It's just over 30 years since Id Software launched Doom onto an unsuspecting world. Famously, the studio decided to make it available by uploading the shareware version onto the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin, immediately crashing the institution's entire network. This was just a hint of the chaos this seminal first-person shooter would wreak. Sure, Doom wasn't the first FPS and it wasn't the first game with online multiplayer, but it innovated in so many ways, it was so fast, so advanced, so imaginative, so violent, that it changed the games industry forever.
Sitting here in (almost) 2024, the age of photorealistic 4K visuals and 1GB broadband connectivity, it's tempting to believe that Doom has long since faded into irrelevance. But that's not the case. In his recent autobiography, Doom Guy, John Romero lists the set of design rules he laid out for the game while the team were working on it. Playing the very latest shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, it's clear that most of the those rules are just as relevant to the FPS genre as they ever were way back in the mists of time (i.e. 1993) – especially in terms of online multiplayer modes. The ghost of Doom still lurks in the burned-out corridors of Modern Warfare, and I'm going to show you where.
