You'll bounce around in it, you'll get a sense of the frantic pace and unforgiving nature of the original and then move on to the excellent Doom of today. Is it worth it to play the original Doom first before diving into the modern remake? I'd say not really.

Those of us who experienced them back in the day can still get a sense of appreciation of how well they work today, along with a healthy dose of nostalgia filling in the cracks where they don't work all that well - map design being one aspect that has aged the worst. I'd say you should spend an hour or two with the first episode of Doom 1 (which is the shareware episode and easily the best in the game) and then figure out what you want to do from were amazing at the time of release but I don't really see someone brought up on modern shooters being able to glean all that much from them aside from a purely archival perspective on the passage of time. But they're also kind of simple, can be difficult, and you don't really need to beat them to enjoy new Doom. They're definitely still worth playing and accessible all over the place (PC, obviously, but the XBLA ports, which run on XBONE, are also great). They also have complex and interesting level design and amazing atmosphere (especially the sound, which is just fantastic.) The hand-drawn art has aged nicely (hand-drawn art generally does) and the weapons are all super satisfying to use.įrom the sound of pinky demons snorting nearby to the look on the Doom guy's face when you pick up a new weapon to watching monsters fight each other there really isn't anything quite like the original Doom games. You move really fast and you don't need to aim particularly well (there's no z-axis aiming at all) so they're really about movement and positioning in a very satisfying way. They don't have stories of note or anything like that (though it will make you appreciate the cool things they did in updating the classic enemies and other nods to the original.)ĭoom and Doom 2 hold up in a way that later shooters (like Unreal or whatever) do not because they're sort of a different thing from modern shooters. You should play the original and Doom 2, but you don't necessarily need to play them (at least not to completion) before the new one.

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