What it was
A marine sits out a punishment posting on Mars after hitting an officer who ordered his unit to fire on civilians. The Union Aerospace Corporation has been running secret teleport experiments on the moons, and they have gone badly wrong. Phobos calls for help, Deimos vanishes, the rest of the response team dies, and he walks into the base with a pistol and a grudge. The trail runs from the moons of Mars down into hell.
It is a first-person shooter in the plainest sense. Each level is a maze with a marked exit: find it, kill whatever stands in the way, and watch your ammunition, health and armour. Demons and possessed soldiers come in crowds, and they do one thing: see or hear you, then come for you. Keycards open locked doors, toxic waste eats your health and ceilings come down to crush you. The shotgun is the best friend you will make.
Where it sits in history
id Software made Doom for MS-DOS and put the first episode online as shareware at midnight on 10 December 1993. So many people were already waiting on the University of Wisconsin's server that id couldn't get on to upload it until the network administrator let more connections in. John Carmack built the engine. Tom Hall wrote a science fiction story for it, but the finished game went with John Romero and Sandy Petersen's action-first design.
Official ports followed fast: 32X and Jaguar in 1994, then Super NES and PlayStation in 1995. Sculptured Software made the Super NES version. Williams Entertainment published it in North America in September 1995, Ocean Software in PAL regions on 26 October, and Imagineer in Japan on 1 March 1996. Reviewers flagged weaker graphics and controls that were slow to answer, then split on how much that mattered: Computer and Video Games, GamePro and Next Generation landed anywhere from high marks to middling ones.
How it plays today
Be clear about what this is: a magic trick, and a good one. Getting Doom onto a 16-bit console at all was a dare, and the bones are here. The layouts still fold back on themselves, the monsters still come in packs, and a door opening on a room full of them still makes you grip the pad.
The cost is in your hands. Turning and aiming feel heavy, and in a game built on spinning round to face the thing behind you, that hurts more than the rough picture does. You fight the controls nearly as hard as the demons. Play it as a curio, a look at what the PC crowd were raving about, and it is a fun hour. As the way to play Doom, it isn't.
Compared with
- Wolfenstein 3D: id's earlier shooter on the same console: flat grid mazes, and an easier fit for the hardware.
- Zombies Ate My Neighbors: Monster blasting on the Super NES seen from above instead of down the barrel, and far more at home there.
Why it matters
Doom gave the world a running joke: can it run Doom? Since id released the source code, people have put it on smart thermostats, on pianos and inside Doom itself. None of it is useful. All of it is play. The philosopher Bernard Suits called playing a game 'the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles', and cramming Doom into a box never meant to hold it is that definition with a soldering iron.
The Super NES version is the same urge, early and official. A 16-bit console was asked to draw a corridor into hell, and mostly it did. In 1995 Next Generation called Doom the most talked-about PC game ever, and if you had no PC, this cartridge was a door into it. Not the best door. But there is something warm in people refusing to accept that a thing can't be done, just to see a demon on the telly.
Read: Why games are fun: it is the order →
- Suits, B. (1978). The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia.
What you're levelling up
You have been training these without noticing. Here is how to do it on purpose, and where it pays off away from the couch. All the skills games teach →
Keeping your cool
In the game. Demons and possessed soldiers come in crowds and charge the moment they see or hear you. Panic and you spray the shells you need for the next room.
Do it on purpose. Next time a door opens on a crowd, back into the doorway before you fire. Make them come to you one at a time.
Off the couch. First date, the booking's gone missing and it's bucketing down. Breathe, have a laugh about it, find plan B together. Keeping it light when it goes sideways is better company than any fancy table.
Judging risk
In the game. You run your own ammunition, health and armour. Cross the toxic waste now and lose health, or hunt for the radiation suit first?
Do it on purpose. Before each big fight, say out loud what you'll spend: shells, health, the lot. Afterwards, check how close you were.
Off the couch. Money's the same game. Know what you can afford to burn before you walk in, and you won't wake up skint on Monday.
Spatial thinking
In the game. Levels are labyrinths with one marked exit, and the keycard for a locked door is usually somewhere else entirely. Walls and floors sit at any angle and height, so you hold the shape in your head.
Do it on purpose. When you grab a keycard, say the route back to its door out loud before you move. Then see if you were right.
Off the couch. New hospital, new shopping centre, new city. Keep the map in your head and you stop being the lost one and start being the one people follow.
Verdict · 6/10
A brave squeeze of the PC's most famous shooter into a Super NES cartridge, with the mazes and the menace intact. Heavy controls and a rough picture make it a curio rather than the place to play Doom.
