Turns out Internet memes don’t make for compelling game design.

It goes back to Brutal Doom, which, in turn, goes back to the 2003 online publication of a 1996 Doom promotional comic, which would go on to become a stock in-joke among the community. “Rip and tear” and associated memery finds its origins in the comic’s take on the berserk pack, capitalising on what the comic medium could do that the engine couldn’t. Silent explodey demon-punching gave way to spine-grabbing and crazed rambling peppered with outrageously quotable catchphrases. It was funny, and cheesy, and goofy. A likable, vaguely quaint little thing to smirk to yourself about.

And so was Brutal Doom, a mid-tier not-quite-fork of Beautiful Doom that switched around the gameplay in vaguely interesting ways. Hardly revolutionary (gameplay mods were a well-established niche in ZDoom modding by then, thanks to DECORATE; I personally owe it much of my dev-fu), but competent. Also a plagiarised fucking mess, but competent. I was late on the Brutal Doom train, first stumbling across v12 on Skulltag (or was it Zandronum?) and getting off around v15 after contributing some DECORATE work.

But Brutal Doom isn’t Doom. Doom, as has been better articulated before, is a finely-tuned ballet of spatial awareness and split-second decision-making, prompted by a very specific combination of predictability and unpredictability. You must play on the simplicity of monster patterns and line-of-sight, and you must play off of the randomised feedback of monster behaviour and weapon damage. Bar really bad or really specific level design, there isn’t a moment in Doom where you aren’t thinking. Calling Doom a dumb game is the kind of spacetime-destroying wrongness that leaves us with semi-sentient fascist carrots for US presidents. (Thanks again, nineties game journalism.)

Brutal Doom didn’t get the memo, though. In fact, Brutal Doom is exactly what you think Doom is when you’ve never seen Doom in your life. It’s Doom for Gamergate kiddies who compared Serious Sam 3 to Duke Nukem Forever, failing miserably to establish their pathetic excuse for nerd cred. From the get-go, the entirely arbitrary reloading mechanics destroy any sort of flow; it and Serious Sam 3 would sour me on them for a very long time. Berserk executions, reworked in Doom 4 as “Glory Kills” (Fuck, almost glory-cringed my face off), bring back to life a distinctly AAA part of the mid-2000s that should’ve stayed very, very dead. “It’s about fast gameplay and violence”, as was said at E3. But it’s not. Were all violence excised, Doom would still be Doom. When it clumsily dressed you up as a waffle, Doom was in fact still Doom. Brutal Doom, and subsequently Doom 4, is Doom being made into the Gamer Game it never was, and Doomguy into the Cool Gruff Badass Videogame Guy he never was. It’s Meme Doom, all the character filed down and defanged for the 4chan generation.

And what do you know? They came. Finally, Doom for Mature Gamers Such As Themselves, at last in a form that didn’t upset the minuscule confines of focus-tested game-design-by-committee spoon-fed to them by revoltingly overpaid AAA marketing execs laughing all the way to the bank for every Great Big Overpriced Plastic Piece Of Shit Edition; a True Gamer ECKS-PEER-YINS with Real Graphics for Gamers. Creaming their Dew-drenched boxers over how cool and manly and big-dicked they were, in the process turning everything they touched — as gamers tend to do — to shit. Out with Dopefish, in with Pepe. They came and they came, and the tumour grew and grew. Slowly but surely, it claimed Zandronum, and the forums, the mod scene, soon the entire fucking fandom. I don’t play Doom with people anymore.

Attention, gamers, you little cancerous stains: You get no cred for playing Doom, you never did and you never will. Nothing that gets namedropped in fucking Friends qualifies as anything but the most mainstream of mainstreams. Doom, as it happens, is the furthest goddamned thing from “gamer” this side of fucking FIFA. Doom is so thoroughly, emphatically not “gamer” it doesn’t even have a video game protagonist. “Doomguy” is a function, nothing but the glorious bastard lovechild of Rambo and Ellen Ripley through the goofy, pulpy, metal-infused lens of post-Keen id. His non-game heritage infuses him with all the relevant character already built-in, even as a blank slate; through the mechanics, you live your way through a balls-to-the-wall rollercoaster ride of D&D, Slayer, Metallica, Evil Dead, and Aliens.

Shit Gamers don’t want you to know: Doom has had feminism in its DNA from day one. Hey, don’t like it, don’t buy it.

Meanwhile, Doom 4 leaves you with Cool Gruff Badass Videogame Guy nonchalantly stomping heads because he’s such a Cool Gruff Badass Videogame Guy.

And of course now, you big-dicked not-offended Gamers, you’re coming; a honed Pavlovian reflex of pure seething not-offendedness — the world’s most not-offended clockwork. Breathlessly memeing at me, not-offendedly red in your screeching not-offended faces, not-offendedly screaming something or other about being offended and/or firearm parts. It’s true, though. I’m really offended by the violence. Triggered, even.

It’s so offensively SHIT. ’93 Doom had me explode chests, crack skulls open, puncture eyeballs, saw through waists, melt flesh clean off of ribcages and watch eyeballs roll down to the floor. Repeatedly. All in intricate 2D glory. Doom 4? Cutscenes. Bits of meat, and some particles, pre-modeled for canned sub-MK cutscenes. Oh poop, son, Shadow better watch out. Fallout beats it. Left 4 Dead beats it. Serious Sam beats it. Killing Floor. Shadow Warrior. Rise of the Triad. It’s fucking shit. Yes, I’m mad, upset, offended and triggered that Doom 4 shits out the absolute bare minimum of bog-standard video game gore and then banks on the brazen ignorance of a generation of Gears-coddled internet hardass Xbox kiddies to meme away anybody calling bullshit. It’s revolutionarily shit.

All the more fitting. Doom 4 is just that. Internet Hardass Doom. AAA Doom. 4chan Doom. It is, in all possible senses, Gamer Doom. It’s Doom for little Halo gamer kiddies who think they get to be snobs about Call of Duty, let alone Gone Home. It’s Doom for the piece-of-shit fucking failed abortions who ape its typeface to drape a quark-thin veneer of authenticity over their Stormfront cash grab, and the decerebrated cunts who make the ploy succeed with goddamned flying colours because gamers are the world’s thickest fucking fiddles. Irrespective of its author being a monumental shitwad (pun intended), I could’ve forgiven Brutal Doom, being a mod; Doom 4 makes the conscious choice to validate and legitimise the entirety of this Gamer bullshit as The Real Doom, For Mature Gamers. But it’s not. It’s Dunning-Kruger Doom, in the image of the audience it chases: a self-absorbed little turd so thoroughly coddled by years of corporate marketing that a one-note Internet meme manages to rot its way into brazen, fractally undeserved delusions of nerd cred.

Doom 4 is shit. Anyone who plays it is shit. Anyone who participated in its creation, marketing, transport, and/or sale is shit. Anyone who calls it “DOOM” is shit. Anyone who doesn’t reflexively smash something the second they’re reminded it exists is shit. Doom 4 is terminal-stage Gamer, the rot gushing forth from the emaciated remains of what was once the Doom franchise. Doom 4 is a cancerous mass of putrid shit.

Go play Serious Sam 3.