Doom

Platforms: PC, Mac, NES, SNES, Saturn, 32X, 3DO, PlayStation, N64, Game Boy Advance, coming to Xbox,
Publisher: id Software/Activision, 1994
Developer: id Software

"The hearings had just started for Night Trap and obviously Mortal Kombat when Doom came out. If somebody wants to believe that they can spit fireballs at me and jump 30 feet through the air while kicking me, staying aloft for 10 minutes while they're kicking me, more power to them. But the dangers of a game like Doom are a lot more pronounced. They sailed all the way through that 1993 hearing without ever mentioning the word Doom. Curiously, though, they never mentioned Castle Wolfenstein, either." --Steve Kent.

The Texas-based id Software ironically hails from the same Dallas suburb, Mesquite, that once tried to run all arcades out of town, claiming that video games were violent and damaging to kids. A city ordinance passed in 1976, preventing anyone under 18 from entering an arcade. A state court overturned the ordinance, and gamers have called Mesquite home ever since. Besides housing id Software, Mesquite is home to the annual QuakeCon competition. Doom, however, unlike its brethren Quake and Castle Wolfenstein, has not skirted scrutiny from video game critics and censors.

Doom and Doom II offered quite an arsenal of weaponry.

Doom spawned on December 10, 1994--the brainchild of John and Adrian Carmack (no relation), John Romero, and others to varying degrees of involvement. The first-person shooter gained instant respect among gamers as a fast, serious, thrilling game. It had depth and was well designed. You played as a Marine, trapped on Mars, whose only hope for survival was to slash through hordes of aliens as hungry to waste him as he was to waste them. From this initial installment, Doom grew into an online mecca, and at the time of this writing a new edition is being produced for the Xbox and PC, due "soon."

Besides the controversy surrounding the grisly departure of id's John Romero, the game has been drop-kicked for its level of violence and its potential, detractors say, to lure youth into real-world violence.

A chilling security camera still of Harris and Klebold on that tragic day.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went to their high school, in Littleton, Colorado, and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. The Columbine High incident raised a panic level already high in the United States, and, most would say, rightfully so. People realized then, if they hadn't already, that kids have access to guns and that the results can be grim. The Rocky Mountain News covered the incident in depth, reporting on August 22, 1999, "His [Eric Harris] nickname, Reb, was inspired by a character in one of his favorite computer games, Doom, where the goal is to score high body counts." The paper pointed out "one of the game's slogans: 'Doom -- where the sanest place is behind a trigger.'" It was widely publicized that police had found a videotape that showed either Harris or Klebold with a sawed-off shotgun on his lap that he called "Arlene"--a Doom reference.

People wanted answers, and as with any such incident of violence before or after Columbine, video games, TV, music, and movies would take the heat until (if ever) people understood what actually went wrong. Harris was also on Luvox, an antidepressant. Harris was rejected from the military--getting in apparently meant a lot to him, according to the Rocky Mountain News. But Doom gave the media a direct hit: Harris played Doom. Harris shot and killed people. Therefore...

Doom does not need defending here. Thousands if not millions of Doom fans nationwide supported the idea that Harris and Klebold's problems were bigger than their interest in playing Doom. And the issue is larger than defending the game, because most people who play it don't kill their classmates.

Gus Van Sant's film Elephant is a fictionalization of Columbine filmed in Portland, Oregon. The movie doesn't directly deal with the issue of video games inspiring the murders or Doom having any role in the killings. Nor does the movie directly deal with any sort of real-world issues surrounding Columbine. In Elephant, there's a brief sequence in which one of the shooters (possibly a representation of Eric Harris) is lying on the bed of the other shooter (possibly Dylan Klebold) playing a computer game. The game is definitely not Doom but rather a game created solely for the movie, wherein uniform male characters that look like thin men in white dress shirts run away from the shooter as he shoots them in the back. As one falls, several more, who look exactly like him, appear--faceless men running away scared. This image suggests that we have little understanding of how the games we like for social or competitive reasons affect others who may not process entertainment the same way or who may not so easily separate fantasy from reality.

And these are just the spiders - taken from the upcoming Doom III

The Associated Press reported on April 24, 2001, that several families of victims of Columbine, including students and teacher Dave Sanders, filed suit against 25 entertainment companies seeking punitive damages of $5 billion. Game companies named included Nintendo, Sega, Sony, id Software, Acclaim, Activision, Capcom, Interplay, Eidos, and GT Interactive.

On July 19, 2001, the AP reported that the named video game companies sought to have the case thrown out of court based on the fact that "lawyers for the companies said the class-action suit should be dropped because it doesn't allege that any particular game led Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to go on their rampage." Id Software, in September 2001, asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit that claims the product influenced the Columbine High School gunmen. Updating further, on March 5, 2002, the AP reported that a federal judge had dismissed the lawsuit against the video game distributors and moviemakers named in the suit.

The suit against video game companies linked to Columbine by accusers remains dismissed. In August 2002, the AP reported another federal court decision to dismiss a $33 million lawsuit that claimed that video game makers, among others, were to blame for a 1997 shooting spree at Heath High School in which three students died.

"We find that it is simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen (an activity undertaken by millions) to shooting people in a classroom (an activity undertaken by a handful, at most)," Judge Danny Boggs said in the ruling from a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, the AP reported.