Hacker Cinema
Doom
2005 · Film · 105 min
Part of Doom Collection
Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak
A team of space marines known as the Rapid Response Tactical Squad, led by Sarge, is sent to a science facility on Mars after somebody reports a security breach. There, they learn that the alert came after a test subject, a mass murderer purposefully injected with alien DNA, broke free and began killing people. Dr. Grimm, who is related to team member Reaper, informs them all that the chromosome can mutate humans into monsters -- and is highly infectious.
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31 comments on Hacker News
I'm pretty similar. AAA games are very similar to modern blockbuster movies. They're playing to the lowest common denominator, and often aren't motivated by any central vision besides making money. But just like Hollywood, sometimes a really creative project makes it through all that machinery. A series that has worked for me are the modern Doom games. Could have been a lame cash grab but they nailed a really interesting formula and continued to tweak it in each game.
Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?
If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
The question is how much that first-mover advantage still means. I guess with video games and movies (Doom and Ghibli), there's a massive difference between telling ChatGPT to make your selfie look like Ghibli.
But for illustrators and graphic artists? What's now keeping me from downloading an illustrator's portfolio and telling ChatGPT to make me something in that style, but for my company?
Is there still value in that illustrator pioneering her unique style? It used to be a client magnet, now a good portfolio might take your potential clients away.
I guess the other side of this is that the more a style/idea/media spreads, the more comesw back to the original creator, but I'm doubtful this is true in AI.
Doom, the PDF Movie.
In Theatres, Near You
Wow, then in that case we should stop making any FPS games because we already have Doom, no more RPGs because Ultima exists, and no more movies because there's Bambi.
The mistakes game movies make is they try to make the movie look too much like the game as if it will please gamers. The movie has to be in the spirit of the game but not too literally. Example is that showing Mario jumping and hitting bricks in real life is just stupid. Or street fighter movie emulating a side view fight is just gonna make it tacky. Doom the movie has these dumb ass fps screens.
Fez - beautiful art, beautiful music [0], nostalgia with a modern take
Journey - beautiful game that does not center on combat
Braid - good art, great puzzles and a game mechanic that is fully realized and explored (time rewind)
Cuphead - gorgeous art, like playing a Fleischer brothers cartoon
Monument Valley - simple but perplexing puzzles wrapped in gorgeous art
One Hour One Life (and, smaller in scope but Passage) - an MMO where you spawn as a helpless baby then grow into a full adult in one hour. The game forces others to cooperate or else you die within the first few minutes [1]. Passage was one of the first games that took me aback [2].
Not sure if "memorable" is the right word for it but "addictive" and "things I play too much" are: Beat saber, Pistol Whip, Crypt of the Necrodancer (all beat games)
For nostalgia reasons: Doom, Angband, Nettreck, (original) Legend of Zelda.
Games I haven't played but have heard are good: The Witness, Legend of Obra Din, Undertale, Transistor, Night in the Woods, Dwarf Fortress
The AAA games, or their equivalent, are like blockbuster movies to me: well scripted, well animated, have lots of "game feel" but ultimately lacking in the artistry it takes to make a memorable game. AAA games can have an impact on people in that way but I suspect this is mostly due to someones first exposure to a full game which usually happens in their teen years. You can probably guess my age from the games I like for nostalgia reasons.
EDIT: added features I like about the games and some links
[0] https://music.disasterpeace.com/album/fez-ost
[1] http://onehouronelife.com/
[2] http://passage.toolness.org/
OMG! I loved this update to Doom. This had the 4th episode called Thy Flesh Consumed, which consisted of 9 new levels that were super difficult compared to the original release of the first 3 episodes. If you guys remember Ultimate Doom introduced the 200% health and armor and the crazy Nightmare level. Anyways thanks for this haha, just reminiscing on a favorite game of mine. Sorry I dont have a compact mac from the 80s though but interesting vid haha
Flipping pissed they cancelled the DOOM tv show
My father (1951) went through Tandy's Dancing Demon through text adventure games, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, Doom and modern video games.
He went from black and white mummies movies through Rambo to Matrix.
I (1980) was raised with Lucas Arts games, and you know the rest.
The gap between my father and me is huge. He saw the entire entertaiment industry transforming, from technology and from content points of view.
I've seeing the same things since year ~2000. I am tired of nostalgia, seeing the same things over and over again... The same formula up to the point I can predict how most movies will end.
While I enjoy Ron Gilbert doing Monkey Island again, and retro games, I still expect something more. And it's not coming.
I surely can see there are more modern topics like inclusion and the kind in most American movies and games, but I don't think it's enough for a change in the industry like the ones my father saw.
And Modern tech like deepfakes will only enforce nostalgia... Entertaiment industry is stealing my middle-age.
Amazing work! DOOM in WEBGL looks like inception movie. a dream within a dream
Same.
Getting that first dot matrix printer was pretty magical. Especially since we could design our own dinosaurs by mixing heads, bodies, legs, and tails of a wide variety of dinosaurs, name them something ridiculous, and print them out. So many dinosaur printouts.
[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Designasaurus_1988
We had to upgrade the 386 to a 486 and install a math coprocessor to play DOOM.
Then later, it was all about SkiFree and Jezzball.
My favorite book was Windows 95 Secrets.
My small town school had a pretty solid computer class where we learned typing, then hypercard, and then digital video editing. The teacher convinced me somehow to make a movie about wheeling around a computer cart around the grounds to a soundtrack full of 'The Drifters' type music
Way later in life I found the guy who ran the one big server that brought internet to most of the community. He said the continuous bandwidth upgrade needs were driven almost entirely by porn traffic.
But it very much is, at least in a "Western world" context which usually also includes Europe, were attitudes to violence and nudity can be completely reversed to the US.
For one of the most prominent examples, just compare the US to Germany: For decades Germany censored very mundane video games, like Counter Strike or Doom, for their depiction of violence.
In games like Command&Conquer, Half-Life and others, whole enemy units and models were replaced to appease the German rating boards. The original DOS Doom game was only "unbanned" in 2011.
A lot of violent movies and TV shows are only aired in censored versions in Germany, yet on these very same channels, during late night, there regularly is completely barrier free soft-core erotica content that for many Americans would qualify as "porn".
Another example is the naturism/nudist culture that very much has a old and somewhat popular tradition in Germany as FKK. It's also a thing in the US, yes, but it never was on a comparable mainstream level like in Germany.
These differences exist because there simply isn't this one unified "Western culture" that some people stipulate to be a thing.
> Right, I'm thinking specifically of code like shaders that do produce copyrighted content.
What do you mean by this exactly? What I meant was "code" that produces a Disney movie for example.
> anyone could have produced a Doom movie
This would actually be great if you ask me! What I fear the most is someone renaming the project and selling it as their own with no added value.
> One day another player showed up from another arcade, and he was doing all three moves.
This was one of the arcade-specific experiences that I've never quite had at any other point in my life. MMORPGS and forums have given me some of the feeling of being at an arcade, but this was something unique.
I was perhaps too young, or for whatever reason not good enough to be noteworthy at the arcades. But (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread), my best friend was. He was notoriously good.
We'd go from arcade to arcade in town, until they'd ban him or (in one case) up the difficulty just to get him to leave.
We'd play co-op games where he carried me through and it was a kind of bonding experience I can't quite compare to anything else.
He was so good at the competitive games (in particular SF2) that people wouldn't challenge him. Why waste a coin? I sometimes put in a coin just to bait others, because the clever players knew that if you saw someone playing SF2 alone for a while, they were probably really good. He'd give me 10 cents to reimburse me :).
Whenever a new arcade opened up (usually in a shipping container, but sometimes 'real fancy'), we'd rush there and first try the new games, but then get back to SF2 and hope there were players that didn't know about him yet. It usually worked for a while.
But possibly one of the most vivid memories of my childhood was the time that, while I was faffing about on other arcades, out of the corner of my eye I'd see some other guy (it was mostly men, but perhaps that's partly culturally. women became mothers-in-training in their teens) walk up to his solo SF2 play, and pop in a coin.
I swear, when that happened, it sometimes felt like a Western. I'd notice first, on account of keeping an eye on my bestie, but others 'in the know' would nudge each other and cut off whatever game they were playing to watch the spectacle.
A crowd would form around my friend and this 'new guy', and, of course, most of the time he'd do the equivalent of drawing so quick that the other guy didn't stand a chance. Sometimes he'd play around. Pick one of the weaker characters (that monster one I don't remember). Or humiliate his new adversary by offering to play with one hand.
I think there was only one time where he struggled, and it turned out this guy was a dude from the capitol and was known there for being the local SF2 champion.
EDIT: Oh, and just to add some color to this story in case anyone liked it: I was one of the few people in town with a personal computer. My parents told me to not mention it to my friends for fear of theft. I told this friend and I will never forget the experience of having him over and playing games together. This was a 486 and we played Wacky Wheels and (I think) Doom and One Must Fall, the latter which was closest to the fighting games he was so good at (or perhaps a similar game?).
These games were clearly a step down from what we got to play at the arcades, but the fact that we could play them without having to put in coins (even if they had the 'continue' and 'credits' screens) was just mind-blowing to the both of us.
Sadly as I moved on to RPG's and RTS', he stuck with the arcades and we drifted apart in this regard. We bonded over watching badly dubbed films though, The Matrix being probably our favorite.
It's the other way around, the film is based on a classified ad, which many years earlier was a YTMND meme/fad. NEDM is also a classic YTMND meme. https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/NEDM
It has a complicated origin, but a lot of YTMND was organic and weird like that.
> I thought the movie was crap.
I'm a fan of the Warcraft lore (though not where WoW took it). I found it pretty awful too. It seemed to lack a story - "stuff" just seemed to happen. It was like a 6-year old telling a story: there was no coherence or continuity. I've liked tons of movies that have done poorly with critics but a common theme across all of them is that they had a storyline.
To put this in perspective, I enjoyed Doom (2005) which is renowned for being one of the worst game movies around.
Top 5 Video Game Movies That Aren't That Bad:
1. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2010)
2. Resident Evil (2002)
3. Doom (2005)
4. Mortal Kombat (1995)
5. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2003)
Doom could have better. They gratuitously changed the plot, which is funny because Doom has practically zero plot at all. And they managed to change it without improving it in the slightest—for the purposes of the movie, they could have easily gone with the "opened a portal to hell" and the rest of the movie would have been the same. Their changes were really dumb and completely pointless which was really frustrating.
Also the first person part at the end was unnecessary and just wasn't good cinema (compare to Hard Core Henry which was 1st person but it worked because they really committed to it).
I recently spent a lazy Sunday morning watching the Doom movie. It was a lot better than it had any right to be, in my book - I haven't played Doom 3, but by the standards of action-sci/fi-horror movies starring The Rock, it was excellent.
I also thought the WarCraft movie was very good, but there I did grow up playing the hell out of WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, and reading and re-reading the manual with the backstory covered by the movie (not to mention the lovely concept art). Bit of a shame that it didn't do quite well enough to continue the story.
Yeah I think that's the crux of it.
The "Doom" movie is arguably an excellent adaptation of the video game. But that doesn't make for much of a movie.
> If there are a few examples of video games as sublime art, then I think that establishes the medium as art. The movie Doom is abysmal, and yet the late Roger Ebert would put that on a higher plane than these great examples? That seems irrational.
I think he would describe the movie Doom as bad art: It's orthogonal to a good game -- not able to be compared as art.
He's working with a very specific limited definition of art.
(I don't agree with Ebert's premise. Although his auteur point is compelling, it is too one-dimensional. And doesn't take catharsis into account.)
Art is up to taste, so as a critic it's easier to recognize something as art that maybe you don't partake or enjoy, like post-modern literature, Jackson Pollock paintings, or anti-art, than to fail to recognize it at all. That is what makes Roger Ebert's argument weak.
The best example of sublime art in a game would be Myst. Outside of that minor examples might be The Stanley Parable, Half-Life 2, or Façade.
If there are a few examples of video games as sublime art, then I think that establishes the medium as art. The movie Doom is abysmal, and yet the late Roger Ebert would put that on a higher plane than these great examples? That seems irrational.
I think the greatest issue is with the video game work that Roger Ebert was exposed to. If you had never listened to music in your life and only read books and seen paintings, and then you were introduced to pop radio or a host of folk death metal albums, you might have the same reaction as he had had to video games: seeing that music is an inferior form, merely an amusement rather than art, instead of seeing that certain genres are more crude than the level of sophistication enjoyed in his books or paintings. Being surrounded by the most popular or violent collections of medium aren't encouraging in the way that seeing an instance of sublime art would be.
The examples that Kellee Santiago gave were really independent renaissance games, which are often minimalistic or contain subtle elements. Instead of an example of an epic like the Iliad or Lawrence of Arabia, they are a short story, of any quality.
And just as Roger Ebert did not live in a vacuum and had certainly seen video games played in movies, he has obviously seen them develop from the very beginning. The examples of early arcade games are like simple drum signals compared to a symphony. It might be that he just missed out on what might have been a great artistic experience.
The 2005 Doom was a movie....
[EDIT: Yes I know the post above has been edited to fix/clarify, no I can't delete this post.]
This was 2003 no TiVo even, and Fox doesn't really do traditional syndication.
Scifi is expensive to make a scifi show has to outperform the competition to survive simply because of production costs.
This is why Shows like Buffy or X-Files worked because they didn't really need anything to set up the world, no need for expensive sets or special effects (buffy had some but you could always just do a filler episode with not much going on to balance the seasonal budget) a high school/small town setting and rural new jersey with a few wind breakers and 2 rental cars isn't going to break anyone's bank.
And also when Fox did try to monetize fans, the fans didn't coughed up the cash, Serenity made 25M at the US box office just to put it into perspective, xXx State of the Union and freaking DOOM made more money than Serenity.
> Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game.
Well, to be honest, Episode 1 and Episode 2 of Doom takes place on Phobos and Deimos, so you could say Apollo software got us to the moon but Doom got us to Mars :)
Overall, I don't think Doom 2 is actually much more abstract than Doom 1. I suspect the real difference is that all of Romero's levels were clumped together in the shareware episode of Doom 1, which is what everyone remembers. Sandy Petersen (who does the really abstract weird stuff) did episodes 2 and 3, but his Doom 2 levels were strewn throughout the game, even in the Earth-like sections that you'd expect to be more realistic.
Hilarious. It reminds me of the terrible DOOM movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45jgCxucL0k
This is much better than the movie. The interactivity and the humanity of it is wonderful.
I think the first Mortal Combat movie did a lot to make room for the first X-Men movie.
(both have a lot more necessary digital effects and fantasy elements than the other comic book movies that were being produced at that time)
The Doom movie was only mostly taken seriously, but it made a real attempt at fleshing out a story rooted in the game, and at least wasn't hugely hindered by a limited budget.
There are a few games that had only a basic plot that was expanded upon in more detail by later games or movies. Doom for example.
I think the overarching point is that "storytelling" simply can't work in the same manner as it does in books and movies.
If you tell a story in a cutscene, you then aren't playing a game at that point. Or if you plot out every possible interaction (kind of like The Walking Dead games) you have to limit the outcomes to a manageable level, which hamstrings the gameplay. So what's the solution? The article is arguing that you have to abandon narrative and focus on what you want the player to feel directly.
The problem is that "game literacy" is focused on all the wrong elements. A game like Doom has much better, tighter, more interesting gameplay than something like The Last of Us. (which I still really enjoyed!) And you can be moved by the story, characters etc. from The Last of Us, but it's a lot more like how you feel watching a movie. With Doom, people create their own narratives by interacting with the game, and those narratives have a different kind of power. People still tell stories about playing Doom for the first time 20 years ago with their friends. The objective, I think, is to make a game where those personal stories are directed to achieve a specific effect.
There's one example of this effect that I've read about before. There was a game in the 80s where you play a war game as either the U.S. or Russia. If you play as the U.S., you stockpile arms and try to win the war as you'd expect. But if you play as Russia, you have a whole different set of concerns - starvation, winters, limited resources, aggressive neighboring countries and other factors which lets you experience some of the desperation Russians must have felt during the Cold War. It's a pretty powerful story to tell through gameplay alone, and a story that was told through gameplay without narrative.