Doom

Platform: PC
Developer: id Software
Release: 1993

Doom did not invent the first-person shooter genre. But it might as well have. Even though developer id Software got its name on the map a couple of years prior to the 1994 release of Doom when it released Wolfenstein 3D, a straightforward but visceral, action-packed corridor crawl, Doom was the game that defined first-person shooters for years to come. More importantly, it achieved its blockbuster success solely through its incredibly high quality.

The shotgun was the mainstay of the Doom arsenal, but pretty much all the game's weapons were great.

Basically, Doom brought a level of sophistication to the first-person shooter framework that instantly rendered Wolfenstein irrelevant, as good as that game was in its time. But after Doom, there was no turning back. Wolfenstein was all completely flat corridors and 90-degree angles. It's a small miracle that the designers were able to put together such a variety of different levels given those constraints, not to mention the paltry selection of four weapons, one of which was a near-useless knife. Doom, while not fully 3D (id Software's own Quake later took the genre into the third dimension, for keeps), added the appearance of depth to its stages. Elevators took you to higher ground, and enemies would fire upon you from all directions. The twisting, dangerous, and ominous corridors of a martian installation infested by the legions of hell burned a permanent imprint of themselves into the minds of millions of gamers who braved their depths time and time again.

Doom's arsenal of weapons is as legendary as its cast of enemies. A well-balanced, fun-to-use, and powerful-looking selection of firearms (plus a chain saw!) let you make short work of most bad guys, but they came at you in droves, and some of them--starting with the hairless, pink demons--could sustain surprising amounts of injury. Plus, the nightmare difficulty mode offered an extra added challenge: The enemies would respawn. In fact, Doom coined that word.

Environmental lighting, great atmospheric sound, and tons of enemies onscreen made Doom not just one of the most entertaining games of the time, but also one of the scariest.

Doom also featured a four-player multiplayer mode, playable over a LAN or a modem, and this was its crowning achievement. While there were no specific multiplayer modes to choose from, one to four players could easily hop into the game, clear out a level of all the bad guys (or start a level without any bad guys in it), and then focus their attention on one another, blasting each other away until the wee hours. In fact, Doom's combination of competitive and cooperative gameplay was truly extraordinary--players could readily switch between shooting each other to bits and helping each other out. For many gamers of the time, Doom marked their first experience playing a multiplayer action game on their PCs, and that experience was a revelation.

Not that anyone questions Doom's status as one of the true classics of computer gaming, but the game holds up remarkably well to today's standards, despite being more than 10 years old. Take just about any successful first-person shooter released since, and you can easily trace its influences back to this one pioneering game, which thrilled and terrified millions and caused its fair share of controversy but ultimately kept us entertained for much longer than most games possibly could.