DOOM, Part 1: Knee deep in the details

Historian Kevin Impellizeri shares a story of a video game controversy to his friends: Kate Lynch and Matt Shoemaker who is a tabletop gaming historian and author of Gathering of Gamers. We continue our long celebration of five years of Scandalous Games by starting a deep dive into one of the, if not the, most famous controversial video games: the legendary 1993 sci-fi FPS: DOOM. In part one of our three-month series, we examine the origins of DOOM, its creators, and the monumental impact the game had on both gaming and tech,

Topics discussed include: the long shadow that is DOOM's influence, reminiscing on LAN parties and shareware games of bygone days, and the eternally retold story of DoomGuy.

If you're interested in more Scandalous Games style action, check out Kevin's recent gust appearance on the show I'm From the Internet where he was part of a fun conversation on the 2012 internet backlash to the ending of Mass Effect 3.

Part 1: https://shows.acast.com/im-from-the-internet-a-podcast-about-somethingawfulcom/episodes/mass-effect-3-part-one-with-kevin-impellizeri-of-scandalous

Part 2: https://shows.acast.com/im-from-the-internet-a-podcast-about-somethingawfulcom/episodes/mass-effect-3-part-two-with-kevin-impellizeri-of-scandalous

For some awesome resources on the history of DOOM, see:

Ahoy, "RetroAhoy: Doom," January 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4-SVUHQYI

Errant Signal, Children of DOOM (Playlist), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O91tro2XwxM&list=PLvTOVWzS1f6-ptFCaXVnl41LZIc4x8Zmo.

David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (New York: Random House, 2003).

John Romero, DOOM Guy: Life in First Person: Building DOOM and a Gaming Revolution (Harry N. Abrams, 2023).

For some of the weirder places you can play DOOM, see: Slope's Game Room, "Top 100 Crazy ways to play DOOM | Weird Video Game Facts," September 21, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srMPmfavTxE. 

The game Kevin mentioned is the Windows 3.1 game Warpath, developed by Synthetic Reality (aka Dan Samuel), which you can play here: https://archive.org/details/win3_Warpath. 

To play a 1995 shareware version of DOOM, see: https://archive.org/details/doom_20230531

To watch Bill Gates promoting Windows 95 in DOOM at the October 30, 1995, Judgment Day event, see: raij, "Bill Gates Doom," YouTube, March 18, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN0K58EfJSg. 

Anthony Hodges composed the soundtrack for the PlayStation version of DOOM, which you can listen to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT8--F5EDpo&list=RDgT8--F5EDpo&start_radio=1.

For a neat podcast devoted to novelizations of video game properties, check out Pixel Lit (https://zencastr.com/Pixel-Lit). 

For more on the DOOM novels, check out the DOOM Wiki: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_novels. 

For stories about the infamous 3DO port of DOOM, see: 

“DOOM 3DO: or How I Survived Hell – Burger Becky,” Vintage Computer Federation, September 14, 2022, https://youtu.be/y_do6lL7ueQ?si=IHfGBpi2E4ToTX0S; “Burgertime 7/12/2015: DOOM 3DO,” Rebecca Heineman, July 12, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBbIil2HPSU; “Doom’s Worst Port Was Made in Ten Weeks | 3DO Console Doom | Past Mortem | SSFF,” Stop Skeletons From Fighting, January 28, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxF1_wg2d_Q.

You can read along the 1996 DOOM comic here: https://archive.org/details/doomcomic/mode/2up. 

 If you want to learn more about the history of tabletop games and the convention GenCon, check out Matt's book, Gathering of Gamers: Dungeons & Dragons and Other Games Through Gen Con from Play Story Press: https://playstorypress.org/books/gathering-of-gamers/. 

More info, including show notes and sources at http://scandalousgamespodcast.wordpress.com.