#One doomed space marine software#
#One doomed space marine series#

The Union Aerospace Corporation appeared as a futuristic defense contractor in the original game.

#One doomed space marine series#

Other games invest hours - sometimes entire games or other media - into molding their doomguy knock-off empty suit space marines into вЂњbelievable characters.вЂќ DOOM embraces a much more straightforward commodity logic: doomguy is worshipped not for any diegetic reason but rather because of the existence of Doom itself as a two-decade old gaming franchise the ever-increasing absurdity of the reverence toward its protagonist mirrors only the relevance of Doom as a product.ДЇollowing these opening moments, we quickly learn the setting of DOOM through a series of voice-over conversations, holographic corporate PR messages, and, for the truly curious, endless reams of hilarious flavor text exposition. A quick action sequence later, and the player is taken out of this strange assortment of signs and symbols and treated to a hologram of several white-collar corporate employees literally worshipping a sarcophagus, which previously held doomguy.

In other words, it is brilliant, horrifying, and silly. DOOMвЂ™s art direction is the Slayer catalog spliced into an Apple Store. DOOM sits in an interesting interstitial space economically and culturally: mass market but niche, known but not ubiquitous.Дoomguy begins the game strapped to a table in a room covered with a confusing mish-mash of sci-fi-looking gadgetry and dime-store Satanism. ItвЂ™s a revival of a dormant one, which came on strong to mostly positive critical reception. So DOOM is neither a tiny, independent game nor a powerhouse juggernaut. In just the first three days after its debut in 2015, Call of Duty: Black Ops III was responsible for 550 million of those dollars, with Call of Duty being probably the largest first-person shooter franchise, and also the most generic. Some projections put a 2017 market peg at approximately $106 billion. The global market for video games is estimated at somewhere between $91 billion and an optimistic $99.6 billion mark. For a game with its unusual design - and one that is notВ part of a dominant franchise ( Call of Duty, PokГ©mon, FIFA, et cetera) - it did quite well. This is probably around $50вЂ“$60 million in sales at least (not counting fall of 2016). DOOM (2016) sold approximately one million copies by the end of summer 2016, and likely many more since then. Now DOOM plays doomguyвЂ™s emptiness back at the game-playing public.Дoomguy sells. In DOOM, you play as a nameless, faceless вЂњspace marineвЂќ so bereft of characterization or quality that across the many iterations of Doom, internet commentators have come to call the protagonist, simply, вЂњdoomguy.вЂќ Doomguy was a useful skeleton to hang the 1993 game on - a game far more focused on introducing then-new game mechanics and game coding practices. But one does not need to spend long with DOOM to know that the game is in on the scam. The mining of recent cultural memory and nostalgia for cheap commercial cash-ins has reached near parodic proportions, with no вЂњintellectual propertyвЂќ deemed too insignificant to be recreated ad nauseum. The question they ask is not вЂњwhat will you do?вЂќ but rather вЂњhow do you feel?вЂќ And DOOM doesnвЂ™t think youвЂ™re feeling particularly good at the moment.ДЄt first glance, DOOM is unremarkable. However, DOOM is built with a different, and, I would hazard, more accurate assumption in mind: games work primarily on an affective plane. It is often assumed that a fundamental question in games is one of вЂњagencyвЂќ - particularly the playerвЂ™s ability to make meaningful вЂњchoicesвЂќ within a game world.

Everything old is new again, and DOOM knows how you feel.

What in May looked like a bizarre retread, an uninvited вЂњblast from the past,вЂќ looks considerably different in cold winter light.

#One doomed space marine software#

This past year, while much of the world was transfixed by the increasingly bizarre American presidential election, a niche but still mass market of gamers saw id Software release the long-delayed DOOM (2016), a reboot of the 1990s game. What it lacked for in plot (and it lacked intensely in plot), it made up for by bringing the speed and fluidity of arcade style gameplay to the nascent FPS genre at home. The original Doom (1993) was a first-person shooter noted, even notorious, for its comically intense graphic violence and early, immersive pseudo-three-dimensional world.