaked me the fuck out.   Nowadays, the pinky demons still freak me the fuck out.   But the thing is, people don't analyze Doom 3 either. Because Doom 3 is a sequel to Doom 1, which was obviously nothing more than a pure mechanical experience with good action and big mazes. So an analysis of Doom 3, likewise, starts and ends at "Added Flashlight" for good or ill. These games were shortchanged by history if you ask me. They're both seen as simple little nothing games, but in different ways, and both of those ways are equally untrue in my opinion. The conversation shouldn't end at "Doom 1 was just a gameplay game. And Doom 3 added a flashlight." There's so much more value to glean from these games, people have devoted their lives to them. And yet these two opinions seem to be held most strongly on places like here, perhaps to justify something, idk.   I think Doom 3 expands on Doom in an awesome way. I think Doom has meaning that gets overlooked. I think it's dumb how whenever I've tried to talk about that, people get mad as if I'm threatening their favorite game because I say Doom 1 doesn't hold up anymore. I hate how a title like "Doom 1 Doesn't Hold Up Anymore" immediately sounds like I'm gonna write about how the gameplay has aged.    tl;dr - Doom 3 is a great sequel, the first Doom is cooler than most people think and you're all idiots, gameboy doom is the best source port, obviously   EDIT: expanded and elaborated on Doom 3