YMMV / Doom

For entries with their own sub-pages:

• Doom II
• Final Doom
• Doom 64
• Doom³
• Doom (2016)
• Doom: Annihilation
• Doom Eternal

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The Entire Franchise

• Awesome Music: Now has its own page.
• Broken Base:
  • Each installment generally has its own identity; which one is the best? Largely split between the original games, Doom 3, Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal for the most part, with a bit of this showing for the novels, movie, comic and other sources. The original duology are classics with massive modding scenes that could provide an insane amount of replayability, but it's hard to deny that the vanilla experience is showing its age. Doom 3 is loved for going into the horror side of the games' action-horror blend and is genuinely scary, intense, and visually appealing, but the combat and general pacing are slow and clunky when compared to the original games. Meanwhile, Doom (2016) goes for the opposite tone, returning to the fast-paced action and has astonishing visuals, but leaves little room for the player to feel frightened by the game's enemies. Doom Eternal doubles down on 2016's actionization over horror, incorporating Stylish Action game design and frenetic arcadey fights, but is a lot less approachable for its Sequel Difficulty Spike and increased complexity, in addition to the much higher lore emphasis being either cool explorations of the 'verse or getting in the way of the gameplay.
    
    The differences that each game brings has led to a growing divide between fans of the classic games and the newer ones (2016 and Eternal, collectively referred to by some fans as "Nu-Doom"). Some reasons include the adoption of the arena-style gameplay made popular by games such as Quake III: Arena and Serious Sam versus the freeform exploration of the early titles, as well as the massive shift in tone and lore established by the newer games which altered the series from being a dark Action Horror franchise modeled after Aliens to a dark Science Fantasy outing inspired by Heavy Metal and Warhammer 40,000; the new fanbase now even has its own modding community distinct from the classic modding scene. As a side consequence, Doom 3 is slowly approaching Vindicated by History status (perhaps in part due to the aforementioned Tone Shift), with its fans becoming more vocal and praising the game for its innovations and atmosphere in spite of its flaws.
  • A relatively minor one since it never actually leads to any heated conflict, but one sometimes wonders whether or not fans will ever have a consensus on how to spell the game's title. Is it "Doom", "DOOM" or "DooM"?
• Cargo Ship: Doomguy X his guns is a very common one usually Played for Laughs, especially in the comic where he openly weeps at the sight of the BFG-9000. The most common weapon used is either the aforementioned BFG or the Super Shotgun.
• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: While both of the original games are still viewed as enjoyable on their own, they're extremely popular among modders due to the tools for creating custom WADs being readily available, and said WADs are usually small in size, making them easy to distribute.
• Common Knowledge: Doom's soundtrack is often characterized as just being metal midis that sound suspiciously similar to popular metal songs from the '80s and early '90s, however a lot of songs in the first Doom aren't upbeat metal riffs and are atmospheric or even outright foreboding, such as Sign Of Evil, Suspense, Dark Halls, and the aptly named Sinister, among several others. Doom II's soundtrack is closer to this misconception, presumably because the songs that are based on existing songs are incredibly obvious (perhaps most notably "Bye Bye American Pie", which is for all intents and purposes a straight MIDI conversion of Alice in Chains' "Them Bones") though it still has ominous non-metal songs like The Demon's Dead, Getting Too Tense, and Opening To Hell. Then there is the Playstation/Saturn ports and Doom 64, which throw all the music out for a new soundtrack that is entirely creepy ambiance full of Nightmare Fuel to make the games feel like they're Survival Horror.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Crossover Ship:
  • Oddly enough, people have started shipping Doomguy with Charlie from Hazbin Hotel. Nobody is really sure where that came from, especially when you consider how different they treat demons, but a lot of people seem to like it. The general premise being that he gains a soft spot for her, due to her being the only good-natured demon in Hell, as well as that she's the only person that could stop him from doing more damage than the purges. As seen here◊. Probably counts as Crack Pairing as well.
  • Some also like to pair Doomguy with Satina, though mostly in a Parental Substitute or surrogate siblings kind of way. The former can go hand in hand with the Charlie/Doom Slayer ship, with them being Satina's adopted parents.
  • In an even odder example, people are shipping Doomguy with Isabelle from the Animal Crossing series since Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom Eternal were set to release on the exact same day.^note Incidentally, both have technically appeared together in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Isabelle as a fighter and Doom Slayer's armor as an option for the Mii Gunner, with Doom staff pointing it out. This can go hand-in-hand with the Charlie/Doomguy ship, with all of them being friends.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Arch-viles are very liked among the fanbase for their unique mechanics of attacking the player based on line of sight and reviving other fallen demons, making them a very unique threat; essentially Love to Hate meets Demonic Spiders. Fanmade WADs have found all sorts of devilish ways to use them, like Sunlust putting them in a room where the only cover safe from them is a constantly moving set of walls that orbits them or Not Even Remotely Fair forcing you to use Arch-viles to Rocket Jump in order to progress.
  • With the proliferation of skeleton memes on the internet, the Revenant got newfound popularity for being just a basic skeleton with rocket launchers attached that punches you out in a comical manner. Being such a threatening enemy that shoots rockets with ridiculously good homing capabilities has also made it particularly infamous among Doom players. When it finally merged with the skeleton trumpet meme it managed to even become an Ascended Meme.
• Fan Nickname:
  • It's easy to forget that the Pinky is a nickname because it's so ubiquitous, perhaps in part because the canon name that the game gives it — Demon — is very vague (almost all of the enemies are demons of some variety). This situation ended up being Ascended Fanon to a degree: the Doom (2016) Pinky got its name from UAC members, as it wasn't given an actual name by other demons.
  • "Shotgunners" and "Chaingunners" for the Former Sergeant/Shotgun Guy and Former Commando/Heavy Weapon Dude respectively, as these names roll off the tongue a little better while also being more descriptive. They, along with the Zombieman, are also collectively referred to as "Hitscanners" due to their attacks all being Hitscan and the three enemies using the same sprites as a base.
  • Barons of Hell and Hell Knights are often collectively referred as "Hell Nobles" by the fans. They also nickname the pair of Barons of Hell that serve as the E1M8 boss fight as the Bruiser Brothers, which was also id's internal name for the pair.
  • The protagonist of the original series was never given an actual name in-game, and John Romero has stated that, being supposed to represent the player, he has no canon name no matter how much other sources try to give him one (e.g. Flynn Taggart from the novels or Stan Blazkowicz in Doom II RPG), so he's referred to as "Doomguy" by fans.
  • Some fans have referred to the sentry droids from Doom 3 as Metal Gear.
  • "Flame boi" for the Arch-Vile, which comes from a humorous Game Mod that replaces all sound effects with a text-to-speech program Saying Sound Effects Out Loud. Said mod translates the Arch-Vile's "spotted player" sound with "here comes flame boi".
  • "Agitating Skeleton" for the Revenant, thanks to the PRO DOOM MONSTER STRATS.
  • Cacodemons are often called "tomatoes", owing to their bright red coloration and roundness. They're also sometimes called "meatballs", but that name is more often used for Pain Elementals thanks to their brown hue.
  • Silent Doom for the Atari Jaguar port, coined by The Angry Video Game Nerd because it has no music.
  • The fanbase frequently refers to the first four releases in the series (Doom, Doom II, Master Levels for Doom II, and Final Doom) by the collective name of "classic Doom" or "Doom Classic", since the graphics and gameplay are so similar amongst them that they could easily be viewed as just one big game, and especially since most WADs (the backbone of the community) use assets from all of them. Doom 64 is also sometimes included in this set, since it uses the same engine, but not quite so universally, as it does actually have new graphics and altered enemy behaviors, and until 2020 was exclusive to a different platform.
  • "Facerocket" has become a popular term for being caught in the Splash Damage of your own rockets, whether because of map geometry or a demon (usually a Lost Soul or Pinky) getting in the line of fire. It's also sometimes used for when Cyberdemon rockets impact the player's face.
  • "Megawad" is the term for a fan-made mapset containing 15 maps or more.
  • "Slaughterwad" and "slaughter map", for wads and levels that pit players against absolutely massive hordes of monsters at once.
  • "Doomcute", which refers to a mapmaking style that focuses on creating high detail background elements, especially those that imitate real world places or use stock Doom assets exclusively. Going Down provides a great example for a wad built in this style.
  • The evil eye decoration became known as "Sigil eye" after the release of John Romero's unofficial episode Sigil, where the eye serves as a sign for "shoot here".
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Wolfenstein. Specifically, fans of the classic games are often also fans of Wolfenstein 3-D, and fans of the reboot tend to get along with fans of the Wolfenstein reboot.
  • With Warhammer 40,000, due to both franchises being set in grim and gritty sci-fi universes where Hyperspace Is a Scary Place and manly Space Marines slaughter The Legions of Hell as a matter of course. Some 40k players even consider the Doomguy/Doom Slayer an honorary Astartes and claim Doom is a prequel to 40k.
  • With Mortal Kombat, since both series were popular in early to mid 90s and have ultra-violence and oceans of blood. Both series got reboots in the 2010s and many Mortal Kombat fans want Doom Slayer to become a Guest Fighter.
  • An odd one in the form of Animal Crossing thanks to the intended release date for Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons being on the same day, resulting in a surge of fanart such as depicting Doom Guy teaching Isabelle how to use a firearm. This even extends to the modding community, with a mod where Isabelle becomes an AI partner who assists Doomguy by supplying health, armor, and ammo as well as helping Doom Guy kill enemies.
  • With Hazbin Hotel, of all things. The most likely explanation is that both involve dealing with a glut of corrupt demons, albeit through comically different methods. Either way, there's a lot of fanart that shows Doomguy and Charlie getting along.
  • Another one with Shin Megami Tensei, another dark and violent video game series about fighting demons, with special focus on Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, whose protagonist is often referred to as 'Doomguy' due to their similarities.^note Gun-wielding Heroic Mime in Powered Armor who fights demons in an Eldritch Location, except Strange Journey's protagonist can recruit the demons too.
  • Another one with Devil May Cry, where both protagonists of series slay troops of demons as their everyday jobs, and both series have rock 'n roll and heavy metal soundtracks.
  • While it once had a minor Fandom Rivalry with Halo, it turned into this once Doom (2016) came out, as said reboot had a lot in common with the series (both are FPS featuring green-wearing space marines fighting inhuman monsters) while still retaining its own identity. This only grew in 2020 when Microsoft acquired Bethesda, making both first-party Xbox IPs.
  • Serious Sam is a long-lasting rival/friend, and many people from both fanbases often interlap. It also helps that id Software is a longtime friend of Croteam, with the two often sharing assets and having friendly discussions; Croteam was even approached to develop what became the 2016 game, a few assets of which made it into Serious Sam 3: BFE (the Khnum enemy was their take on the Baron of Hell). Both series have a similar, somewhat non-linear plot of a badass human acquiring a lot of guns and taking down innumerable hordes of demon/alien baddies. They also have similar gameplay, although Doom is much more focused on platforming and strategy with enemies that are more of an individual threat and a story that tries to be serious, while Serious Sam throws you back in time, has Sam crash a flying saucer into a bus made out of crates, and throws a million rock-stupid enemies at you all at once.
  • With Chainsaw Man, thanks to Denji tearing apart demons just like Doomguy does.
  • Fans of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal tend to be fans of ULTRAKILL.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Doom wouldn't be the only first-person computer game series to come out of The '90s that had interdimensional demonic beings and various other supernatural aspects in it. Even better, the 2016 reboot was published by Bethesda Softworks, the creators of that other series, and both developers belong to the same company: ZeniMax Media. For extra hilarity, both the original and the 2016 reboot would end up getting published to Nintendo systems.
  • Edge magazine's infamous "If only you could talk to the demons" review of the first Doom came out only a month after Shin Megami Tensei II, the fourth game in a series where you can, as the reviewer wished, talk to the demons and form alliances. However the lack of global internet at the time meaning that very few knew the existence of the game. For additional hilarity, one of the first source mods released for Doom, Marine's Best Friend, added friendly monsters to assist the player, and most of subsequent source ports inherited such feature. Furthermore, 2019 saw the release of Mr. Friendly, a Lighter and Softer fan mod which not only allows the player to interact and talk with demons, but also do silly quests for them.
  • Sandy Petersen, who worked as a developer on Doom and Doom II, is also the creator of Call of Cthulhu. Not only did someone later make a Cthulhu Mythos-themed mod (Strange Aeons, for the original Doom), but said mod features Dimensional Shamblers (they are referred in one of the "Quit" message of vanilla Doom).
  • At one point, Doom was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows, the game was heavily promoted by Microsoft, Bill Gates himself appeared inside the game to promote Windows 95 and DirectX and there were even rumors of a buy-out even though all Microsoft did at the time is publishing and porting the Windows 95 version of the game. In September 2020, Microsoft actually acquired Bethesda and by extension, Doom.
  • One of the Compet-n speedrun categories added was the Solonet category (playing coop-mode alone, effectively). When Bethesda made an Updated Re Release of Doom in 2019, this mode was added as "Ultra-Violence+" but with "fast monsters" enabled like in Nightmare! mode. Imagine the difficulty fighting through a horde of monsters meant to be fought by a team of players but they're hyper-aggressive like on Nightmare! mode.
• I Knew It!: For many years, fans have theorized that Doomguy is related to B.J. Blazkowicz, even hinting at being his descendant in Wolfenstein RPG. On January 30th 2018, Tom Hall and John Romero both confirmed on Twitter that Doomguy is Billy Blaze's son and B.J.'s great-grandson.
• The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: The game series is about a Space Marine's eternal struggle against the Legions of Hell in defense of humanity, with lots of blood and gory violence and, later on, a very convoluted lore. The fanbase is famous for making silly memes and jokes like "DOOT" and "Pogodemon", making cute and wholesome crossovers with other franchises like Animal Crossing, and making Doomguy himself an over-the-top Memetic Badass.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • The legendary Doom Slayer himself, the greatest and most feared enemy of all demonkind, was once a humble marine caught in a demonic invasion. After fighting the demon hordes from Mars to Earth, the Slayer sealed himself in Hell before becoming a Night Sentinel to the world of Argent D'Nur. After reawakening many years later, the Doom Slayer resumes his fight on demonkind with overwhelming force and intelligent strategies, including shooting a hole through the surface of Mars to reach a way to Argent D'Nur. The Doom Slayer steadily destroys every opponent in his way, even unleashing the demons on the Maykr world of Urdak to destroy the Khan Maykr's base of power. Later fighting to bring the demons' ruler, the Dark Lord, into physical form to destroy him once and for all, the Doom Slayer is willing to gamble all existence on his chance to destroy the demonic threat for good.
  • Samur Maykr, better known as the Seraphim, aligned with the Father eons ago to defeat the Dark Lord Davoth and seal away Hell. Tasked with hiding the Father's life sphere, Samur, upon witnessing the Doom Slayer's battle prowess and willpower, assisted in helping him defeat the Dreadnought Titan by using the Divinity Machine to transform the Slayer into a legendary warrior and king, intending to use his skills and power later to revive his master. Coming to Earth years ago, Samur transfers his consciousness into an artificial human body, taking the name Samuel Hayden and becoming a powerful scientist who assisted mankind in discovering and harnessing Argent energy at the cost of many lives. Becoming the CEO of the Union Aerospace Corporation, Samur as Hayden releases the Doom Slayer when his understudy, Olivia Pierce, goes rogue and makes a pact with the Dark Lord in order to defeat her, then later assists him in locating Urdak to take down the Khan Maykr. Upon regaining his original body and being betrayed by Doom Slayer when he destroys the Father's life sphere, Samur fights the Slayer himself to prevent the Dark Lord's resurrection.
  • Davoth. See here for more details.
• Memetic Badass:
  • The protagonist, Doomguy. While he's already regarded as a legendary soldier by longtime fans due to his exploits against Hell, his over-the-top portrayal as The Dreaded in the 2016 game caused his reputation to skyrocket to Chuck Norris levels of infamy.
    "Doomguy once threw a grenade and killed 80 demons. Then it exploded."
  • The classic game itself because of talented programmers and hackers who can port it on many machines; see the trope below for further explanations. This also applies somewhat to its programmers.
  • Speaking of whom: the lead programmer of the original games, John Carmack. His code is legendary, but what especially put him in this position is the story that he created a thermite mixture to attempt to steal computers from a school when he was 14.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "PROTIP: To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies."
  • The Revenant has become entangled with other skeleton-related memes that circulate the Internet, such as the Agitated Skeleton, the (DOOT) Trumpet Skeleton, and the Spooky Scary Skeletons song.
  • The Godmode cheat code IDDQD has become a major piece of modern gaming culture and is regularly referenced in games, jokes, and is crossbred with other related memes such as the Konami Code. The "Get all weapons, ammo, and keys" cheat code IDKFA is very nearly as popular.
  • The BFG 9000 is such a memorable weapon that it has an entire article about its influence on gaming culture on Know Your Meme. It is also the Trope Namer.
  • The iconic "status bar face◊" - the protagonist's face displayed on the bottom that makes amusing grimaces depending on circumstances (getting hit by enemies, picking up a weapon, etc); over the years, it became memetic in Doom fandom and a common source of photoshop memes and shout-outs, as well as being referenced in some of id Software's later games.
  • The 16-page comic book released to advertise DOOM 1 on PC (DOOM Volume 1 - Knee Deep in the Dead) includes many a line that has since become memetic. DOOM 2016 even has its first spoken phrase include one of the more infamous ones.
    "They are rage; brutal without mercy. But you? You will be worse! Rip and Tear until it is done!"
  • "But can it run Doom?"^note The art of getting either of the first two games to run on as many computers and computer-like devices as possible, from the ZX Spectrum to the TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator, to a Canon printer, inside of Windows' CPU Utilization tab in Task Manager, and even a pregnancy test. It reached its zenith when you can actually play Doom as a Game Within a Game in Doom Eternal. Yes, you can even play Doom on Doom.
  • "HERE COMES FLAME BOI" in reference to the Arch-Vile, originated from a humorous Doom mod that turns every sound effect into voiced text to speech, it made it all the way to the Doom Eternal gameplay reveal, where most of the live comments said the phrase upon the appearance of the Arch-Vile.
  • "Unf!"^ExplanationAn onomatopoeia of Doomguy's grunt while trying to interact with walls, locked doors (if the player doesn't have a respective keycard/skull key in order to work), or even when trying to find secrets throughout the original games.
  • "A Bethesda.net account is required to play this title. Please connect to the internet to continue." ^ExplanationA message that appeared after booting up the 2019 Unity ports of the first two games for the first time. This seemingly arbitrary restriction for the over 20-year-old games quickly became a source of mockery, and similar to the Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice copypasta, everyone has had a field day putting this phrase in everything, such as Garfield: A Week of Garfield◊, SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, Kirby's Adventure, and Super Mario World◊. Since then, the developers have removed the reviled DRM and the PC version of the Unity ports are DRM-agnostic outside of needing a Bethesda.net account to download the free add-ons.
  • Pogodemon ^ExplanationAn edit of the Cacodemon sprite made to imitate the PogChamp emote from Twitch.
  • "If only you could talk to these creatures..." ^ExplanationA rare mixed review for the original game, Edge magazine's 7/10 review from March of 1994, found the relentlessly fast pace to be monotonous, and signed off with the above line, adding on that it would be "interesting" if you could "make friends with [the monsters], form alliances..." The line quickly became memetic in the Doom fandom, both for the reviewer's obvious failure to grasp the point of the game and also for the sheer absurdity of the idea of Doomguy befriending the demons.
  • "SPISPOPD" ^ExplanationIn the final weeks before Doom's launch, the hotly-anticipated game became the bane of many early gaming forums, who were getting clogged up with repetitive threads asking whether it was available or when it would be released. One Usenet user, Eli S. Bingham, suggested that Doom was only generating so much attention because of its cool, catchy title, and joked that id's next game should compensate with a really long and weird title instead, putting forth his own suggestion of "Smashing Pumpkins into Small Piles of Putrid Debris". The joke name and its equally silly acronym "SPISPOPD" quickly caught on among fans, inspiring entire parody websites about the non-existent game, leading to the creation of an actual game of the same title, and ultimately bleeding back into the real Doom itself, when programmer Dave Taylor added in a last-minute cheat code, "idspispopd", which grants players the ability to walk through walls and objects.
  • "Mother of God, its all toilet sounds!"^explanationThe Sega 32X port of Doom is infamous for the abysmal quality of its soundtrack, which many fans have likened to a soundtrack consisting entirely of flatulence. Go to any video of the 32X OST, and the comment sections are guaranteed to be filled with fart or toilet jokes.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Despite the Christian-spearheaded moral panic about the game back in the 90s, and although the franchise rarely ever bothers with following a traditional Biblical interpretation of Hell, many Christians are actually quite fond of the series, since there’s ultimately not much for them to object to about a story where the minions of their God’s worst enemy get slaughtered into gory chunks. Notably, this includes Sandy Petersen, co-designer of the classic games and a practicing Mormon.
• Rated M for Money: Alongside with Mortal Kombat, Doom helped codify and originate the mentality that controversy helps games sell.
• Recurring Fanon Character: John Stalvern is a space marine and the protagonist of the Troll Fic DOOM: Repercussions of Evil. While the fic is extremely short, John became well known because of its hilariously bad writing.
• Scrappy Weapon: The pistol in every game. In Doom, Doom II, and their expansions, it was objectively inferior to the chaingun, which used the same rounds but could fire them much faster with about the same accuracy, so you'd only use it for as long as it took to get said chaingun, and that's assuming you couldn't get by with just the shotgun. Subsequent games tried and failed to fix it. Doom 64 gave you the chaingun later to encourage you to use the pistol more, but shotgun shells were plentiful enough that you'd still be better off not bothering past the first map. Doom 3 gave the pistol a different ammunition pool from, and slightly higher damage than, the chaingun's main replacement (the submachine gun), but an even lower rate of fire than its classic counterpart; even with the game's emphasis on ammo conservation, you were still much better off just using the SMG and shotguns for most everything except the bosses (which require the minigun, rocket launcher, or BFG). DOOM (2016) made one last attempt to salvage the pistol by giving its version a Charged Attack and Bottomless Magazines... which still weren't enough to make it worth using. Doom Eternal finally just gave up and removed the pistol entirely in favor of starting you off with the shotgun.
• So Bad, It's Good: The comic, movie, and novels.
• Tainted by the Preview: Excitement for the 2019 re-releases of the first 3 Doom games was tempered by the fact that the games required you to log in to Bethesda.net for the first two games, even to play in single player mode. It didn't take long for the Internet to greet this with both frustration and derision. Bethesda later clarified that it was meant to unlock special content for Doom Eternal by linking with the Slayer's Club, but the mess was already made and the (supposed to be optional) Slayer's Club connectivity is mentioned nowhere in the game itself.
  • The controversy was also not helped by the fact that, at the same time as the ports launched, the Xbox 360 versions of the port were suddenly pulled from the Xbox servers, leading to people accusing Bethesda of deliberately pulling their purchased copies to force them to buy the new (and at the time inferior) ports. Bethesda quickly apologized, claimed it was an accident, and fixed it. The combination of everything surrounding the port and the utter disaster that was Fallout 76 being fresh in people's minds led to people assuming that Bethesda was lying. However, it likely was an accident, and possibly one that Bethesda was Mis-blamed for, at that. What likely happened was that Bethesda wanted to delist the old versions of the port from the Microsoft store - a fairly common practice when a new re-release of a game comes out, so as to prevent buyer confusion - and the Xbox 360 store, which can be finicky with delistings, fucked up and removed the game from people's purchases.

The Original Game

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Spider Mastermind has always been infamous for this. Sandy Petersen admitted it was a mistake to have it as the final boss in the original Doom ^note During the testing process, the tester for the levels (Petersen himself) would pistol-start every level on Ultra-Violence to ensure it was doable. E 3 M 8 is fairly limited in items, and thus the relative ease of the monster was obscured by the ammo situation; something made completely trivial if the player had saved ammo from earlier levels.. The main reason is if you have the BFG9000 you can just BFG rush it and win every time; sure it'll rack up damage very fast at point-blank range with its Super Chaingun but it won't instant kill you like the Cyberdemon's rockets will, while its huge body will easily soak up all the BFG tracers and die in a guaranteed two hits. It's even possible to get a One-Hit Kill at near point blank range, as the BFG blast plus all the tracers can deal out over 3000 damage and the Mastermind's huge body will make it soak up all the tracers easily, though this requires getting quite lucky in the original Doom due to the blockmap bug causing tracers to be blocked, but in source ports that fix the bug it's a lot more common. Even without the BFG it's simple to beat, as you can either stand far away and unload onto it with the Plasma Rifle, where the Mastermind's surprisingly high pain chance will stun lock it enough for you to kill it before it kills you, or as long as you have a piece of cover you can simply pop out, hit it, and then get back behind the cover, repeating until it dies without you ever getting hurt, as the Mastermind has quite a bit of startup to its attack. With how huge and unwieldy the Mastermind is it can even get stuck sometimes, where it's then completely helpless. And having more than one at a time can't make a challenging fight, when since they have a hitscan attack Masterminds will still infight with each other, allowing you to get them to destroy each other. The only way for the Mastermind to be a challenging fight is to have it an open area with no cover and without giving the player a BFG or Plasma Rifle, where it then becomes a blatantly unfair fight as the player can't dodge its hitscan attack, so mappers can't use it in that capacity either.
  • The Cyberdemon can be this in its original Tower Of Babel fight for those that can circle strafe well. Once you get past his giant roar and KATHUNK-KATHUNK-KATHUNK footsteps, he's less of a boss and more of a circle-strafing damage sponge since, unlike the Bruisers, there's only one of him and he hangs out in a much more open arena. His rockets are definitely faster than the fireballs you've been dodging up to this point, but after a while you will find yourself filing them under Painfully Slow Projectiles all the same. Since his rockets hit so hard and have the splash damage effect that can get you hit by their explosions even when you dodge, and he is a lot more mobile than the Mastermind, custom map designers can intentionally design their maps, sometimes cleverly and sometimes not so much, to cut down this issue. Particularly cramped areas with no room to circle strafe and close quarters are scary to fight the Cyberdemon in, as it becomes a lot harder to avoid the rockets and even harder to avoid the splash damage, while you have little room for error as even a Doom Guy with 200% health and armor will die to 2-3 direct rocket hits.
  • Even the battle with twin Barons at the end of the first episode can be cheesed out if you brought the Rocket Launcher with you. Pistol-starting E1M8 is much more challenging however due to the lack of Rocket Launcher and the player's arsenal being limited to pistol, shotgun and chaingun, making the fight more fair.
• Awesome Bosses: The original fight with the Cyberdemon. It's a gigantic demon with a rocket launcher for an arm and loads of bionics. It's in a stage where it's the only enemy besides a few Lost Souls, and you're handed a rocket launcher and tons of ammo to fight it on even terms. It explodes when killed because the ammunition inside it cooks off and detonates, reducing it to a pair of stubs where its legs were.
• Awesome Levels:
  • E1M1: Hangar is perhaps the most memorable level due to its simplistic architecture and the relatively low enemy count, making the speedruns a breeze to go through. To this day, there exist many fan remakes of this map due to how popular it has become.
  • E2M2: Containtment Area is liked by many due to its unique Container Maze layout, as well as being the Wide-Open Sandbox level with many locations to visit and slightly realistic architecture, which includes the raising platforms machine, a ventilation shaft and the introduction of crushers. For those who want to get to the exit as soon as possible, there exists a well-known bug that can do exactly that.
  • E2M7: Spawning Vats is no slouch either, being an amalgamation of the locations visited in both first and second episodes alike, including the computer station from E1M7, the aforementioned storage from E2M2 and the open area from E2M6.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The finale for the Game Boy Advance edition of Doom shows the ending picture from Ultimate Doom's fourth episode, with the marine carrying the severed head of his unfortunate pet bunny, but it doesn't show the cutscene from episode three that gives the picture its context, leaving new players wondering why the hell Doomguy is just holding some rabbit's head.
• Breather Level: Map four of Thy Flesh Consumed, "Unruly Evil" will come across as this. While resources aren't plentiful, the enemy count is low with no real dangerous placements nor difficult level sections, and the level on a whole is rather easy. Unruly Evil comes after those two levels and another fairly difficult level.
• Broken Base:
  • Should maps be played continuously, or should every map be pistol-started? There are those that can't fathom the idea of willingly giving up all their weapons after every map and having to scramble to get them back at the start of each map, while there are others who think playing continuously breaks a map's balancing and can disrupt the map author's intent. Generally people are amicable to others' preferences on how they play and one of the oldest tenets of map making is that every map should at least be beatable on a pistol-start (given that losing all your weapons was supposed to be the penalty for death and thus the original games are explicitly designed to have all their maps comfortably beatable when pistol-starting), however there are some map makers who don't really pay much mind to making their maps balanced for pistol-starts, making their maps overly frustrating or even nearly impossible on pistol-starts, while on the other end there are some map makers who enforce pistol-starting every map of their megawad by forcing the player to suicide exit every map (a suicide exit has the effect of clearing the map but still counting the player as having died, thus booting them to the next map with only their pistol, 100 health, and no armor, giving the player incentive to use up most of their ammo and vitality by the end of the level). Other times, the map maker may balance their levels around limited health and armor, and make weapons and ammo so abundant that pistol-starting isn't as huge of a disadvantage.
  • What is the best source port to play on? The question is mostly divided between two branches:
    • One side is those that modernizes the Doom engine. The most popular such source port is GZDoom, which provides modders a ton of opportunity to create things not possible or otherwise much easier than in the vanilla engine^note slopes for example cannot exist in vanilla Doom, but are possible in GZDoom , updates the engine to be more palatable from a modern perspective by fixing the myriad of bugs and quirks^note one example being having the option to remove the infinite height limitation, allowing players to walk beneath flying enemies, and adds a slew of visual and audio features, allowing for aesthetic improvements almost on-par with games on much more modern engines. But in doing so, it has a far less optimized engine that has to support all the new features^note One such example being that even the strongest of modern computers cannot run the infamous Nuts WAD in GZDoom without suffering an unplayable framerate, whereas non-ZDoom source ports can. and isn't fully accurate to the vanilla games even when its compatibility settings are set to strict, with subtle differences in the physics and RNG, and some bugs and mapping exploits no longer existing (this results in any demos recorded in GZDoom being not vanilla-compatible, making it undesirable for speedrunning, and some maps utilizing the aforementioned vanilla bugs/exploits may not fully work properly).
    • The other side of the coin are those that strive for vanilla accuracy and gameplay performance, which itself is split between strictly vanilla like Chocolate Doom, and vanilla-accurate but with limits removed and some other enhancements like PrBoom+. Favored by purists and challenge runners, they aim to maintain parity with vanilla Doom and can run massive maps containing ludicrous enemy counts without a sweat, at the cost of them being less approachable to younger audiences and not as easy to modify.^note For example, if you want to create a new custom enemy, in GZDoom you're able to just add it on top of what already exists, but in these ports you'll have to utilize DeHackEd to replace an already existing thing with the new enemy.
    • There's then dozens of other source ports aimed towards more specific needs, such as Zandronum, a fork of GZDoom optimized for multiplayer, and DSDA-Doom, a fork of PrBoom+ optimized for speedrunning. Like with the aforementioned pistol-starting, people overall are generally content to accept others' source port preference, and most will readily switch between whatever source port is required or works best for any given WAD, but there are some hardliners who will refuse to use any other source port, creating the occasional conflict when a popular WAD is nonfunctional or outright doesn't work with certain source ports.
  • "Thy Flesh Consumed" is either a worthy follow-on to the original three episodes included with the initial release of Doom that provides a decent challenge for people who mastered them, or is a poorly designed mess full of Fake Difficulty that follows a much different and inferior design philosophy that meshes poorly with the first three quarters of the game.
  • Brutal Doom also has this. Some consider it the best mod made for the game, period, to the point several further mods have been made which add onto or are otherwise based on its gameplay. Others consider it to be excessive and overhyped, if not a bit buggy. The arguments over the mod itself are also hurt greatly by Sgt_Mark_IV (the mod's creator) having alienated and/or angered a good chunk of the Doom community with racist remarks, a general bad attitude, and even encouraging a member of the community to commit suicide- acts which led to him being banned from several Doom message forums. Many map makers and other modders, in backlash against Brutal Doom, would refuse to make their WADs compatible with Brutal Doom, or even intentionally break compatibility, such as Demon Steele swarming you with small, invincible golden Revenants if you try.^note The developer of DemonSteele has commented that he doesn't hate Brutal Doom, he just got tired of bug reports whose cause always ended up boiling down to "tried to run it together with Brutal Doom" when it should be obvious they won't work together, given they replace many of the same objects and items, so he intentionally broke compatibility in a way that makes the cause obvious.
  • The soundtrack replacement in the PSX port, exchanging the hard rock/metal-influenced tunes for more abstracted compositions filled with creepy, industrial-sounding clanking and scraping noises. Some love it for establishing a very effective horror atmosphere, while others dislike it for establishing a very effective horror atmosphere, but one that's far more suited to Silent Hill-ish Surreal Horror rather than DOOM's furious, adrenaline-fueled run n' gun style. Notably, DOOM 64 has a similarly horror-themed soundtrack, but the fanbase isn't nearly as split on it because the game is designed from the ground up to have a darker and scarier tone than the original.
  • The all new sound effects in the PSX port and Doom 64 also get this, with some thinking they're more intimidating, impactful, and higher quality, while some others think they're cheesy, too echoey, and that the PC sounds are higher quality. Generally, the preference comes down to if one's first experience with Doom was the PC original or with the PSX port and Doom 64, with people having nostalgia for whichever sounds they first became familiar with. Some may also Take a Third Option and think some sounds were done better in PSX Doom/Doom 64 while thinking some other sounds were done better in the PC original, or that the darker soundeffects have their place, especially in Doom 64 with its focus on action horror.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The combat is immensely satisfying, from chainsawing Imps in two to blasting a Zombie's head out with a shotgun, with the cream of the crop being the One-Hit Kill that a berserk punch can do on a Pinky.
  • Various mods are themed around catering to a power trip gameplay style: absolutely eviscerating monsters with Brutal Doom, Demonsteele, or Guncaster will rarely not be fun as hell.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Doom and Doom II often get called 2D or 2½D. While the engine may appear primitive and might seem to function like Wolfenstein 3-D's lack of a third dimension (monsters use sprites, can't have rooms vertically above each other, most objects are infinitely tall, no jump button), by the strictest sense of the term, the game uses all three axes of movement. To name a few things where height comes into play in addition to lateral movement, height allows the player to drop down to lower floors, blocks them from ascending to higher floors without an elevator or a short enough incline, lets them move beneath projectiles, and prevents the player from being hurt by damaging toxic waste floors unless they're actually in contact with the floor.
  • Many people believe that this game was meant to be played keyboard-only, with mouse and keyboard being the control method used later that retroactively made the game easier when it became more widely adopted. As community member Dwars analyzes, this is largely false. The Doom manual and encourages the mouse and keyboard setup for experienced players, stating that the mouse enables finer control over aiming. This can also be seen in how the Attract Mode displays many sharp turns that cannot be done with the static turn speed of a keyboard, only a mouse. Lead developer John Romero has gone on record stating that "Doom was made for mouse input". Dwars suggests that the myth originates from the Doom: Collector's Edition release, which contradicts the previous points and implies that the "true" way to play the game is with keyboard only. As for why Doom is seen as an easy game when it wasn't at its release, it codified the concept of PC gaming and mouse controls were rarely (if ever) used by games, so even among the many players who used mouse controls, aiming using a mouse would need some learning to do since the muscle memory would not be developed.
  • A lot of people not closely familiar with the series mistakenly believe that the first game takes place on Mars. While Doomguy is stationed on Mars in the backstory, the actual game takes place on Mars' moons, Phobos and Deimos, as well as Hell and Earth but never Mars itself.
  • There's a common misconception about how the berserk power up works: basically it's a black healing kit which raises your health to 100 (unless it's already higher) as well as massively increases the damage of your punch attack. The confusion comes in with how long it lasts: when you pick it up, the screen turns red for about 20 seconds before fading back to normal. Since every other power-up only lasts for a set amount of time, many people are lead to believe the Berserk Pack's effects only last as long as the screen is red; in fact, you still get powered-up punches until you die or exit the level. Technically, it does have a set duration, but that timer is several years long, so you're very unlikely to ever see it run out before you exit the level.
  • During the release of the 2019 DOOM Enhanced ports, many believed that the first two Doom games were entirely remade on the Unity engine. In actuality, these ports use the Unity engine as a shell for the original id Tech 1 engine's code, allowing the engine to be easily ported across multiple platforms. Similarly, when the PC version of these ports came to Steam as a free update, there was some outcry from detractors claiming that a Bethesda.net account was required to play the games due to the dire state these ports initially shipped in, ignoring the fact that the Unity ports are entirely optional as the vanilla version of these games are still provided and the mandatory Bethesda.net login issue was already resolved by the time the Unity ports were re-released for PC.
  • The hanging corpses seen in Hell levels are often assumed to be taken from real photos of hangings, namely the hangings of Benito Mussolini and his followers, due to how photorealistic they look. According to Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud made the hanged corpses using G.I. Joe figures.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Ultra-Violence is largely treated as the "standard" difficulty despite it originally being designed as the original game's hardest difficulty, and so many players will just refuse to play any other difficulty. While this works fine for Ultimate Doom and Doom II since they're designed to be tough but fair in UV, it does become an issue when one ventures into WADs, where many players end up frustrated when they're unable to beat WADs designed to be much harder than the original games because they won't try a lower difficulty. This isn't helped by many map makers only making a token effort at implementing the lower difficulties or literally changing nothing at all for them in their WADs. It's so bad that some map makers like Ribbiks actually withheld the UV version of their maps until players proved they could handle the HMP difficulty on them, so that they didn't have to deal with people complaining their maps were too hard after only playing on UV. There is a vocal contingent in the community though pushing back against the "UV or bust" mentality, encouraging map makers to take advantage of the lower difficulty settings so their WADs can be enjoyed by a greater variety of skill levels, while chiding players that complain a WAD is too hard after only playing on UV.
  • The fanmade mapset Dwango5, according to Doomworld. Seventeen DWANGO compilations for a total of over 300 maps, and only the first and, more rarely, seventh maps of Dwango5 saw any play, the latter mostly limited to the time when ZDaemon was the most popular multiplayer source port.
  • When it comes to the gameplay modding scene, Brutal Doom has been hit extremely hard with this, due to the majority of players never trying anything else and loading everything they play with Brutal Doom (and then being turned off when it inevitably doesn't work). Or worse, being completely unaware of any other mods or their accomplishments. It's been common enough that the gamer whose first question is "Is it compatible with Brutal Doom", and then slates a mod if it isn't, has actually become a stock stereotype in the Doom modding community.
• Demonic Spiders: Normally Pinkies/Spectres are a borderline Goomba, due to being melee-restricted enemies whose melee attack is slow and incredibly short-ranged. However if you play on Nightmare difficulty or with fast monsters enabled, they become far deadlier, as they run at twice the speed (which makes them the fastest enemy in classic Doom by far), their bite is twice as fast (meaning you can no longer just keep moving out of their bite range so easily and they'll rack up damage quickly through repeated bites), and their pain state animation has half the duration (meaning they can no longer be stunned as effectively, notably the Chainsaw can no longer reliably stunlock them to death). "Turbo Pinkies", as they're called by fans, will be able to nearly keep up with Doom Guy's own incredible running speed and will force the player to act fast as they charge towards them, while being able to corner the player quite easily, where it's near certain death for a player that gets cornered by a group of Turbo Pinkies. Also since this isn't Doom II, the player does not have the Super Shotgun to point-blank one-shot them with ease (which makes them significantly more manageable in the sequel), and with them beelining for you with their incredible running speed, using the Rocket Launcher against them is dangerous as often they'll get close enough to make you get hit by your rocket's splash damage, so without plasma you have no reliable way to take them out quickly (it takes 2-3 close-range Shotgun blasts to kill them, well over a second of Chaingun fire to kill them, and Berserk Fist's highly random damage makes it very unreliable for one-shotting them). Those that attempt Ultimate Doom on Nightmare or play with fast monsters will find themselves getting killed by these demons very often.
• Difficulty Spike: Episode 4 of Ultimate Doom is significantly harder than all three prior episodes. Additionally the first two levels of Episode 4 are the most brutal levels in the game due to the extreme scarcity of health and ammo, so the difficulty spike is especially shocking upon starting it.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • In the original Doom, Dis is generally seen as one, being just a small visually-unimpressive one-room arena that just houses the Spider Mastermind and a few other monsters, while the Spider Mastermind is infamous for being seen as a significant step down from the Cyberdemon in the previous episode, to the point that even the developers admitted it was a mistake to have the Mastermind after the Cyberdemon.
  • Ultimate Doom's final level, Unto the Cruel, is also generally considered one; while unlike Dis it has an actual level leading up to the boss fight, the fact it's against the Spider Mastermind again, in an arena where it's even easier to fight both design-wise and item placement-wise (complete with an easily assessible alcove with BFG inside), left a sour taste in many players' mouths. Unto the Cruel is also a significantly easier level than much of what the player contended with in Episode 4.
  • Some go even farther and argue "Thy Flesh Consumed" is a Disappointing Last Chapter, due to the very heavy Difficulty Spike and not always for the right reasons. For instance, many levels start you in rooms cram-packed with enemies, something that was never done even on the hardest maps of the first three chapters, and a sudden much greater emphasis is put on platforming in a game that doesn't have a jump button. It also features absolutely nothing new from the first three chapters aside from its skybox, with even the boss being recycled as mentioned above. It does get its defenders from people who enjoy the far greater challenge though.
  • In the Jaguar, 32X, 3DO, and GBA ports of the original Doom, with the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind removed, a new final level was needed, so the Fortress of Mystery was moved from a secret level to the final level, completely unchanged. Now Fortress of Mystery is generally considered the absolute worst level in the original/Ultimate Doom and a complete letdown of a secret level, so needless to say, this applies to these ports.
  • The PlayStation/Saturn ports of Doom in their Doom 2 episodes, due to not being able to port in the Icon Of Sin, have a unique final level not in any other versions of Doom, Redemption Denied. The map consists of a replica of the IoS's starting room with all the weapons (sans the BFG), and then you're teleported to a large and enclosed plainly textured arena, where you initially fight against a large horde of Barons Of Hell, but with them grouped up and a large space to easily circle strafe them in while you lob rockets with impunity, they're of little threat. After you kill them all, two closets open up with a Spider Mastermind each, which sounds like it could be challenging... until you remember the Mastermind uses a hitscan attack and thus they can (and will easily) infight with each other, leaving you with just a single near-death Mastermind to fight at the end. If you go out of your way to avoid getting them to infight, it might be a bit tricky, as the pillars you use to take cover will automatically slowly lift up and down, but they're still simple to handle with your Plasma Gun or SSG, since they're still Spider Masterminds. Then if you're playing continuously as most players do, you can still just BFG rush them to win.
• Ending Fatigue: One of the bigger critiques of the original three episodes is that they run out of steam faster than you would think. The original episode introduces you to six weapons, five enemies, and one boss. The second episode introduces you to one weapon, two enemies, and one boss. The third introduces you to one weapon (which can be missed) and one boss. Add in the fact that a lot of Doom's enemies function similarly to one another (there are three each of melee-only enemies and ones with both melee and a ranged projectile, for instance), and it doesn't take long for the game to start running out of tricks. It really doesn't help that the second episode ends on what most would consider a suitably climactic Final Boss, only for the game to keep going for another nine maps and end on an absurdly easy final boss.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Cyberdemon left a big impression on everyone after their first time encountering him, being so large and intimidating while making a very loud "KATHUNK" for every step he made stalking the player to terrify them, and in their first time through players generally found him really difficult, as their inability to strafe effectively (especially limited by the poor controller options back then) got them absolutely murdered by his rockets that killed in 1-3 hits while the Cyberdemon took seemingly forever to kill. To veteran Doom players with strafing down his original battle in an open area is now a joke of a boss fight and in general the Cyberdemon alone does not suffice for a remotely decent boss fight nowadays, but his initial impression was so strong that he is still one of the most famous video game bosses of all time, and people generally agree that the Cyberdemon would have made a much better final boss than the Spider Mastermind, with even the developers admitting having the Mastermind afterward was a mistake.
  • The Cacodemon is the second most recognizable Doom monster after the Cyberdemon and its most popular, with it being a sort of mascot for the series. Fans particularly find its Ugly Cute design endearing.
  • Daisy the bunny appears only at the end of the third and fourth episodes of the first Doom (as a Tragic Keepsake for Doomguy in the latter), yet she gathered a considerable fanbase. Some fan WADs have her as a living entity.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • A recurring complaint about Doom (2016) is that the campaign becomes homogenous and unable to provide varied challenges near the end. Yahtzee Croshaw points out how the game eventually gets kind of samey, and Mark Brown comments that the core gameplay starts running out of tricks after some time. The original Doom faced this issue even harder: it only had 7 non-boss monsters compared to 2016's 19, stops introducing new ones early into episode 2,^note On the easiest two difficulties, the Cacodemon is last to appear in level 3; on the other three difficulties, the Lost Soul is the final new basic enemy and appears starting in level 2 and many of the monsters fight the exact same way.^note For example, the Imp and Baron both throw basic projectiles occasionally; the Cacodemon does likewise from above; and the Cyberdemon mildly varies this by shooting three at a time But when Doom was new, the monster variety was actually quite significant, especially compared to Wolfenstein 3-D, which had about the same number of normal enemy types but had barely any variety between four different hitscanners (one of which doesn't appear until the final episode), the melee dogs, and the fireball-throwing fake Hitlers that only appear in one level. And, even when playing Doom from a modern perspective, the game has measures to reduce how repetitive its combat can be, such as starting over with the pistol at the start of each episode, to challenge the player to fight tougher enemies with a more limited situation.
  • One of the primary complaints about Final Doom's difficulty - to say nothing of that of several of the other "Doom clones" of the era - is its overuse of zombies with hitscan weaponry. The fault for this can be laid at the feet of the original game, which uses hitscanners as its most basic enemies and its Final Boss. Doom got away with it for several reasons: the basic zombies are as basic as basic enemies can get (they move slowly, attack rarely, have significant aim deviation reducing their threat beyond a couple feet, and do low damage on the rare occasions they do hit you - Wolf3D's brown-shirted guards are more dangerous than a Doom shotgun zombie), while the final boss, which makes up for its low accuracy by emptying its gun in your direction, can still be easily stunlocked to death by hammering on it with the chaingun or plasma gun, and can even be killed in one shot with surprising regularity with a close-range BFG blast. Doom II introduced chaingun zombies, which are slightly tougher and also fire their gun endlessly until you kill them, make them flinch, or break line of sight, but they didn't become a problem until Final Doom because the game was conservative in their use. One can compare MAP10: Refueling Base from Doom II to MAP09: Stronghold from TNT: Evilution, maps infamous for having the most enemies among their respective games, and see the difference: both have about 300 enemies each with a significant number of zombies, but in the former, only about 100 of its 300 enemies are zombies, many either in wide-open areas where they can't regularly hit you or areas with a lot of cover to take them on two or three at a time, and there are only four chaingunners; in the latter, 200 of its 300 enemies are zombies, almost 70 of those are chaingunners, and the vast majority of them are clustered together in cramped areas where it's impossible to either take cover or deal with them without letting all of them shoot you at once. Later games in Doom's style, though backing away from the ridiculous number of basic enemies, still make them far more dangerous than they have any right to be as the most common enemies, often being able to shoot you the instant they see you, moving faster and shooting more often, dealing greater damage while having next to no aim deviation, and often some other highly-dangerous gimmick, like Blood's basic cultist being able to toss even more highly-damaging sticks of TNT on higher difficulties.
  • The Spider Mastermind gained a lot of infamy for being either too easy or too hard to fight depending on the circumstances. Yet its first debut on E3M8 of the original Doom was forgivable because, while an absolute joke if you carried over the weapons from previous levels, the Mastermind is actually more challenging to fight when pistol-starting the map due to limited ammo pool and having to collect rockets from the far end of the arena, giving the boss more than enough time to pelt you with its chaingun. It wasn't until Ultimate Doom and its E4M8 that the Mastermind's issues had been all brought to light: a cramped room where it is given less maneuverability, a lot of enemies for it to infight and presence of powerups, plasmagun and even a secret BFG to kill it with little issues.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The BFG. It fires a big green orb that deals a lot of damage, and upon colliding with something, the player (not the orb) emits 40 damaging rays in a spread pattern pointed in the direction the player was facing when they fired.
    • In single-player, the BFG is unparalleled in its ability to both mow down swathes of fodder, and take out major targets as quickly as possible. With good aim and a bit of luck, you can take out even a Cyberdemon in only two shots or a Spider Mastermind in just one; without those things, you just need another shot or maybe a few shotgun blasts to finish the job. The only balancing factors are its high ammo cost (40 cells per blast) and the fact that it's only found late in the game, but once you do get it, not much in the game can survive more than two shots. The ammo cost isn't even that bad if you consider the benefits of wiping out most of an encounter for just 40-80 cells.
    • In multiplayer, you can fire off a shot in one room, run over to another player, and then use the tracers to frag them instantly without them even knowing what hit them. They could even kill you first, and still get nailed by the hit-scan!
    • In the Super Nintendo port, the BFG manages to be even more powerful thanks to simplified mechanics. It's effectively fire and forget and there's less effort needed to position yourself right. Any big fight gets reduced to a joke as the BFG fireball detonates even faster.
  • The Shotgun in the SNES port is this thanks to how simplistic the weapon is, working more like a pump-action rifle than a shotgun. With the ability to chip away at monsters from relative safety and do so with surprising accuracy, the "Shotgun" is even more of a work horse here than before. Getting the hang of Shotgun sniping takes away much of the difficulty from the clunky controls.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The final level in Episode 3 of the first game is named Dis, after the capital city of Hell in The Divine Comedy.
  • The episode title, as well as the level titles (save for the secret level), of Episode 4 are all taken from The Bible.
• Genius Programming: Much like how Wolfenstein 3-D used raycasting to simulate 2D despite hardware limitations, Doom used binary space partitioning to take it even further. Now the levels had stairs, different heights, rooms were no longer restricted to right angles thus leading to more variety in level design. It also allowed the game to run on basically any computer thus ensuring it would be a hot seller.
• Genre Turning Point:
  • Doom wasn't the first FPS game, but it was the game that really set the genre on fire. Soon after Doom was released to massive acclaim due to its great gameplay, frightening atmosphere, and revolutionary multiplayer, countless video game developers started developing their own FPS games. Because this was before the term FPS existed, computer gaming magazines referred to these games as "Doom clones."
  • Hell, Doom was the platform turning point that established the PC as an equal, if not superior, choice to consoles for gamers thirsting for high-adrenaline action games. Bill Gates made certain that a Windows 95-compatible version of Doom was available once he found out that even more PC users had installed it than Windows itself, and another major goal kept in mind during its development was ensuring Doom could be launched while Windows 95 was running without any issues. Not for nothing is Doom considered one of the most-significant PC games of all time.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Lost Souls, who just float around blocking you, and then charging at you at random intervals, while they also don't make any sounds when alerted, so a lurking Lost Soul can often catch players offguard. What makes them most annoying though is their strangely high 100 HP; it doesn't sound like much at first, but it's nearly double that of an Imp's and equivalent to Doom Guy's own default HP, while with this HP they can almost never be one-shotted by even a point-blank Shotgun blast, it takes about a second of Chaingun fire and ten bullets to kill them, and the Berserk fist has an unreliable 60% chance to one-shot them. As a result, killing several Lost Souls can be quite tedious and an ammo drain. Because of this, it's not uncommon for WADs to reduce Lost Souls' HP to half, a change that was even made in the official Playstation and Saturn Doom ports, as well as in Doom 64.
  • Shotgun Guys can prove to be a hassle, as since their attack is Hitscan, you can't dodge their fire and it's completely random if they hit you or not, while with their Shotguns firing three pellets, they're a lot more accurate than the feeble Zombiemen, so more often than not they will hit you as long as you're in their line of sight and not far away. Their Shotguns can also do a surprising amount of damage if you get hit by all three pellets, up to potentially a hefty 45 damage, making them considerably more dangerous than the other low tier enemies. When playing on Nightmare or with fast monsters enabled, they can become an outright Demonic Spider, as they'll fire nonstop the instant they see you, essentually turning them into accurate and undodgeable turrets.
• Good Bad Bugs: The id Tech engine Doom runs upon has some amusing 'quirks':
  • Custom level makers discovered that you could spawn 'extra' copies of the player into their levels, that could be used for all sorts of interactive things. Naturally, level designers quickly exploited this to create "voodoo doll" effects that allowed them to create remote kill triggers for instant death traps.
  • Due to the way the game handles textures, it is possible to get a Hall of Mirrors effect under certain circumstances. This effect is actually deliberately utilized in some fanmade mods.
  • In early versions of the game, because of how the game assigns an 'owner' for sources of damage and the monster infighting code, a monster that injures itself by accidentally detonating a barrel with its own ranged attack while trying to hit its original target will end up in a frenzy, killing itself with its own melee attack if it has one or just shooting blindly in all directions if it's a purely ranged attacker. This phenomenon is known as "barrel suicide", and while later versions of the original game fixed it, like several other glitches, some source ports reimplement it because it's hilariously dumb.
  • The splash damage hitbox for a rocket is in the form of a cylinder of infinite height, which can spill off of the edge of a floor and affect things on the floor underneath that edge. Players can exploit this bug under certain conditions to kill monsters on a lower floor with the rocket launcher without having to properly autoaim.
  • The rather simplistic physics system for the game means that you can move noticeably faster by running forward and strafing in a direction at the same time.
  • You can clip through gates and gaps by simply walking up against them and using vertical mouse movement to push yourself through them. While it takes a few seconds and may require a few attempts, it's rarely slower than taking the intended path.
  • The baseline engine has some amusing behavior if the damage value of an attack is set to an absurdly high value, such as by using DeHackEd. If the damage is sufficiently high, instead of an actor being blown away by projectile, they'll go flying towards you like you harpooned them with a cable. This can lead to wacky behavior like a monster hitting you in the face at high speed as they die.
  • As shown in this video, you can manipulate the Pinkies' speed by abusing the "New Game" option. This allows you to play with regular-speed Pinkies on Nightmare difficulty, make them slower than normal... or give them effectively infinite speed, allowing them to insta-kill you as soon as they spot you.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of the quit messages is "If I were your boss, I'd deathmatch ya in a minute!" A few short years later, the workaholic John Carmack, convinced people weren't working as hard as he was, moved his desk into the hallway of the id Software offices specifically to make sure nobody was wasting company time, and John Romero was fired from id because he spent too much time slacking off in deathmatches.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: After learning that Doom was installed on more computers than Windows, Microsoft founder Bill Gates briefly considered buying id Software before deciding to have a team port the game over to Windows 95, and at the time it was all that Microsoft did for Doom. In March 2021, Microsoft purchased ZeniMax Media, the parent company of id, making Microsoft the owners of id and Doom.
• It Was His Sled:
  • The existence of the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind was originally a spoiler, with the manual not having them in the bestiary and the game making no hints that there was anything bigger than the Baron. Word of mouth got out quickly after the game's release about them though, and the Cyberdemon became so infamous that it would become one of the game's most iconic monsters, with it ending up on the cover art of the sequel released less than a year later. Additionally manuals for the various console ports no longer tried hiding their existence either.
  • Doom Guy dying and going to hell at the end of Episode 1 was meant to be an unexpected twist at the time, with even the episode's ending text lampshading how it "wasn't supposed to end this way". Like with the above example though it quickly got out how the episode ends, especially given the sheer magnitude of people that played the shareware version that consisted of just the first episode.
  • The demons making it to Earth at the end and killing Doom Guy's pet rabbit. The scene of Doom Guy's impaled decapitated rabbit is probably the most shocking image from the classic games, and the sequel's title outright gives away that it's supposed to take place on Earth, so one would have to be completely unaware of the sequel to not know how the original game was going to end.
• LGBT Fanbase: The modding scene is very pro-LGBT; multiple prominent modders are visibly queer, and the official Discord server for ZDoom (the family of Doom ports best known for their modding capability) uses the gay pride and trans pride colors for its icon.
• Misaimed Fandom: In one of the most infamous cases of this trope, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, were avid fans of the game and even created custom maps for it. Doom was one of many different reasons cited as to what motivated the pair to shoot up their school. The reason this is Misaimed Fandom is because the Doomguy refuses to shoot unarmed civilians, and straight up assaulted the officer who ordered him to do so in the backstory.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The "Power-up Get!" gong sound in the first two games.
  • The first time you charge up and blast the BFG, that electrical crackle and whoosh of its discharge will satisfy you most immensely as that horde of demons just melts from the blast wave.
  • The sound of a shotgun cocking each time you pick up a weapon (even if it isn't a shotgun).
  • The death rattles of the Baron of Hell, Cyberdemon, and Spider Mastermind.
  • The double-barreled shotgun. Any game.
  • That nice pulpy sound of something or someone being gibbed (so long as it isn't yourself).
  • The first time you rev up that chainsaw. You know that your best friend has arrived.
  • You reach the end of a long and brutal level, and press the switch. *ka-thunk!* DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN!
  • The dying snort of a Pinky Demon is oddly satisfying, especially if you punched it out.
• Narm: In the SNES port of the game, the limited memory means that many sound effects get reused, leading to amusing curiosities like the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind using the Baron of Hell's death report, and their death animations being sped up tremendously.
• Narm Charm: The deep voice declaring your victory at the end of the PS1 version is clearly artificially deepened and is delivered in a lovably Evil Is Hammy Troll tone, but coupled with the triumphantly sinister fanfare it plays over...it all just works so well for a balls-off-the-wall action game like Doom. It can also be a breath of fresh air after being treated to ominous ambience for most of the game.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Tons of it. Doom specializes in this trope even in spite of being relatively lighthearted Black Comedy.
  • The Playstation port is rife with this, thanks to its creepy ambient music, colored lighting creating a more forebading atmosphere, and the monsters having more intimidating sounds.
  • In source ports with the aforementioned "Ouch Face", it's pretty funny the first time you see the Doomguy's expression when he takes high damage. As his health drops lower and lower, though, and the "Ouch Face" is triggered, you get to see the Doomguy's facial injuries in all its glory, including lacerations, with blood still dripping from them.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Episode 4, Thy Flesh Consumed, has a few brutal maps that are quite the challenge on Ultra-Violence, with stringent resources and nasty enemy placements.
  • When playing the whole game with fast monsters or on the Unity ports' UV+ difficulty, Ultimate Doom and Doom II can get very difficult, the latter of which enables fast monsters and multiplayer-only spawns. On Nightmare difficulty, the game becomes outright Harder Than Hard, with only a small fraction of players being able to beat the entire game on Nightmare.
  • Most fan-made WADs are designed to be a lot harder than the original games, making them this on Ultra-Violence difficulty, or even so on the easier difficulties.
• Older Than They Think: Everyone knows that the BSP tree was pioneered in Doom to allow for faster rendering, right? Well, not quite: ignoring computer applications for BSP trees outside of video games, Wolfenstein 3-D on the SNES was actually it. John Carmack needed a way to get Wolfenstein running on the SNES' hardware faster, and when BSP worked for Wolfenstein it was ported forwards to Doom.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The first game was credited with popularizing the entire FPS genre, creating the A Space Marine Is You formula, garnering attention for its shocking violence, and introducing game modding. Naturally, some would draw unfavorable comparisons by modern standards. Many younger shooter fans would consider its gameplay to be simplistic and its story to be lazily shoehorned compared to likes of Halo and BioShock. Likewise, while Doom garnered much infamy during the 90s for its violence, modern graphics can depict far more realistic and disturbing acts of violence; today, Doom's low-resolution gore just comes off as quaint.
  • At its time, Doom was considered fairly challenging, but modern players looking back on the game would find it fairly easy and simple. This can generally be attributed to Doom's controls: it released at a time when control schemes, especially for the still-fledgling FPS genre, were still being standardized, and as a result defaults to rather clunky control schemes that make use of just the mouse or keyboard rather than both where, for instance, you can only strafe by using a modifier key to temporarily change the "turn left and right" buttons into "strafe left and right". Even among players who have used the provided control scheme of mouse and keyboard, aiming a camera with the mouse was unheard of and thus the muscle memory hadn't formed to do so. These days, mouse and keyboard is widely accepted as the optimal setup for shooters since the mouse enables very fine control over aiming, and gamers have developed their skills using this setup. Thanks to this, playing through the original Doom from a modern perspective feels rather quaint, at least until the fourth episode released a year and 4 months after the first three — during which players had time to build up their first-person shooter skills — and is generally accepted to be as difficult as it was back then.
  • Certain ports have had this happen to them as well, in part because of the game's continued easy availability and the evolution of fan-made source ports while the systems it was officially ported to have fallen out of favor and been replaced with more modern ones, making it easier and more feature-rich to just keep playing on PC and contributing to the idea that Doom console ports were an epidemic in the mid-90s. The PlayStation version, Nostalgia Filter aside, is looked at with a certain amount of disdain nowadays because of features it had to remove, including a handful of maps and the Archvile, but at the time it was probably one of the first console ports to stack up to the PC original, even holding its own in some regards such as introducing colored lighting, replacing the soundtrack with a downright creepy ambient score, and even featuring Doom II monsters in Doom 1 maps if played on the higher difficulties. The Super Nintendo port is likewise seen nowadays as a very shoddy port, but in its day, getting a game of its technological complexity to run at all on the SNES hardware, even with the addition of the Super FX chip, was seen as an amazing accomplishment, especially considering it only lost a handful of levels, and it also had one of the best renditions of the original soundtrack on any platform.
• Overshadowed by Controversy:
  • Doom has ultimately managed to escape this reputation and is now recognized as a classic of the First-Person Shooter genre, but for a period in the late 1990s to early 2000s, it was inexorably linked to the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who were big fans of the game. Over time, it has become increasingly accepted that violent media does not cause real-world violence and those who still advocate otherwise are viewed as behind the times, and evidence points to Harris and Klebold already being unstable before the massacre (the FBI concluded that Harris was a psychopath motivated by a desire to inflict pain for his own enjoyment, while Klebold was bipolar and motivated to take revenge for being mistreated in school).
  • The 3DO conversion became this over time: the conversion itself was ridiculed for running at a slideshow frame rate, though Rebecca Heineman, the programmer behind this port, was largely spared from the blame, as she was basically tasked to finish the port in ten weeks for Black Friday and the subsequent holiday season and, instead of the id Tech source code she actually needed as a starting point, was given a retail copy of the game and a few jpegs by her publisher, Art Data Interactive. Unsurprisingly, that company's founder, Randy Scott, turned out to have a gross misconception on how video games are developed - seemingly under the impression that porting the game was just a matter of a cut-and-paste/recompile job that could be done in ten weeks - and did what amounted to defrauding both Heineman and the gaming press as a whole, lying to them that the conversion was already mostly finished and that it was to feature additional content to further show off the 3DO's capabilities, like new weapons and Live-Action Cutscenes. Randy Scott and his company flew off the radar afterwards, but he resurfaced in 2017 when he was accused of molesting young girls at his music school.
• Paranoia Fuel: In E2M5, there's a marble wall with an alien face that damages you, just for standing in front of it. That texture shows up a lot in other levels, and each time you see it from then on, you'll wonder if it's going to damage you, too. In reality, it's actually a damaging floor in disguise, but still.
• Polished Port:
  • The PlayStation version is known as the first legitimately good console port during the '90s, combining both Ultimate Doom and Doom II into one game, while additionally featuring new lighting effects (including colored lighting), new and improved sound effects for everything, and changed the rockin' soundtrack for some dark and ambient music that makes it feel like a horror game. While it does have disadvantages due to hardware limitations such as a subpar framerate (though still better than the other '90s ports), simplified and easier maps (as a majority of the maps were derived from the Jaguar port), some maps removed completely, and other features missing from the PC version such as the lack of Arch-Viles and the Icon of Sin, the port makes up for it by adding in new visual changes that brings new life to the game's atmosphere, such as skies in the Hell maps being an animated wall of flame, as well as having a few new high quality maps of its own. It also featured Doom II monsters in the original Doom when played on Ultra-Violence to mix up the Ultimate Doom maps. Compared to the technically better console ports, PlayStation Doom offered its own unique experience. The port is so beloved, the Doom community worked together to not only effectively port it to GZDoom with all the modern advantages it would entail, but also worked to recreate all 72 maps that didn't make the original cut in the PlayStation version's style, as well as recreating the No Rest for the Living expansion and John Romero's Sigil, Tech Gone Bad, and Phobos Mission Control maps in a similar fashion. After the port's source code was released to the public in 2020, the community also began working on a reverse-engineered port, providing a faithful yet modern way to experience these games on Windows and MacOS.
  • The Game Boy Advance version has the technical issues of running in a handheld device (less buttons, lower framerate, low-res visuals, altered levels) and some bowdlerization of the blood and gore, and yet ended up as remarkably well-done port considering the GBA's limitations and impressive additions to the system's library of first-person shooters.
  • The original Xbox version of The Ultimate Doom and Doom II included in Doom 3: Limited Collector's Edition and Resurrection of Evil (the latter also includes the Master Levels of Doom II) are near-faithful ports of the PC version. Unlike the other console ports, nothing was sacrificed during the transition, they run at a decent frame-rate, and include a new secret level for each game. There are some Game-Breaking Bugs, however (e.g. potential crashes, being trapped in certain areas of a map or stuck in objects), and due how cheat codes were handled, players may accidentally activate a cheat while holding the sprint button. The HD version on Xbox LIVE Arcade fixes many of issues of the original Xbox version while giving these games a higher native resolution, uses the Gravis Ultrasound music, added online multi-player, and in Doom II's case, features an all-new "No Rest for the Living" episode. Unfortunately the Wolfenstein 3D levels were censored, and the red medical crosses were removed from the healing items. These ports were also included as part of Doom 3: BFG Edition and the PlayStation 3-exclusive Doom Classic Complete compilation; the latter also includes Final Doom and Master Levels for Doom II.
  • While extremely poorly received at launch, the 2019 suite of ports (which encompasses PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and eventually PC^note where it is known as Doom Enhanced) eventually became this thanks to a set of patches. For starters, it's the first official version of the game to run at 60 FPS — every other version prior, including the DOS original, ran at 35 FPS. In addition, the resolution is doubled from 320x200 to 640x400, a quick-saving and quick-loading feature was added, cheats are available (unlike the XBLA/PS3 versions), a radial menu was added to make weapon switching much easier on controllers, and an "Add-Ons" section was added that allowed for players to download a set of curated community WADs for free — launching with No Rest for the Living, both halves of Final Doom, and Sigil, and later adding player-created mods like the two Back to Saturn X episodes and Doom Zero. In addition, the PC and Android versions support the ability to import custom WADs. Another patch would go even further to implement 16:9 widescreen presentation with the option for the original 4:3 presentation, variable framerates on supported platforms, gyro motion controller support, revamped deathmatch multiplayer, added a new Ultra Violence+ difficulty, and DeHackEd support for mods among other improvements. It does have some drawbacks, such as inconsistencies with certain add-ons reverting back to the 4:3 status bar while others lack 16:9 art assets for the title screen, intermissions, and ending screen (although a user savvy enough with Doom WAD editing tools can mod them in and more for the PC version at least), the Wolfenstein 3D levels in Doom II are censored but not to the extremes of the BFG Edition versions^*the differences are the SS soldiers, level names, and music are retained from the PC version, but the Nazi iconography and Hitler pictures were altered and the "schutzstaffel" voice clip was slightly redubbed to "schutzkämpfer" (which can also be restored via modding), a few bugs from the id Anthology version of Final Doom were left in the WADs (such as a scripted ambush at the end of MAP31 in TNT: Evilution that doesn't work at all), lacks control remapping on consoles and mobile (although averted in the PC version as it supports full keyboard and controller remapping), as well as no online multiplayer unlike the XBLA/PS3 versions, but is more than adequate for casual players and for a handheld experience on the Switch and mobile.
• Porting Disaster: Doom has been ported to all sorts of systems, some of which couldn't really handle a game of its size and complexity all that well. This often resulted in extremely pixellated graphics, shortened and sometimes removed levels, missing weapons, fewer types of enemies and removed frames of animation for them. The last one led to "crab-walking" enemies that faced the player constantly, meaning it was impossible to sneak up on them and very difficult to trick them into damaging one another.
  • The SNES and Sega 32X versions are considered the worst of these: The SNES version gets props for being made in the first place, and sported a few pros such as an awesome soundtrack, the full enemy roster, the least amount of cut or simplified maps, all power-ups, a proto-Sniper Rifle (the shotgun still fired multiple pellets but they had no spread whatsoever), and a spiffy red cartridge, but also had the graphical problems mentioned above in addition to no circle-strafing, the second and third episodes only being playable on harder difficulties, and no ability to save the game. The 32X version, however, despite appearing on an allegedly more advanced system, was even worse: terrible music^note This is thoroughly unforgivable considering the Genesis uses a sound chip that is a very close relative to the synthesizer found on Sound Blaster cards, which were the most popular sound cards at the time the PC version came out, and the music sounded great on those. It should have been a total cinch to accomplish the same on the 32X., and losing more levels than any other port (only the first two episodes are ported, and it only has both of their secret levels on the technicality that the second episode's secret level replaces "Tower of Babel" as the end of its episode), and both the Cyberdemon and the Spider Mastermind are gone. The remaining levels were also haphazardly gutted, sometimes making it impossible to get a 100% score since items and enemies had been left in removed areas of the maps - including every instance of the BFG.
  • The Sega Saturn version of the game, despite being on a more advanced system than the 32X, is an absolute mess. It suffers from horrible frame-rate issues and jerky and unresponsive controls with a questionable control scheme that makes it almost unplayable. This was due to Executive Meddling from John Carmack, who absolutely refused to let the Saturn version use hardware rendering since, while the Saturn's specs would have allowed the game to run at 60 FPS, it resulted in texture warping, which was a deal-breaker as far as he was concerned; the quick-fix to this was to hastily reprogram the 32X port's renderer, with disastrous results. The American (but not the European and Japanese) version also axes the multiplayer. And some of the sound effects are lower quality than the other versions.
  • The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer version comes dangerously close to being the very worst, thanks to being headed by someone who had no idea how difficult it was to port games between systems (he gave a single programmer ten weeks to make the port with nothing more than jpeg images of some assets and a copy of Ultimate Doom). In addition to cutting the same levels and monsters as the Jaguar and GBA versions, it also has serious frame-rate issues. You can either shrink the screen down (making it virtually impossible to see anything without bunching up to the TV), or you could make the window bigger (which caused the frame rate to drop into single digits at points). The only thing saving it is the awesomely remixed soundtrack, which is itself brought down by the fact that so many levels were cut that a lot of tracks go unused. Even the soundtrack has an odd backstory. Programmer Rebecca Heineman informed her boss, the owner of Art Data (and the same person who gave her ten weeks to make the port), that the 3DO had a different sound chip which made porting the soundtrack impractical. Luckily, he happened to be a guitarist with musician friends who performed for their church. So with a cassette tape that Heineman recorded of the original music, they were able to recreate the soundtrack in a garage over a few days, which ended up becoming the only positive point of the 3DO version that everyone can agree on.
  • The Atari Jaguar version is pretty decent for a console port at the time (Romero, Carmack, and id Software developed the Jaguar version themselves, and many of the console ports are based on this version), but it contains no in-game music because the sheer computing load on the console's co-processor precluded it from playing the music. It's additionally missing some maps, and does not have the Cyberdemon nor Spider Mastermind.
  • The official Microsoft Windows port, Doom95, introduced many problems that weren't in the original DOS version, such as the demo recording feature does not work when launching an IWAD directly from the launcher, running the port in any resolution above 320x240 causes severe rendering bugs in the automap (e.g. using map markers causes the automap to freak out and doesn't display the correct coordinates), the player's weapon sprites are also misaligned and appear shorter than in the original version, the intermission screen for the Thy Flesh Consumed episode in The Ultimate Doom somehow reuses the one from Knee-Deep in the Dead, broken partial invisibility effects on certain hardware configuration and versions of DirectX (see Special Effects Failure below), and the screen is slightly stretched horizontally, making the game's enemies looking shorter and explosion effects appearing as an oval shape instead. Mouse controls when running Doom95 on newer versions of Windows were also rendered useless without a fan-made patch due to the port using a driver file type that became obsolete on Windows 2000 and later. Doom95 also misspells E1M1: Hangar in as "Hanger" (the name for a TNT: Evilution map). It's no wonder why many players on PC would rather play the game through DOSBox or one of its many source ports.
  • While many leagues better than the aforementioned ports from the '90s, the 2019 ports of Doom and Doom II for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and mobile Android systems were, on launch, inexplicably inferior to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and even original Xbox versions. For one, they required a mandatory login with a Bethesda account to even be played, which tended to cause problems when using the respective console's sleep mode (which required one to reboot the game to fix). Lacking any kind of online features at launch, with even the multiplayer being split-screen only, people were baffled at the requirement — turns out, it existed solely to activate an Old Save Bonus in the then-upcoming Doom Eternal, a feature which was probably not worth the hassle. In addition to this, the game was improperly scaled to a 16:10 aspect ratio (as opposed to increasing the field of view or a similar solution), resulting in a stretched, warped picture. The ports also emulated shadows incorrectly, leading to some areas (such as the dark room in E1M3) appearing much brighter than intended. To top it all off, the sounds appeared to be recorded from the MIDI files and played back incorrectly (as opposed to simply emulating them), leading to slowed-down music and sound effects.^note Here is an example of the MIDI music, and here is that same track on the pre-patch Switch version Fortunately, Nerve Software eventually patched out most of the problems with the port — removing the mandatory login in one update, fixing the lighting and repairing the sounds and music in another, and finally fixing the aspect ratio and adding a whole lot more — ultimately putting these versions into the opposite trope.
• Recurring Fanon Character: A fanmade Cacodemon plushie known as Hissy (distinct from normal Cacodemons by a cuter smile, rounder eye, and lacking the pink skin around her eye) is generally treated as the classic Doom community's mascot, famous for going on a planned world tour and getting traded with other Doom Fandom VIPs, before subsequently being "Hissy Hogged" for long stretches of time without being passed on. She shows up as cameos in multiple Doom fan projects, like cameoing in Action Doom, Massmouth 2, and Ashes 2063, being playable in the Skulltag source port, and appearing as the logo for the unofficial wiki.
• The Scrappy: The Spider Mastermind is rather unpopular with Doom fans, with it being mocked for its boss fights being complete jokes and for its rather silly design that isn't intimidating like the Cyberdemon and Barons nor Ugly Cute like the Cacodemon and the second game's Arachnotrons. Among custom map makers it's also by far the least-used stock enemy in WADs, not counting the Icon of Sin/Boss Brain, as with it being a huge Damage-Sponge Boss hitscan attacker that will get stuck or infight often, it's impossible to make it into a challenging boss fight without making it outright unfair for the player, and with its qualities it can't really be used well as a normal enemy nor Elite Mook, as it can be either easily ignored, just get BFG blasted, or will really slow the gameplay down. It's not an uncommon view among Doom mappers and players that "there's no good way to use the Mastermind", and otherwise it's generally agreed the Mastermind is the hardest Doom enemy to use properly; there are entire megawads that don't use the Mastermind even once. Tellingly, Doom II turned the Mastermind into a joke, with every level it appears in having some way to easily kill it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • If you obtain a weapon for the first time during gameplay, your current weapon always switches on what you just picked up. In the heated firefight this almost certainly means a death sentence on higher difficulties due to a whole second delay between the switching. Thankfully, modern ports allow the "always switch on pickup" option to be turned off and not bother with it.
  • Doom's RNG is disliked by a lot of players, especially speedrunners. Damage dealt both by the player and the enemies is heavily randomized, for example, Revenant's missile can do between 10 and 80 damage or, on the player's side, Berserk Fist can do between 20 and 200 damage. This, along with random bullet spread, can make the game feel wildly inconsistent in some scenarios. Some speedrun categories like UV Max skew towards Luck-Based Mission as a result.
  • The Nightmare! skill level is broadly disliked for its modifications (monsters move and attack faster, and have a chance to respawn after dying) falling into Fake Difficulty that makes speedruns and 100% completion much more down to chance. It's telling that among the hardcore playerbase of Doom, Ultra-Violence is heavily preferred as the default difficulty for completing maps, with Nightmare generally relegated to niche challenge categories or maps that are specifically designed around it. It's worth noting that Nightmare was not present in the game on release and was actually added as a joke in response to players who complained that Ultra-Violence is too easy. John Romero has stated that id deliberately made Nightmare as stupidly difficult as possible to the point where not even Romero himself could beat it.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The pistol, after the chaingun is picked up. You'd expect the chaingun to be less accurate due to being a faster-firing minigun, but nope, it has the same spread as the pistol and it keeps the ability to fire perfectly accurate shots if you tap the fire button and it uses the pistol's ammo making it a direct upgrade from the pistol. This is one reason why weapon mods may try to replace the pistol with a viable starting weapon (such as Brutal Doom's assault rifle), or enhance it (like Project Brutality adding both a Guns Akimbo option, as well as a suppressor to make it a stealth weapon).
  • The chainsaw is iconic, but as a weapon it's pretty damn bad. First being a melee weapon, running in to saw an enemy to death leaves you way more vulnerable than just keeping your distance and shooting them, and if you're trying to stunlock an enemy to death the chaingun has the same rate of fire and the same DPS as the chainsaw but doesn't require you to get in an enemy's face to hit them. Then you can't really use the chainsaw on anything bigger than Cacodemon; due to buggy hit detection in vanilla Doom the chainsaw fails to properly latch onto wide enemies like Arachnotrons, while Revenants' and Mancubi's pain chance are low enough that you can't reliably stunlock them with the chainsaw without them hitting through, then you have no chance to stunlock Hell Knights, Barons, and Archviles with their especially low pain chances, and trying to chainsaw a Cyberdemon and Mastermind is flat-out suicidal. The only real practical use of the chainsaw is to save you some ammo against Pinkies and maybe the occasional solitary Caco, but as an ammo saver the chainsaw is outclassed by the Berserk Fist, which once you learn how to safely weave in and time your punches with your weaves, you can use it much more safely against those bigger enemies that the chainsaw can't safely stunlock, and kill enemies faster than the Chainsaw can too. It's especially useless on Nightmare mode or with fast monsters enabled, as besides it being a lot more difficult to get close enough to an enemy to melee them when they're constantly firing at you, the Chainsaw loses its one niche of being useful against Pinkies/Spectres, as due to their attack speed being twice as fast and their pain state being reduced to half the duration on Nightmare/with fast monsters, they cannot be reliably stunlocked and will usually bite through the Chainsaw, making it suicidal to try Chainsawing a horde of them like you could on lower difficulties.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • A very popular challenge is to pistol-start every map instead of playing continuously, making most maps play quite differently when you no longer always have all your big guns to blow through every fight, can't carry over max health and armor to trivialize rough beginning sections, and resource management becomes a much more serious deal when you only have what's in that specific map to work with. It's so popular that many players only pistol-start, even with the hardest of WADs, and some map makers will employ tricks like forced suicide exits to make the player have to pistol-start each map of their WAD. Additionally, community-ran speedrun leaderboards mandate players pistol-start for speedruns of individual maps.
  • Instead of only pistol-starting, players may play in an "ironman" style instead, where they do play continuously, but if they die at any point they're not allowed to reload a save and so must start over on the map they died on from a pistol-start. "Ironman" may also mean to try playing through an entire megawad without dying at all, with it being a popular monthly competition on Doomworld's "DWIronman League" to see how far players can get through a chosen megawad without dying.
  • There are several community-recognized speedrun categories for these, with others rising from the command line parameters for different source ports:
    • UV Speed - Simply beat the map/episode/WAD as fast as possible on UV difficulty.
    • UV Max - Same as above, except with the stipulation of also getting 100% kills and secrets (or the maximum obtainable amount in maps with unkillable monsters and broken secrets).
    • NM Speed - Beat the map/episode/WAD as fast possible on Nightmare difficulty.
    • NM100S - Same as above, except wth the stipulation of also getting 100% secrets (or the maximum amount in maps with broken secrets).
    • NM100SI - Same as NM100S, but including all items, or as many as possible if any prickups are broken.
    • UV-fast - Beat the map/episode/WAD on UV difficulty with fast monsters enabled, while also obtaining 100% kills and secrets
    • UV-respawn - Beat the map/episode/WAD on UV difficulty with respawning monsters enabled, while also obtaining 100% kills or more and 100% secrets). Can additionally be combined with the -fast parameter to simulate Nightmare mode without the double ammo bonus.
    • UV-Tyson - Beat the map/episode/WAD on UV difficulty, with the stipulation that you not only obtain 100% kills, but you also only attack with the fist, berserk fist, chainsaw, and pistol.
    • Grandmaster Tyson - Same as above, except fast monsters are also enabled.
    • UV-Pacifist - Beat the map/episode/WAD on UV difficulty without attacking any enemies directly (with your weapons) or indirectly (by blowing up barrels). Instigating infighting, killing monsters via Tele-Frag, and killing monsters via crushers is still permitted (Compet-N had a rule that the latter two couldn't be done "intentionally", but the more modern Doom Speed Demo Archive removed that restriction, due to the ambiguity with determining "intent" and the fact many maps will force you to kill monsters via crushers and telefrags).
    • Stroller - The same as above, except you also cannot run nor strafe. While the official DSDA speedrun category mandates pacifist play, one can apply this restriction to their normal play to make things much more challenging.
    • UV Reality - Complete a map/episode/WAD on UV difficulty without taking any damage (since getting shot in real life will kill you). It was originally devised to disallow using the Plasma Rifle and the BFG too (since those weapons don't exist in real life), but DSDA does not have that restriction and only mandates taking no damage to accept Reality runs. DSDA also recognizes "R3ality" runs, which is the same, except you're allowed to take damage from unavoidable damaging floors.
    • UV Solo-Net - Beat the map/episode/WAD with co-op thing placement enabled; this typically features extra enemies and even extra boss enemies (Masterminds and Cyberdemons) that weren't there even on UV in normal solo play, though no Ultimate Doom map is really affected by this and only a handful of Doom II maps are, making it more relevant for Final Doom and fanmade WADs that take much greater advantage of co-op thing placement. This challenge would go on to be officially incorporated (with the addition of fast monsters) in the 2019 Unity ports with its Ultra-Violence+ difficulty.
    • D2All - Beat the whole megawad, start to finish, without dying or loading a save once. Other modifiers can be applied for extra challenge.
  • Another challenge is a keyboard-only playthrough, a relic from the DOS era when this was the baseline method of playing. This is quite simply playing the game with Tank Controls, with limited turning speed and with strafing as a separate mode (alt key plus the turn keys). This can make a frantic map a real handful to get through.
  • One may mod Doom itself to make it more challenging for themselves, with there being plenty of mods made just for that, that range from as simple as the Snake Eyes mod, which will make the player always deal the minimum possible damage with their attacks while enemies always deal the maximum possible damage, to as extravagant as the popular Corruption Cards mod, which on a per-map basis does things such as grant enemies a variety of enhancements, add new enemies that didn't exist on a map, or introduce a variety of unfavorable conditions, on either a map-only or permanent basis.
• So Bad, It's Good:
  • The (in)famous FIREBLU texture which is essentially an animated red fire over an ultramarine-like blue wall in a vaguely web-like pattern. It's such an out of place texture yet appears surprisingly frequently in some levels, particularly maps designed by Sandy Petersen, perhaps most infamously "E3M6: Mt. Erebus". The vividness clashes so badly with overall quality of most textures that the texture has memetic status as having a charm of its own, to the point some have bemoaned that it didn't return for Doom II; you can even find merchandise with the texture printed on it!
  • Even though "E3M8: Dis" may be seen as a letdown for the final level of the episode, it can be amusing that the only forces that the Spider Mastermind could muster were two Cacodemons and a Baron of Hell. Players playing through the entire episode are also likely to have the BFG and pulling off a One-Hit Kill on the boss can feel so comical. Even without a BFG like starting the level with a pistol start, the Plasma Gun leaves her in a Cycle of Hurting and barely a threat.
  • Due to poor usage of the system's audio chips, the 32x port's soundtrack, in the words of The Angry Video Game Nerd, "sounds like shit", both figuratively and literally, and led to many people mocking the tracks as a Taco Bell orchestra, one fellow even going the extra mile and creating...this.^note A high-res cover of the "At Doom's Gate" track with fart sounds. For added irony, some comments point out it actually sounds better than the 32x port's own version of this very track
  • And for some people, the four novels based on the original game. The demons were changed to aliens and the Doomguy was forced to have a female Marine tagging along with him, then her plus a Mormon soldier and a teenager on Earth. That's ignoring how the third and fourth books really went off on a tangent about faith and the soul.
• Special Effect Failure: The Windows port, Doom95 (which incorporates Doom, Doom II, Ultimate Doom and Final Doom) makes full use of Windows' facilities, including using hardware acceleration (where available) to implement the "partial invisibility" effect. Unfortunately, on some graphics cards this didn't work properly, and Spectres (and players using the Partial Invisibility power-up) are even more conspicuous than other creatures. Modern computers don't always make it work properly either. Lampshaded in the Doom95 manual:
  "Due to all of this new hardware tech, the previously-nearly-invisible Spectres are now in the realm of sorta-invisible. To make up for the difference, please close your eyes when you encounter them."
• Spiritual Adaptation: Technically, to Aliens (since it was originally meant to be based on the film), with a good amount of the Evil Dead trilogy thrown in.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • John Romero asked Bobby Prince do songs in a metal style, and even borrowed some tapes for inspiration. The end result is compared to many existing songs. While the most representative track, "At Doom's Gate", Prince said to have written even before Romero's request, it includes a style of riff hugely popular in 80s Heavy Metal and Hardcore Punk, including D.R.I.'s ""Hooked" and Ronnie James Dio's "Stand Up And Shout", with most fans comparing it specifically to Metallica's "No Remorse" (which has nearly identical structure).
  • "Nobody Told Me About Id", which plays in the level where you first fight the Cyberdemon, sounds very similar to the main theme from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The track "Sign of Evil" from E1M8 is extremely somber and melancholy. It gets worse when Doomguy gets seemingly killed at the end of the level before you start the second episode, of course.
  • Doomguy's pet rabbit Daisy's death may count as this as well as Nightmare Fuel.
  • Mod specific, but Samsara, a mod in which you play as characters from several different 90s FPS games, has bot "Voice lines," which are just text. Some are colorful, some are cool... But then we get to the Security Officer. Holy. Shit. Don't believe me? Grab some tissues.
• That One Level:
  • "E1M3: Toxin Refinery" is among the easier levels on UV difficulty, as would be expected for only the third map in the game, but on Nightmare its difficulty gets a ridiculous spike and it becomes the hardest map outside of Episode 4. The level is filled to the brim with Shotgunners and several turbo Pinkies/Spectres that will constantly block you, with the map constantly forcing you to contend with them in tight corridors and limited walkways, while even on a continuous playthrough the player is stuck with just the basic Shotgun and Chaingun for a big chunk of the level until they acquire a secret Rocket Launcher. The opening area is especially terrifying, as upon opening the door the player is immediately besieged by a swarm of fast enemies, with nowhere to hide in the small opening room and the small walkway space surrounding an inescapable toxic waste pool. This map additionally features a lot of backtracking, which with the reviving enemies is just hellish to deal with, including having to go back through the aforementioned starting area. Players that attempt a full Nightmare playthrough for the first time will often give up on this map, and those that are capable of beating it will be capable of beating every other map before Episode 4.
  • "E2M6: Halls of the Damned" is a drag the first time playing it without a strategy guide. The goal is to obtain all three keys to open the exit near the start, but two of the keys are buried deep in the halls. The major threat is a maze region with a Lovecraftian layout, and some nasty monster ambushes. The night-vision goggles placed through out the level help a lot here. There is also a nasty Kaizo Trap deep within the level; it looks like the exit but just lowers you into a big ambush - and, if you're going for 100% secrets, you need to go through with it.
  • "E3M5: Unholy Cathedral", mostly because even the most efficient path through the level still requires you to go through almost every room, slowly slogging your way through several Pinkies and Cacos. Not helping matters is trying to find that efficient path, since it requires figuring out which of the several teleporters in the central courtyard takes you where you need to go. Thankfully, the teleporter puzzle can be made easier if you know which one takes you where you absolutely need to go^note it's highlighted with pulsing glow., but the only way to figure it out is by testing them. It can even be skipped entirely, but nonetheless requires a lot of backtracking, including a mandatory room with lava floor.
  • "E3M7: Limbo" is not heavily populated, but is made difficult by a much more elaborate teleport puzzle that must be solved by crossing mandatory "hurt-floors" with a finite supply of hazard suit power-ups. The first time in this level will probably be very confusing, with the player wondering how the hell they raise the bridge to the exit door. Much of this level is figuring out where the numerous teleport pads lead.
  • In Episode Four of Ultimate Doom, "E4M1: Hell Beneath", "E4M2: Perfect Hatred" and E4M6: Against Thee Wickedly are infamous for their difficulty:
    • Hell Beneath is a short level with not that high of an enemy count, but it's the first level of the episode (so you must pistol start it) and has a severe lack of resources. The Ultra-Violence difficulty has the least benefits available to a player here: there's only 9 health bonuses for health (a total of 109% health for the level; at least the lower difficulties have four medikits to patch you up), a suit of green armor with 12 armor bonuses (a total of 112% armor for the level), and not enough ammo to kill all the Barons of Hell unless you can get them grouped together to spread out enough damage with your 12 rockets. And as expected, this level becomes especially hellish on Nightmare difficulty; the very limited health and ammo, all the Shotgunners, and the very small walkways that can easily be blocked by Spectres and teleporting Barons turn beating this level on Nightmare into essentially a Luck-Based Mission, even if a Good Bad Bug is exploited to grab the Red Skull Key through its cage to skip having to the enter the central building in the second room. And the less said about the Nine Inch Nails Easter Egg trap, the better - it basically puts you in a very cramped box where you will have to dodge constantly teleporting monsters, including two Barons of Hell, while praying for the floor to raise high enough to be lowered back with a switch (or have your partner do it from the other room when playing in co-op).
    • Perfect Hatred, while not lacking in resources like the previous level, is usually considered the most difficult level in Ultimate Doom on UV difficulty and shows how wicked John Romero can be as a level designer. It's a compact level where you must constantly jump over lava pits while being assaulted from all around you with no cover, with powerful enemies placed in the most inconvenient of places (there are 12 Barons in the level, all fought in either tight spaces or on little ground to maneuver on). The exploitation of two design oversights (grabbing the BFG through the wall it's behind to obtain it significantly earlier, and skipping a large portion of the level by exploiting a jump to access the last area without the blue key) are required for many normal players to beat the level on Ultra-Violence difficulty, and few can beat the level on Nightmare without utilising those exploits. The Attract Mode for the Ultimate Doom version features the demo recorded by Romero himself where the player dies less than half a minute into the level while showcasing the lack of cover and constant assault from the enemies.
  • E4M6: Against Thee Wickedly also contends with the aforementioned two levels for most difficult level in Ultimate Doom. The main feature of the level is a teleporter in the central area that the player must use to access different parts of the level. However entering the teleporter from different directions teleports the player to different areas, and the teleporter is located in a large lava pool, while the level in general forces the player to run through lava at frequent points, meaning the player will regularly be taking unavoidable damage trying to figure the level out. The level is additionally large and complex while the teleporter is unintuitive and takes a while to figure out, leading to a ton of unavoidable damage for those who don't know the right path and an effective time limit on figuring the level out. On top of that, resources and radsuits are very limited and spread out, while the opposition is nearly as strong as in the rest of E4 (including a mandatory Cyberdemon fight at the end on a small ledge, though this can be mitigated with a secret BFG and invulnerability that can be used to easily defeat it). Then on Nightmare difficulty this level ratchets it up several more notches to being the outright hardest level in this game and Doom 2, when you have to constantly go back through the large and open central area that gets you continuously harassed by respawnings Cacos there and leaves you wide open to getting sniped at from the respawning Shotgunners and Imps in the upper areas, and if you can't make it to the aformentioned Cyberdemon with the Invulnerability intact (which is no small feat when respawning enemies block a clean path to him), your run is over, as trying to fight him on a small ledge or in the very small final room while the aformentioned enemies are assaulting you from behind is essentially suicidal, while you won't be able to kill him fast enough by sniping him from afar before the respawning enemies wear you down.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Being a PC exclusive was a massive boon to it in the visuals department. Back in those days, fully-3D games were expected to look like the original Star Fox, with visible polygons numbering in the dozens at best and flat colors over everything. For its day, Doom was basically Crysis.
• Win Back the Crowd: The 2019 Unity ports of the first two Doom games by Nerve Software were initially reviled for not only being shipped with a plethora of problems that drew unfavorable comparisons to previous console ports of the past, but also implementing an always-online DRM that forces players to sign up for a Bethesda.net account to even play the games. Since then they took the criticism of the ports to heart and eventually removed the game's DRM and rectified the port's issues. Rather than leaving the ports at that, however, the developers continued adding new features and updates to the classic Doom games, all while adding a collection of curated mods from the community for console players to enjoy and the ability sideload vanilla-compatible WADs in the mobile and PC versions, effectively turning them from one of the worst ports of Doom to one of the best.

The Comic Book

• Awesome Ego: Holy shit, the Doomguy. He's "a man and a half" through and through.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Brutal Doom uses lines straight from the comic. After playing it, you're guaranteed to hear the lines in Zero X Diamond's (the guy who provides the voice for Doomguy in the mod) voice every time you read the comic.
• Fountain of Memes: Everything "Doomguy" says is a catchphrase in the Doom community, most notably "RIP AND TEAR YOUR GUTS!"
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Green Aesop and portrayal of the UAC as a Toxic, Inc. that carelessly leaves radioactive waste around, complete with Doomguy pondering the kind of world humanity is leaving to their children. Come 2016 and Eternal, and the UAC nearly dooms humanity by trying to use Hell as an energy source, bringing forth a demon invasion and outright becoming servants of the invaders.
    "Even if I personally stop this alien invasion, what kind of planet will we be leaving to our children?"
  • The flashbacks in Doom Eternal have Doomguy shouting about huge guts and ripping and tearing. Instead of being hilarious or badass, it illustrates the toll fighting demons for so long has had on Doomguy.
• Narm Charm: The hero falls in toxic waste while fighting some zombies. When he climbs out, he delivers a hilariously deadpan PSA about pollution that isn't as important to him as the fact that he's also out of bullets.
  "Now I'm radioactive! That can't be good!"
• So Bad, It's Good: Unless you think the comic was intentionally funny. Considering it has a shout out to the most famous scene of Evil Dead 2, it's not an unreasonable assumption.
• Vindicated by History: While the comic is still largely seen as a meme, fans have taken on a new appreciation for it as it heavily informs the tone and characterization in Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, with several memetic lines becoming recurring catchphrases and the Doom Slayer acting like a silent version of the comic protagonist. In fact, many fans have come to agree that, for as ridiculous as the comic is, it perfectly captures the feel of the games and the experience of playing them.

The First Film

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Hell Knight is established early in the film to be the biggest and baddest creature that Grimm's team encounter on Mars, and single-handedly goes on an unopposed rampage through the facilities on both Mars and Earth. Yet when John faces it half-way through the FPS sequence, it gets unceremoniously blown away in a matter of seconds, and we're instead left with the newly-transformed Pinky and Ax-Crazy Sarge to provide the ending conflict for both the FPS sequence and movie, respectively.
• Awesome Music: While the film itself was controversial with the fandom, to say the least, the track "First-Person Shooter" has enjoyed praise from even the film's staunchest critics, for being a kickass metal track that fits Doom like a glove. It's even become a popular choice for fanmade WAD soundtracks.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The first-person sequence is this when you think about it. It comes completely out of nowhere, seems out of place when compared to the rest of the movie and has absolutely no basis in narration up to this point. It unexpectedly appears near end of the film "just because", as if the screenwriter, having the script already done, suddenly remembered that it was supposed to be an adaptation of an FPS game (not some completely different survival horror series) and decided, at the last minute, to stuff in that scene as a "reference" in the most clumsy way possible. What makes it so jarring is that it did not have to be that way. First-person perspective (and not for just one random scene, either) could have been introduced seamlessly into the movie — for example, by having the marines wear personal cameras in Aliens or REC 2 fashion.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The explanation for the "demons" being humans infected by a virus was derided, not only due to the canon games' being unambiguous about the connection to Hell, but the idea of the virus empowering people with good moral character while allowing them to retain their senses and humanity is thought to have defeated the point of the explanation since it comes off as just as fantastic as the original demon explanation.
• Franchise Original Sin: The idea of removing the explicitly supernatural nature of the demons isn't new to the franchise, with the 1995 novels saying they were created by aliens, but the games were already loose plot-wise, thus the novels could be seen as a genuine expansion of the series' mythos (though this idea is not universal), and the novels themselves were fairly obscure among the mainstream public anyway. The movie, however, was a release with a decent marketing push, and was heavily based upon the then-recent Doom³, which not only spelled out that the monsters were demons but even illustrated in a few of the lore entries that the scientists can't make sense of their powers, making the attempt to drop the supernatural nature of the monsters in the film adaptation a much harder sell.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • John Grimm says "They're marines, Sam, not poets", and later after a big fight, "we were conducting a firefight, not an autopsy." In 2009, Karl Urban, who plays John, was cast as Dr. Leonard McCoy, the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier of I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder, in Star Trek (2009).
  • The Squad's weaponry is apparently tagged with a user ID able to identify the gun's user. Karl Urban would later star in Dredd, whose source material is the Trope Codifier for the Smart Gun.
  • One of the chief criticisms of the movie when it was released was that it would probably have been more enjoyable had it been the first person sequence stretched out over the whole film. Almost exactly a decade later, Hardcore Henry would be exactly that.
  • There's a fossilised native of Mars named after the real-life fossilised Australopithecus Lucy, and its role in researching unlocking human potential via the 24th chromosome. Lucy is also the name of another movie referencing the same fossil by name, while unlocking more human potential via 90% of Your Brain instead.
  • Al Weaver's role as The Kid predates a handful of things to his role as Rex 12 years later, which would be the Parental Abandonment, showing goodwill here and there, and ultimately dying for defying orders, except Rex's death is at the beginning of the game, was a result of him not having enough time to process an order rather than actively defying it, and he is revived soon after, and his parents are revealed to have died when he was very young. A few fans have joked about how The Rock kills Rex upon making the connections.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Most people want to watch this movie for the first-person shooting scene.
  • Others just want to watch for the Incest Yay Shipping between John and Sam.
• Moral Event Horizon: Sarge crosses it when he orders The Kid to kill the uninfected UAC personnel, and then shoots him when he refuses. Keep in mind that he had already killed a begging scientist who might not have ever been infected earlier.
• Narm
  • Sarge's spontaneous Camp attitude when he becomes Ax-Crazy.
  • When Sarge is pulled away by the monsters, he yells: "I am not supposed to die!" which is followed by a very awkward scream as he is dragged away from the heroes. Really, Sarge?
  • The constant awkward references to Hell and demons when the plot writes out any actual relation to either of those things.
  • The way John Grimm shouted "It was his first mission!" after Sarge shoots The Kid was way overacted to the point it becomes hilarious which mildly ruins what's intended to be a dramatic scene.
• Older Than They Think: One of the complaints towards the movie was that it focused on The Squad instead of a One-Man Army like in the game. However, the Doom Bible by Tom Hall reveals that the original Doom was also supposed to focus on different members of a squad of Marines before they were all replaced in the final product by Doomguy.
• Periphery Demographic: Outside of its original audience of fans of the game and more typical action movie viewers, the film also became a cult classic in certain fandom circles because of John and Sam's relationship having something of an incesty vibe.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Sam and John are twins, but tend to come across more as estranged lovers rather than brother and sister.
• Retroactive Recognition: The Kid is played by Al Weaver, who would go on to actually play a video game protagonist 12 years later.
• Signature Scene: The first-person sequence, which is generally regarded as the highlight of the film even by its many detractors.
• So Okay, It's Average: It's not necessarily an awful movie and watchable enough by video-game movie standards, but the loose relation to the source material in terms of plot, setting, and characters leaves it feeling like a big-budget version of a Sci-Fi Channel original that could have easily skated by without using the Doom license at all. There's a good reason the first-person sequence is widely considered the best part of the film.
• Spiritual Adaptation: An experiment conducted by an amoral corp backfires and causes horrible mutations, then a team of elite badass soldiers are sent to clean the mess and suffer great casualties... Despite being an official adaptation of Doom, the plot is much close to a Resident Evil in space.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The most common criticism of the film from fans of the games is how it borrows almost nothing from any of the games, verging on an In Name Only adaptation. The reason the first-person sequence is nigh-universally considered the highlight of the movie is because it's the only part of the entire film that's anything like the games.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The film plays out more like a Resident Evil movie with a space setting, likely because the filmmakers were trying to cash in on the success of the latter's then-recent film series.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Not only were the resources to make this movie wasted on a plot that had nothing to do with the actual game, but even the movie completely fails to take advantage of its Mars setting or give a proper explanation as to why a Martian retrovirus would change some people into superhumans but others into monsters based on how "good" or "evil" they are. And even though teleporters are established and used prominently in the movie, they aren't even what bring the creatures to Mars.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: The film is most charitably considered a mediocre Cliché Storm video game adaptation movie, but one thing reviewers all noticed was how good Dwayne Johnson is as the leading man. Despite a howlingly dumb script where the central twist is him becoming a crazy zombie with bad makeup stuck on his face, he injects a lot of humanity into it, showing cracks in the mask while still being likeable, and making the descent into madness convincing. This was early enough in Johnson's career that he was still being credited as "The Rock", so was probably the role that showed studios how strong an actor he actually was.
• Video Game Movies Suck: Despite a solid budget, big-name draw and being violent enough for an R rating, the assessment is that it's either So Bad, It's Good for how it craps badass all over the place, start to finish, or a complete fail for having next to nothing to do with any of the Doom storylines. Its actors are certainly giving it all they've got, and it has that rockin' FPS sequence and music. In fact, Roger Ebert's review for the movie provides the quote for this trope's page.
• Vindicated by History: Over time, the movie has become a Cult Classic of sorts, especially among the game fans. Many of the film's assets, especially the music, had been used in fanmade mods. The further divisiveness of the second Doom film, Doom: Annihilation, also helps.

The Novels

• Broken Base: Are the novels good for what they are, taking an Excuse Plot and moving it in a neat new direction that will forever keep it distinct in the franchise, or are they a dumpster fire of too much creative freedom completely warping the entire point of Doom into yet another '90s sci-fi novel with "demons" on the cover?
• First Installment Wins: When fans talk about this series, they'll usually only recommend the first book, maybe even the second. Mostly because while it's apparent that at least one of the authors personally played the original Doom, everything beyond that took such a massive swerve from anything in the games and loose canon that the books became more of a punchline than anything taken seriously.
• Harsher in Hindsight: During the L.A mission, Arlene's weapon of choice is the 'AB-10 Machine Pistol'. The AB-10 is actually a variant of the TEC-9 pistol, made famous by gang culture (hence the probable inclusion of it during the LA mission) but also made infamous for its use in the Columbine High School massacre. The Doom games were blamed as a scapegoat for the shooting, since the perpetrators were fans, and one of them even made custom levels for the games, which rumors held included a recreation of the school.
• Older Than They Think: Giving the Doomguy a distinct name, identity and personality happened long before the movie or the like with this series. Flynn Taggart became a surprisingly consistent go-to name for modders writing plotlines and characters.

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