You’re a space marine. The mission is to shoot your way through a monster invasion unfolding on the moons of Mars. And the monsters? They come from hell.
When Id Software — six mostly 20-somethings at the time — pitched this gleefully unhinged premise to prospective recruits in 1993, millions answered the call. The technically masterful, thrillingly glib video game that Id released online crashed Carnegie Mellon University’s network within hours because so many students were playing. Two years later, actual Marines were using a version of it for training exercises, and it had purportedly been downloaded onto more computers than Windows 95, the newest PC operating system. The game was called Doom.
Sequels, prequels and offshoots inevitably followed, including this month’s Doom: The Dark Ages, with each new title bringing more resources to the pursuit of mass exorcism.
But Doom’s most entertaining developments happen in the shadow of the franchise, where fans resurrect the original game over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign.
These esoteric achievements quickly became a meme. Now they look more like a legacy.
Doom defined the first-person shooter genre, put computer games on the map and helped ignite a graphics war. But what many hard-core tech hobbyists want to know is whether you can play it on a pregnancy test.
The answer: positively yes. And for the first time, even New York Times readers can play Doom within The Times’s site. (Start by hitting the button below. The game is rated Mature for both violence and blood and gore.)
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