Get Played - Retrograde: Doom

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Heather, Nick and Matt take a look back at 1993's Doom! They talk about how influential it was as an FPS, the many clones, what you can play Doom on and more! Our next We Play, You Play: Mother 3 Check out our brand new merch at kinshipgoods.com/getplayed Follow us on social media @getplayedpod Music by Ben Prunty benpruntymusic.com Art by Duck Brigade duckbrigade.com For ad-free main feed episodes, our complete back catalogue including How Did This Get Played? and our Premium DLC episodes and our exclusive show Get Anime'd where we're currently in the throws of AniMAYhem go to patreon.com/getplayed Join us on our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/getplayed Wanna leave us a voicemail? Call 616-2-PLAYED (616-275-2933) or write us an email at [e-mail] Advertise on Get Played via Gumball.fm All of our links can be found at linktree.com/getplayedpodSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. Tender, juicy, and its own sauce. Would you look at that? Well, you can't see it, but trust me, it looks delicious. New McCrispy strips, now at McDonald's. Hey guys, it's really exciting here at id Software. It's 1992. We got a huge game coming out next year in Doom.

All we have to do is tweak a few more items on the spreadsheet and we're good to go. Basically we're looking for the name of the weaponry in Doom. Yeah, the ultimate gun you get. The most powerful gun. we're looking for the name of the weaponry in Dune. Yeah, the ultimate gun you get, the most powerful gun. I mean, because the gameplay is so on point. I mean, this thing plays like a dream. So it's just a matter of like, you know, that little extra level of polish.

And let me just pitch a name for this thing. Dick gun. Okay, well, hold up, hold up. Let's just, Charlie, I really appreciate you coming into these meetings hot and ready to go with your pitches. But I do feel like this is not the first time that you've pitched dick gun as a weapon in a first person shooter.

OK, well, it's maybe not the pitch, but it's just maybe it's the pitch that gets us to the pitch. I don't know. I'm just throwing ideas at it. Yeah, well, I just, you know, it's maybe not the pitch, but it's just the, maybe it's the pitch that gets us to the pitch. I don't know, I'm just throwing ideas at it. Yeah, but you pitch it every single time first. Okay, so all right, fine. Well, why would someone else throw out an idea?

I don't know, we're trying to name these guns here. Well, I just wanna, like, I've gone, I hate to say this, but I've got some footage here. I called up some of your former employers, and I have footage here of other similar pitch sessions for other games. And if you look here, I've got a clip here from when you worked at Nintendo.

Yeah. Okay, everybody. So we're looking for some new Mario power-ups for Super Mario Bros. 3. Anybody got a pitch? Mario, it's so cool that you're coming in person to these meetings. I mean, some video game stars would be too big for this.

Hey, you know, I like getting my hands dirty in the work itself. So who's got an idea for a Mario power up? Well, I say, you know, you got the mushroom, you got the fire flower, you got the invincibility star. I mean, you got a lot of great ones already. How about Dick Gunn? So as you can see from that clip that I just played, you've been pitching this same idea for a long time.

So Doom is gonna open up an entirely new world of interactivity, it's gonna be a huge game. So let's just hear some other thoughts. Matt, what do you got? Well, I had a notebook filled with notes earlier that seems to be missing from my desk. And the only thing that's coming to mind right now, unfortunately, is Dick Gunn. Dick Gunn is pretty good.

It's not because it's my idea. I like that. Yeah. I wouldn't have come up with that, but I just keep hearing it. And now it's like it's infected my brain not unlike a virus I'm trying to think of something else pistol shotgun like a Gatling gun off the top of my head. Those are some other guns. Yeah, we got we you know, we got the chain gun We got the shotgun. We got the super shotgun. We got the pistol I mean, these are already already taken care of we get the rocket launcher we're talking about the the ultimate weapon here we're trying to name the ultimate weapon yeah so

something in that in that family like um the destroyer or um yeah yeah the dick destroyer yeah yeah no no well who's gonna pick up that weapon reminds me of dick destroy december which always follows no nut november what you don't know about Destroy Dick December? HR has talked to you about this. Oh, sorry, I'm sorry. I thought this was a space where we could just throw out ideas. Your request for it to be a national holiday has been denied. You don't give a fuck off?

Well, we have No Nut November, and then we got all this pent up energy. It goes straight into Destroy Dick December. I think it's a pretty natural progression. You know there is a job opening at Duke nukem. Why don't you take that? Fuck it'd be perfect for that. I'd love to work on the Duke nukem franchise. He's so funny. He's so funny I heard he's cool, too. I Saw I met him once what saw him as like hey Duke you're you're handsome guys like damn. I'm looking good I was like he said it he said it fuckers said it I one time I took a piss next to him at the urinal one time

Yeah, and he looked over at me, and he said I'm not even pissing. I'm taking a shit right now his classic line It was crazy. Yeah, that's Duke So I just want to clarify he was facing the urinal shitty Holding his dick in his hand doing like the urinal action, but he was shitting out of his ass. Meeting adjourned. He was holding his dry dick and shitting his pants standing at the urinal and they told you that's what he was doing. I'm just gonna pack my stuff up. All right, see you guys Monday.

Hey, we get to keep our jobs. That's huge. Yeah. Hahahaha. Impossible to keep our jobs. That's huge. Yeah. It's impossible to get fired here. We s- and s- As we discuss the father of first person shooters, 1993's Doom.

This week on Get Plained. Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between. It's time to get played. I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Tiger Weiger. That's me, Tiger Weiger, along with our third host, Matt Apodaca. Hello everyone. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast where this week we're talking about the old school stuff.

Yeah, we're doing a little thing we're calling retrograde. We're taking a look back at Doom, the 1993 Doom, not that newfangled 2016 Doom and not the new Doom, the Dark Ages that is dropping this week. We're going back to the OG, the father of FPS games. We're kicking in old school this week. We sure are. We're in our old school era.

Now, full disclosure, Matt Apodaca has got a tiny bit of a cold. Just a little bit. So he's not in the studio with us, and Nick is sitting very close to me now. That's right. As a result. Like, he's usually across the room,

and as two people who I think have difficulty looking at other people, it's a very strange proximity for us to have. Neither of us are particularly comfortable with it, but it's what we're working with. Yeah. I also like that our color palette seems to be inverted, because I've got a tan. Oh, yeah. I've kind of got the rust top, this hoodie I got on.

And I've got a khaki bottom. But anyway, for listeners, this is the least exciting thing you'll hear all podcast until the very next thing we end up saying. Don't make any promises you can't keep, Heather. We did. Matt, you feeling okay? Are you hanging in there? I feel just fine.

I just had enough of a little bit of a cold that I could tell it was not, it would not be wise to you know Being in such small proximity right with people So I decided to just play it safe and stay home, but I'm thriving. I'm doing great over here I got a cup of tea right here. Oh, what kind of tea you got? Uh, it's just some like stress and immunity Tea, I can't remember what it is,

but I'm drinking it out of my Yoshi cup. Cute. Kinda looks like he's shitting those eggs. I mean, who knows exactly what's going on there below the waist? He has some sort of orifice that dispenses eggs. Is it the same sort of orifice that dispenses fecal matter? Is it like a cloaca for a bird?

I don't know, I don't know. Wait. Reptilian anatomy. Is Yoshi a she? Hmm. I don't know if Yoshi's gender has been determined. But Yoshi lays eggs. Yeah.

And that's not a thing that boy dinosaurs did to the best of our knowledge. Yeah, I don't know. I have no idea if that the, you know. I think Yoshi has to be a she. It's possible. I mean, she. I don't I have no idea if that the you know, she has to be a she it's possible I mean says he says he's a boy. Well, then that's exciting That's that's uh, I don't know. That's very progressive. I like it go off. I like that. Yoshi's a boy who lays eggs Let's fucking go Yoshi

Berto is a lady who shoots eggs. That's fun. Out of her mouth. Yeah. Ugh! That'd be a bummer to witness. We have a lot to talk about with Doom and other video games, but I guess we should start by talking about the semi-topical thing that happened this past week

as of this episode's release, the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer and the official May 26, 2026 release date. The quote, official release date. The official release date. I've heard or read online that the game is finished, that the main game, the single player campaign is completely done, totally playable, bug free.

It is the executive's insistence on an absolutely flawless day one online mode that is holding back the game. I mean, that does make a lot of sense because there's so much backlash from a, you know, and we forget about it, but you know, obviously Diablo 3 was the was the big one of just like that day one launch was so Disastrous and anytime something like that happens

You know, there's such a backlash That takes a while to recover from so I I can understand that if that's actually what's happening and that's not that's not just you know online speculation. It's nice to have the luxury that they can figure out, take as much time as they want to release this bad boy and make sure it's up to their internal standards. Because not all developers are able to do that, but they have pretty much the ultimate cash cow in Grand Theft

Auto Online. It's crazy that there have only been, I mean, there's been Vice City and there's been San Andreas and stuff, but generally the numbered Grand Theft Autos have only been three and then four, five and six since the year 2001. That's crazy to think of. They sure take their time making them. Again, it's nice to have that luxury and I

wish all developers were able to do that, to be able to refine and polish things until they were at a state where they were as, you know, finished from the developer's perspective. I did see a comment on the trailer that I isolated. I am already 63 years old. I probably will not see GTA 7. Holy Jesus Christ. How quickly the time flies in anticipation of a new part of my favorite game.

And the top reply to that is just sorry. I'm looking at the Grand Theft Auto Wikipedia right now. And yeah, from 2001 to 2013, we have Grand Theft Auto. We have all the mainline Grand Theft Auto games. Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, San Andreas 4, and then 5. And then in the same amount of time, it's been the same amount of time between Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto 6 that all of those games came out. It's insane to think about.

That is, that's sickening. White swath of time. That's horrifying. Sorry to that man. I'm a living corpse. I don't know, I kinda like it. I kinda like that this is becoming like a once a decade or once a decade and change sort of event.

It feels seismic, it feels. Yeah. And you know, like, it's also just kind of wild to see how video games have, this is a trite thing to say, but to go back to Grand Theft Auto 1, which we've talked about on the podcast and which I've played, I played back in the day on PC.

It's just like, that is just such an incredible gulf in terms of how games have progressed to what we're looking at in the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer that tricked some people into thinking it was live action. Is that true? Yeah, I read some people saying they're having that reaction, yeah. Wow. I was not at all tricked.

It looks really cool. Yeah, I know. I'm not fucking dumb, but some people are apparently. Yeah, I'm not a fucking idiot. I have to say that I was not enticed by the trailer. And I don't mean that to be, oh, Heather always takes the contrarian position. I just don't see anything that sets it apart from Grand Theft Auto V, which is similarly like... I don't know. I mean, it's been a long enough time

since I played V that I'm no longer aware of the graphical fidelity of the game. But my response to the trailer for V was similar. It was like, oh, wow. And then Five was similar, it was like, oh wow. And then I played it and I was like, yeah, it doesn't feel like a new game. It's hard for me to tell much from the footage that was shown, because I can't really infer much

about how it actually plays, but I do kind of, would think that a lot of the player base just wants a better looking Grand Theft Auto 5. I feel like a lot of people who are pretty content with the Rockstar formula. I think the other thing is like this game is targeted not at people who have podcasts about video games. This is targeted at the general public.

There are people who will just buy this game. There are people who don't own a PS5 now who will get one when Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out because they got to play the new Grand Theft Auto. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, I don't think these games are ever really for me. I think the last one I really, really got into probably was Vice City. And, you know, which speaks to how fucking old I am, but but B just kind of how my gaming tastes have diverged from the general public's. I kind of expect what I would Grand Theft Auto 6, it will be kind of like what I did with Grand Theft Auto 5,

which I'll put 30 hours into, and then just kind of be like, all right, well, I played that. I don't know, Matt, what do you think? I am, and again, I just want to be completely clear. Like this is, it's really incredibly impressive what these These velcro. Yeah, technically it's technically it's stunning. Yeah Yeah, it looks great. I think

What I've kind of the reaction I've seen online is people are sort of thinking that it kind of story-wise looks like it could be closer in tone to something like a Story wise looks like it could be closer in tone to something like a Red Dead Redemption than a classic Grand Theft Auto kind of like it has the Grand Theft Auto elements But like the story could be a little more a little darker a little less goofy Maybe a little yeah a little more sophisticated a little more like, you know, I guess not sophisticated is not the right word it's not gonna be like Downton Abbey or something. It's going to be like it looks a little I don't know It looks a little more a little I guess a little less silly a little less like

Mark loser bird or whatever like the type of humor that they do in those types of things But I I'm a big fan. I loved five I've I've not played a second of Grand Theft Auto online. That is not what I'm there for. I like a I just like a single-player Story, you know, yeah, so I'll be I'll be looking forward to this when it comes out I'm actually really um, you know, we're giving a lot of grace. I Am a Grand Theft Auto online just a role playing as a cop. So I'm doing that all the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Making traffic stops. It's kind of a generally enforcing the law. Playing people over, shooting without reciprocity. Right. If Grand Theft Auto 6 is like a really serious in tone, like heat inspired crime drama. Yeah. Like then I would be like, oh, this is a new kind of game.

Cause nobody has, I mean, there have been dramatic crime games, but nobody's actually nailed, oh, this would be a fantastic television series. Like a William Friedkin movie or something. Gritty sort of crime drama. Yeah, I mean, that would be interesting. Is that like, hey, you wanna go down to Chuck's Big Dick Hot Dogs?

Yeah. And see how many you can suck down. I'm gonna get my tires rotated at the Shafty Lube. Grand Theft Auto V is heat from people who like, who love Scarface. Like, do you know what I mean? Or it's like, they're just like two very different things, but they think they're the same thing, kind of.

I think this could be more maybe heat-like, I hope. I love it, I would love that. I'm pumped. I love Grand Theft Auto. I wish it was coming out when they fucking said it would. God damn it. Fucking bullshit. Being one of those guys.

Yeah. Can't believe they're delaying this game. No. Fucking pissed. I'll be happy to play it when I can get my grubby hands on it, assuming we have electricity in 2026 when it comes out. How long was the space of time, the span of time between the announcement of Final Fantasy

Versus XIII and the release of Final Fantasy XV? Because I want to say that it was not quite as long, but it was a very similar amount of time. I have no idea off the top of my head. Because Final Fantasy Versus XIII was announced in 2007. So when was, when was 15, when did 15 come out? I guess I could look at my phone like a journalist. Yeah, I'm not sure.

But as far as the game's release date, I mean, it's just like you hear versions of this. There's the one that got misattributed, Shigeru Miyamoto. Delayed game is eventually good, but Rush game is forever bad. And I guess he never actually said that. But the sentiment is, you know, like I get why that got circulated

and why that got attributed to an unimpeachable game developer, because it is true. Gabe Newell had a similar one, latest just for a little while, suck is forever. That's pretty good too, I've not heard that one. Yeah. I like that one more. But I like the, I mean, like it's like,

always just take whatever fucking time you need to make these games. Yeah. Keep polishing. So Final Fantasy Versus XIII was announced in 2006 and then released in 2016. So that was a 10 year delay between announcement and release.

How long has it been since Grand Theft Auto 6 was announced which game has taken up more of my existence on planet earth the answer is Duke Nukem forever oh yeah yeah forever hey buddy you know what I like to do? Eat. That's right. Well, I'm not flapping my gums to talk at you. I'm putting stuff in there, stuff that I like. And hey, you out there can enjoy some tasty foods and make this your best season yet with nutritious two-minute meals from Factor.

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Taxes and fees extra. mobile for details oh gotta go medicine's calling me I don't know when this was I have no again I'd have to look it up when Grand Theft Auto 6 was originally announced but um What else? I, you know, it's been 12 years since Grand Theft Auto 5 and it'll be 16 before 6 actually releases But I hope it's good. I hope so too. We're fucked. Nobody's fucked. We're doing great.

We're ruined. We're doing great. And just to circle back to, you know, take as much time as you need We currently don't need more new video games we can we can a great point Matt we can wait for one more for later that's fine I don't need any in the immediate right now we're good I'm not gonna get to all the ones are already currently own yeah so like let alone the new ones that are released this year so yeah holding it till 2026 I feel like I

also read a Kojima quote about how all of the release dates had to move out of Grand Theft Auto VI's way when it was still going to come out this fall. Yeah. And that that had created crunch in different games who had to be like, okay, well, we can't release after because that's gonna be too long for our our books.

Yeah. So we have to release before, which means we have to crunch. And now there's just this giant vacuum of release date in in the in the fall of this year. Didn't he say that that's why Death Stranding 2 is coming out in June? They like, yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Which wow, I did also read a quote from him, I think today where he was like,

I'm just happy to be done with it. He's like, I want to I want to be done with this. That the first impressions of Death Stranding 2 have come out as of record, and they are effusively positive. So I'm I so I'm excited. Can't fucking wait that'll certainly tide me over for 2025. Also reminder we're gonna be doing our WePlay YouPlay of Mother 3 on Monday June 2nd. That's a game that Heather selected as a result of winning the our Switch 2 release date bet.

It's a game that's very important to you and we're all gonna be playing it and giving our thoughts at length. Even Ranch has started playing Mother 3. That's true. Wow. And if you're at home thinking, when did Mother 3 come out? It didn't, but you can play it. If you wink, wink, know where to look for it,

wink, wink, so please play along. And if you don't know where that is then just go to discord.gg slash get played and maybe ask a question of somebody who might wink wink point you in the right direction we can't get litigated against for any of this right no this is actionable well I haven't said anything that's right you've just been saying wink wink parody that's no that's the noise yeah I have to every time I I physically blink I have to You've just been saying wink wink. Parody. That's the noise Heather's eyes make. Yeah, every time I physically blink,

I have to say it out loud. And being that it's never happened on the podcast before, my eyes hurt. All right, hey, we've been playing some other video games and we're gonna talk about them. The question for the room is, what are you playing? What are you playing? Hire me the Resident Evil Merchant and I'm going to ask my friends

what they've been playing for video games. I don't know. Matt, I'm sorry if I got you sick, buddy. It's OK. You know, I knew I knew hanging out with you after after work was gonna You know come at some cost Match you have the Laplaga. I think I might have a bad. Oh shit. I had a cold for 21 years That's not fun. That's not fun I just I'm just I'm just hoping it's not the one that you need the sort of bioluminescent goggles to

see and shoot out of. That would be worse, I think. Yeah, it's a little bit cumbersome to treat. You got to find a physician who's got those bioluminescent goggles and hope they're in your network. You know, it's a whole thing. Yeah, not covered by insurance. No. That's, you know, it's a whole thing. Yeah, not covered by insurance. No, that's, you know, of course not.

Right. That means that's just the way the world these days. And that just happens. Let me send Merida Madaka. What do you believe? Well, look, I've been thinking quite a few hours into the we play you play. Hey, don't speak about it too much. But I've been sending Heather photos of my Gameboy advanced

like just screen with the screen turned off just like in weird places. Yeah. Like almost like a sort of threatening or yeah, just sort of like, look what I could do. But I've been playing that quite a bit. I dipped back into Clare Obscure Expedition 33. And I would like to see that one through. I haven't played that much of it, much more of it, since we talked about it last week. But that is a game that I'm itching to get back to.

And it seems like I'm going to have a pocket of time to do so coming up. So hopefully I can get my ducks in a row there. But I did. I rolled credits on a game that I haven't had a chance to talk about here on the show. Wow. The fuck I beat Celeste and I think I told you this in person or maybe via text, I dropped it. Yes. But I beat Celeste and look, that game's fucking hard. Yeah, it's a

challenging game. That's a really, really, it's a really hard game. It's a very special game. Yeah. It's it's beautiful. Heather, I think you'd really like it. It's it's it's yeah, it's like it's a masterpiece. It's just fucking great. If we just just, you know, it's one know, it's an all-timer for me. I mentioned before I have a Celeste poster on the wall in my office. If I'd won the Switch 2 bet, and obviously I did not, I would have had us all play Celeste.

Wow. Because I think it's a game, Matt, I'm glad that you're playing it. Heather, I think it's like, it's the game, even though it's not a combat-focused game, it is a really challenging platforming game and the story I think would you'd really connect with. Okay.

Traversal is combat. Yeah, traversal is combat. It is, I agree. Yeah. Conversation can be combat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There, you know, within the game, it deals with a lot of like heavy stuff and like there's like You know, I'll just I'll be candid. I've had like three panic attacks in my life And there's like a couple of there's like a depiction of a panic attack within the game. That is just like it's astounding It's like it. I was like, oh it is kind of exactly fucking like that. It's like terrible and like bad It's like, oh, it is kind of exactly fucking like that. It's terrible and like bad. But it's really worth, if you have not played it,

I think it's worth checking out. It's a really, really great game. I feel like it's always on sale. You can always find it reliably in a Steam store, in a Steam sale for sure. And I loved the characters, I loved the story, I loved the music, the sprite work is really, really stunning to me.

God, on that OLED Switch 2, come on now, Switch also. On the OLED Switch 2, not the Switch 2. The Switch also. Yeah, Switch also was on the OLED switch to not the switch to the switch also the switch. Yeah, switch also just really gorgeous looking on there. And yeah, I they have these other things you can do. There's like post credits or post game thing that you can like stuff you can do. And there's like alternate, I think. Yeah, I mean, there's like the-sides and the C-sides. And I did the B-sides and the C-sides

are just a whole other level that I never actually got all the way through. But yeah, there's quite a bit of post-game content you can mess around with. Yeah, I loved it, but that's it for me. I'm really glad you played it, Matt, and I'm glad you really connected with with. Yeah, I loved it. But that's it for me. I'm really glad you played it, Matt. And I'm glad you really connected with it. Yeah, Matt.

Mattie Thorson, the director, Mattie Makes Games, the developer. And yeah, I'm not sure when their next game of that scope is coming. But I'd be very, very excited to play it, and of course, Lenerane, the composer, Lenerane, just that soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. Yeah, whatever their next game is,

is a day one purchase for me, because this was, yeah, like you said, Nick, an all-timer. Heather, what are you playing? Well, since our last record, the new expansion of Pokemon the Card Game Pocket has come out. Oh. That's 200 more cards changing up the meta. And that also means that the ranked season came to an end. I finished at Ultra Ball 2 after sort of being like, I don't know what getting the master ball is going to get me.

And as I've complained about on the show before, it felt like I was running into the same decks over and over and over again and refused to play those decks. So I capped out at Ultra 3. Since the new season has begun, just like a week ago as of record, I am back at Ultra Ball 2 in ranked. I just spelled. Keep talking. I watched him... It was... Okay, Nick wasn't even, to my knowledge, picking up the glass. Nick, you're so fucking glad... You should be glad I'm not fucking there, dude. He was, I think, looking at it. It's fine, it's not bad.

Nick, just stop hovering over the glasses now. Well, hold on, no, I got it. Just, I don't want, Matt, I'm not gonna be able to hear if you're syncing, I gotta take the headphones off. Hold on. Good. Yeah, I don't want you to hear this. Talk shit, talk shit. Keep saying it.

He can't get away with this anymore. This is fucking ridiculous. I completely fucking agree with you like also he wasn't Trying to pick up the glass. He was just touching it. He was it was like he was tempting gravity Do you think you maybe he was defying gravity think he's perhaps the witch do you think he's Elphaba? No, because Elphaba could do tricks Yeah, at the very least you know we should look into maybe if they make a mug or a cup out of Weeble technology.

So that it will wobble, but it won't spill over. They do have those for babies. We gotta just get them a baby cup. We gotta get them like a big, wide bottom baby cup. Yeah, yeah. Nick is sitting back down. No idea if any of this is gonna make it in barely even a spill it was fine barely even a spill that was a lot of production for all just barely little spill ranch branch brought me some

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Thank you, Aura. Thanks. So I'm back at Ultra Ball 2 in ranked in this new season already. And to my pleasure and joy, there is no single absolutely dominant deck, because if any of those decks begin being played, then there are counters to those decks now. So there has to be a constant rotation in your decks.

I got almost all the way up to Ultra 3, and then lost, I think, 20 games in a row, and knocked myself back down to Ultra 1 and had to work my way back up. Wow. It was wild. But that's what I've been playing, Pokemon in the Card Game Pocket.

Nick, what have you been playing? Heather, thank you so much for asking. I've been playing Clare Obscure Expedition 33. But instead of talking about that this week, I thought, since we're talking about something retro, I would talk about a new book that I got, The Art of the Box. This is published by Bitmap Books.

I'll read the copy here. The Art of the Box features 26 biographies of artists who at some point in their careers found themselves illustrating video game packaging. With information drawn from live interviews whenever possible, we discuss their beginnings as an artist, their inspiration influences, the games they illustrated and where their artistic careers have taken them. We'll talk through this because obviously this is an audio medium and Matt, I wish you

were in studio to mess around this because this is a thick boy. Oh, look what daddy did. wow, look what daddy did. Yeah, look what daddy did indeed. This is like a textbook, this is like an encyclopedia volume of box art starting back in the 80s and going into not all the way into the present but covering a good swath of gaming. This is just like a really handsome volume. I mean, it's very thick, but then also it's just got so many examples of just like full color box art right there. We've got bad dudes. Which is just...

Yeah, it's just really cool art. And part of the fun of these games is like a lot of times they were just sort of like Gunship 2000, just like also just like a really, really cool bit of art from a 1994 game and it's basically just like a reference to Apocalypse Now. A lot of these, you know, has captions that provide context, but there's also just like a lot of times these developers, these artists rather, had either a fair amount of leeway or just didn't really even know what they were drawing. And so they just kind of took a guess and just sort of sometimes made a really wild decision.

So for instance, like this, you know, the box art for Othello, you know, it has for some reason like this weird guy at the center of it. Yeah. Like, I don't know why this guy is like the Othello guy, but they just sort of made that this creative decision. It's a cool bit of art. Like it is a really gorgeous painting. But also the book itself is gorgeous.

It is like a coffee table book that your dad would have had when you were a kid. And you'd be like, what are all these paintings? What does this mean? Look at this Legend of the Mystical Ninja one. Jesus Christ, that's a nightmare. I love it. That is a nightmare.

Whoa. Are these multiple volumes or is this only like, does this cover like 1980 to 1995? Cause it doesn't seem like a large enough book to cover like in the modern era. Well, the way it's organized is it's based around artists. So it's basically like a large catalog of an individual artists work for,

and sometimes that encompasses, you know, one decade. There are things that came out as late as like, you know, the 2010s that are in this book. So there is some more contemporary stuff. It just depends on the particular artist. Here we've got a we're talking about Kojima earlier. Is that Bayou Billy? Yeah, we got Snake's Revenge.

Wow. Right next to Bayou Billy. Bayou Billy was one of my, like it's just one of my favorite weird games to exist because it's like, why the fuck would they make a game where you were like a Louisiana shit kicker? Like what like little boy dreamed of playing that like game on their Nintendo,

but that for some reason that was a Konami game that was made and the art is really cool. It's just like this Bayou man with a big knife and a gator. I bet it was a Crocodile Dundee license that they couldn't get. That makes sense, yeah. This was also, for me, a cousin game. This was a game that a cousin had,

that years after it came out, that I was like, ah, this is strange. Snake's Revenge, which is the kind of weird semi-sequel to Metal Gear, not Metal Gear Solid, but the original Metal Gear. And the box art here, that is just very like, it looks like an 80s movie poster. So anyway, it's a really gorgeous volume.

Oh, Golden Axe, there you go. That's one for you, Heather. Wow. That's great, right? That's one for you, Heather. Look at that, that's great, right? That's red. But anyway, this brings us to one by artist, rather, Roger Matskus, which is the box art, or one of the box arts for the PlayStation

and Sega Saturn versions of Doom, the 1995 Doom. And look at that. Wow. Wow. Wow. Look at that. Yeah, we got Doom, and look at that. Wow. Wow. Look at that. Yeah, we got Doom guy helmet off, just shotgun blasting the shit out of an amp.

And I don't know, this is just like a, this is just like the kind of shit you'd see painted on a van, you know what I mean? It's like, I don't know, I love this sort of art, and I do miss box art. That is one thing I will say, like, with the erosion of physical media, just having a really cool looking box.

Yeah, I really do miss that, a pamphlet too. And especially when it was a little bit more interpretive. Oh shit, there was Eternal Champions. Yes, there was an Eternal Champions Yes! art right there, yeah, that's really cool too. This is also just fucking great. That's great art. God, this is such bad audio,

but we're having a great time looking at this thing. I love it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. It's a, Eternal Champions was a Sega, it was, was it Sega CD exclusive? Or an additional Sega CD? Starts as a Genesis game that Yes, it's a Sega CD expansion Yeah, which had a lot more extended animations, which we covered here on the podcast

That's right We sure did and but we but like, you know that that was like a like a fighting game in the era of little Mortal Kombat So 1993 actually the same year is doom and the idea was just all the violence was just extremely over-the-top But yeah, anyway rad, and I like having big chunky books like this. I mean, it's just a fucking blast to look at, and all the information on all the artists, all the context on how these designs came to be is really awesome.

Hey, there you go, that's one for you, Heather. Another one for you, The Outer Worlds. Hey, it's The Outer Worlds. Hey, it's The Outer Worlds. Yeah. Which I became deeply familiar with while doing the research for my episode of Secret Level on Amazon Prime.

Fuck, I just wanna keep looking at this book. It's a hypnotic book. It's really cool. It's really great. Here, take a look. It's a hypnotic book. It's really cool. It's really great. Here, take a look. It's too heavy for me to hold. I don't appreciate that on the cover of the book is a rating for the book like it's a video game.

Nine out of 10, a must have for any self-respecting retro gamer, says Nintendo Life. I don't want a book to have a nine out of a 10. I kind of like it, cuz it's got that sticker And then it's also got the MS dos like sticker in the bottom left It's like I don't know it's kind of meant to evoke a an old-school box office or a box art itself Oh, yeah, the art type that one there fuck. Yeah, really cool. This is a this is a fantastic book and

I might I might get myself a copy. This is not an ad I might get myself a copy. This is not an ad. I might get myself a copy of this fucking awesome book. It's great. It's a great book. Matt, you got a favorite box art that comes to mind? Gosh, I mean, not really. I feel like a lot of the games that I'm super fond of

didn't really have that sort of unique box art aesthetic. I remember the box art of like Kingdom Hearts 2 having like this sort of like holographic. That was kind of cool, but other than that, not really. It was more of a byproduct of before, you know, you could just take a 3D model from the game itself or an environment for the game itself and it would just kind of work as a piece of art

as a still, you'd be a little bit more interpretive. You'd be having like, hey, I've got some, whatever, I've got some eight bit pixel art, I've got some sprite that I've got to figure out how to render as a full color painting. You know, because I feel like a lot of the games that I love were like, here's the thing from the game, yeah, like on the box for sure, right?

Like, you know, it's like Charizard or Pikachu on the box. And it's like, okay, well I know what that is. But even that though, you're not seeing like just a sprite of Charizard or Pikachu. Like you're seeing a drawing of it still. You're seeing, yeah. And that art style is very special to me actually, like from that era.

Not to go back too far into a topic we were discussing earlier, but I kind of do think that the box art for Grand Theft Auto 3 is pretty good. Like it's very iconic. Sure. You know, like it's like that, it really pops. No, 100%.

I've never wanted to just cancel a podcast and read a book. This book, like I wish, I wish this was a video podcast so that we could just flip through it and show the drawings. It's hypnotic. I feel like I have lost the ability to speak. So this drawing, this I also like because you know just speaking of things that would be painted on a van we've got this this bikini cave woman and a dinosaur and then a dude with a fucking gun with it with a rifle But this was a they made some games the worlds of Ultima

That were kind of spin-offs of the Ultima franchise in the 90s and this was worlds of Ultima the Savage Empire And so they just take you know the Ultima a, it was like a kind of a swords and sorcery, you know, high fantasy franchise, but they had a couple, they had this one and then they had one that was set on Mars, but they were kind of based on like H.G. Wells sort of sci-fi sort of, sort of universes. And I don't know, this is, it's kind of cool that they were experimenting in those directions, and I think this art reflects that.

A lot of these box covers, for those of you who are young and perhaps don't remember any of these 90s or 80s games, they look, all of them look like the art for Stranger Things. Like every single one of them has like that, that hyper-realistic painting of a human face in front of like floating pyramids and boulders and like a dragon. This artist, Denis Loubet, or Denis Loubet,

did a lot of the Ultima franchise and one that is a full page here, which is really great. This is a game I had and this was another game that like Doom was hugely influential in terms of establishing first person as a gameplay perspective, Ultima Underworld. The art for that, classic Dungeons and Dragons monster manual sort of stuff. But it's a really cool bit of dark fantasy art with a warrior stalking down into a catacomb and some sort of, we're looking over the shoulder of some sort of goblin that is lurking in

the depths below. So much of this art would have been dismissed by parents, and like, certainly any art critic would not look at video game boxes and be like, wow, this is an elevated piece of art. But when you see it placed in a book like that, you really gain a full respect for how much work goes into one of these box art covers that often kids would open the box and throw the box

away. It was it wasn't until you know, PlayStation, Saturn, Sega CD, that games started coming in boxes that you would physically want to keep. Yeah, and but it also function, you're absolutely right, and it also functioned, the boxes themselves function as a bit of point of sale marketing because you weren't advertising video games on television, obviously you weren't showing, like the internet did not exist in the way that it does now. So a lot of times people would go to a store and be like, oh, look at that game and pick

it up and look at it and decide to buy it on impulse. I mean, it's just it's was it was a completely different time for the industry. But anyway, art of the box is the book bitmap book, but that books never mind. I won't bother trying to say it. Never mind bitmap books, bitmap books, bitmap books, bitmap books. Any noise annoys an oyster, but a noisy noise annoys an oyster most. Shraco Dunlap. Let's talk about Doom.

Doom the Dark Ages is out this week. We are going back in time to 1993's Doom for retrograde. This is the game that started the franchise that started first personperson shooters, although there are other FPS games that predated this including id's own Wolfenstein 3D, but this is really the one that made it a thing and it's as such one of the most consequential and influential games of all time. I'm curious here, like let's just start here.

What is everyone's background with Doom? Like when did you get introduced to Doom? What was your first time playing a game in the Doom franchise? Doom came with a computer that my parents bought me. Wow. And I don't know if they, I mean certainly they saw me playing it because the computer didn't live in my room. The computer was a family computer. Everybody used the computer. My mom used it for balancing checkbooks and doing spreadsheets.

I used it to play video games or write papers for school. But Doom came with the computer and I had to learn, I didn't know how to enter, like DOS was not like something I knew before Doom, and then it was like, oh, this is how I access this drive, this is what I do in order to launch the game. Like, DOS is not a visual interface, it's a text, it's a line of text that you type in to begin games,

which I don't think is something that makes a lot of sense to a lot of gamers today. The idea that you would turn on your PlayStation 5 and there would just be a blinking cursor at the top, and then you would have to type something in order to start a game. But that's how you started Doom. Maybe if you're a contemporary PC gamer

You know you've messed around with your bios at a certain point that that's maybe the closest You know to kind of what it was like to work in and a pre gooey operating system But yeah MS DOS was what the platform that doom was originally released on MS stands for Microsoft DOS Disk Operating System, and it was the command line operating system that was the predecessor to Windows, and it's what I played most PC games on.

It was what we had on our home computer. Even when Windows 95 came out, and there were other Windows before that, but Windows 95 was the first one where it's just like, yeah, you can just kind of use this as your primary OS on PC. Obviously, they had graphical user interfaces on Mac for a while by that point. But it was years before high-end games actually

supported Windows. So you still were just playing them in DOS. And yeah, you have to get in there and you have to type some shit. And sometimes you'd have to make a boot disk so that your computer would boot using certain parameters so that you could play a specific game because of the quirks of your individual hardware setup

and how the individual software interfaced with it. It was a whole fucking ordeal. It was a big pain in the ass, but it was a thing you just kind of got used to. So today, in preparation for this episode, I downloaded the original Doom on PlayStation 5, just so I could like re-familiarize myself with it one more time, even though I've played infinity hours of Doom.

And the coolest part of it was, oh, this is what Doom looks like running on a high-end computer that we couldn't afford. Because at the time, Doom was like choppy, it had a low frame rate for us. You know, the only way you could play it is with your keyboard at the time. So it was kind of like you're looking through a window at a game that could happen in the future for me, but it wasn't a game that actively in the present

I could run at blisteringly fast speeds. Also, we didn't have a sound card, so the sound would come out of the... The PC speaker. The PC speaker. Yeah, so you're just getting bleeps and bloops. Yeah, bleeps and bloops. I mean, you'd still get like a...

Well, whenever you'd shoot somebody. But it wasn't the higher end sample that's on the PlayStation 5 game. I was like, God damn, this game looks good. I remember when we got a sound blaster in my, because you know, the step, the move from going from the PC internal speaker, which is just, it's impossible to describe how crude it is

if someone hasn't heard it, but it's like a one channel, you know, basically tone only that's used for both music and sound effects. And it just sounds like nothing, basically. It's like, you know, it's like trying to use, I don't even know how to put this in young person terms. Cause I don't even know what, what do you, like I was gonna say, it's like just trying to make sounds

from the numpad on your phone. Cause like that doesn't even track if you haven't ever used a phone like that. I don't fucking know what to say. I don't know. It's bleeps and bloops. What do you want from me? Well, if you have to dial in on your phone instead of pressing one of your contacts,

it sounds like that. It would be like boop, boop, boop, because there's still dial tones when you're entering dials, like phone numbers. Yeah, right. So, yeah, that's what it was. So what? But when we got a Sound Blaster,

we like you act like a, you know, an expansion card that went into a, boy, it was before PCI slots. I don't remember what the slots were before that, the expansion slots that we're using, but it went into one of those. And it's just such a huge upgrade, going from bleeps and bloops to like hearing like full speech.

Like, you know, and it was just like CD quality audio practically or comparatively it was it's such an was such an crazy leap and that's what I had when we were playing doom for the first time so I was hearing the famous doom music and sound effects as it was supposed to be presented Matt what was your first experience with the doom franchise I mean my very very first experience with the Doom franchise? I mean, my very, very first experience with the Doom franchise was the fucking bad movie that we watched for the podcast. The Carl Urban, Dwayne Johnson led 2005.

2005 movie Doom, yes. Real bad, bad movie. Very, very bad. And then since then I've messed with both Doom 2016 and Eternal. And very excited actually about the Dark Ages. It looks really cool to me. And then the first time I ever played Doom 1 was when Heather brought in the 32X. That's wild that the 32X version of Doom is the one that you've played. Yeah, truly very insane. But I like...

You might, Matt, you might be the only person in the last, I would bet the last decade for whom Doom was introduced to them on a 32X. On planet Earth. It's entirely possible. I should be given some sort of trophy or something for accomplishing such a feat. But I like, I like sort of just like what I know about Doom. I like the Doom guy.

I feel like the development is very storied. And I do think it's just like, and obviously it's an iconic franchise for a reason. It has stood the test of time. And people are still excited about Doom, which I think is very cool You know my very very first exposure to any of these original 3d games like Wolfenstein 3d Yeah was at my school in the basement was the guy who would be the

The track and field medic I don't know you would call him like the guy guy who was like the, if you fell down in PE and you broke your leg, he'd be the one who'd come up and attend you first, right? Okay. He had a windowless office. Nick's filling out a job application right now. Okay. And he...

He had me at a windowless office. He... He had... And he had, yeah, no windows in the basement of our school, and he had brought in his own extremely high-end PC, and he was playing Wolfenstein. And I did a lot of like, you know, sports when I was a little kid, so I would go down there and have to get like my legs wrapped for shin splints. And I would show up and he'd be playing Wolfenstein. And it was like, Oh, my God, that game is 3D. And he would let me watch him kill Nazis

for like, a half hour before I went to track practice. And it was so, I wish you could understand how the first time you see something moving in three dimensions, but it is a video game, how staggering that was. And then when I saw Doom, I was like, oh, this is like that game that guy plays, the Wolfenstein game. I was gonna say, like certainly certainly a novelty of an era.

You cannot experience that anymore because now everybody knows what video games look like. No one's ever going to be shocked really by what a video game looks like, I think, anymore. I feel like the closest is the first time you put on a VR headset. Right. Yeah. And you're like, oh shit, I can look around

and the game is everywhere. And that is similar-ish to the first time you see a video game that is three dimensions instead of two. I agree, that's the closest experience I've had in adulthood to what it was like to experience something like, and I remember more vividly, like you, my first experience with Wolfenstein 3d than I do my first experience with doom. But Wolfenstein 3d we should say that neither of

these games are actually 3d if you want to be pedantic about it, they're two and a half D games. They all sorts of trickery is going on to add to simulate 3d we didn't have a proper 3d engine from it until quake which comes later the thing about wolfenstein 3d 3d versus doom is it was all corridors and everything was all on a flat plane so when doom comes out and you've got you know ramps you've got changes in elevation even though you can't aim vertically it feels like things are a lot more open and and also like they like just the environments are a lot more

diverse versus just again just just just room hallway room hallway was basically all you were dealing with in Wolfenstein 3d but it's the main thing beyond these games being 3d was that they were smooth scrolling because you know i i'd played a lot of PC RPGs, and even PC RPGs that were like 10 years older than Doom had first person dungeon exploration. But it was like step by step. It was grid based. Phantasy Star on Master System and Genesis had a similar sort of thing when you got into the dungeons, correct?

Yes. Yeah. And the Wizardry games, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, all these franchises had that similar sort of thing. Ultima actually is one of the, through the Ultima Wonderworld, is a game that had smooth scrolling, first-person perspective gameplay,

but Doom is the one where it was like really like became this mainstream thing. And it really is like kind of amazing how silky it felt compared to everything else of the era. Yeah, I mean, I had seen a three-dimensional first-person game previous, but it was like you were looking at somebody shuffling through postcards.

It was like somebody had walked through a hallway and taken a picture with each step, and then they stood in front of you and you would just cycle through that deck. So it didn't feel like movement, but Doom felt like movement and so did Wolfenstein. Yeah, it was a flip book versus a movie. Yeah.

Anyway, so the other thing I guess we should talk about in terms of Doom and what software was like in this era is not that the internet didn't exist, but it didn't exist in the way that we know it today. Didn't have like this easy widespread distribution model. There certainly weren't any digital storefronts, wasn't that sort of the environment. You might find a doom on like a BBS or something

or a news group, but a lot of times if you were maybe- I think you should describe what a BBS and a news group is for people who don't know. Yeah, like me. How to describe this. Yeah. BBS did for bulletin board service, and so it was basically like, you would dial in to a specific network to interface

with just the people using that network. So it was like kind of a closed sort of system as opposed to the internet at large, which is kind of like this more open environment. So you're kind of clustered into these smaller sort of buckets of interaction. I think a similar way of looking at it would be if your television could only look at,

like if you subscribed to Macs, and the only thing you could look at on your television was you open up your television and you could only dial into Max, and that was the available content that you had, and that was the only, like you could never watch anything else. That's kind of like what a BBS was,

except it was like a, cause I had a, Prodigy, I think was what it was called, when I was really young. Yeah, well Prodigy was I think, was what it was called when I was really young. Yeah, well, Prodigy was kind of like an early ISP. That was much more of a closed sort of network environment. That was also something through a corporation. BBS is a newsgroup for oftentimes just like niche enthusiasts, you know, like who are

organizing themselves and we're grouping themselves that way. Anyway, something might be, you might find this, a shareware version of Doom there, but also you might find just like a floppy disk or buy it at retail. Shareware, by the way, is that, again, this is so old that I feel like we gotta catch people up. Of course, no, yeah.

Shareware was, there were two types of distribution systems for video games back in the 90s. There was the games that you purchased and then the games that you could get For free and doom was shareware. It was a free game Yeah, I had a bullet point in here. Do younger gamers understand the concept of shareware question mark and it was it was basically an early internet slash pre internet way of of independently publishing software Yeah slash pre-internet way of independently publishing software. It's the same phenomenon, the same thing as like you'd get a demo and then you could buy

the full version. In my memory, mostly these were games that were shareware, but there were like indie word processors, indie accounting apps, niche apps, like audio editing or whatever the fuck. And I used to go, when I was a kid, I used to go with my dad and my brother to computer shows. And a lot of the show floor would be dedicated to shareware, which would just be like, hey, here's some discs for applications and games, and you can get the shareware game

or you can also buy the full version. My introduction to Doom was getting it on a floppy disc, installing it on our home computer, and then eventually getting the free version, or I'm sorry, the full version rather, and playing the full game. And I had played shareware versions also I should say of Id's previous, two of Id's previous games, which was Commander Keen, one of them was a, which was a 2D platformer, and then the aforementioned Wolfenstein 3D.

But all this comes out as, via Id Software, which is the developer that is founded in 1991, the suburb of Dallas by John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, Tom Hall and John Romero. They all end up working on doom. One of the strangest things about it to me is that John Carmack and Adrian Carmack are not related. How specific is the Nick is the last name Carmack both work in video games, to work at the same company, to co-found a studio and no relation? I think one of the strangest things about id Software is that it gave birth to one of

the, to my knowledge, to my experience as a conscious human, celebrity game designers in John Romero. Like when Romero left id, it was like a thing that happened that I knew about. And why would a kid know that a developer had left, like that a programmer had left a developer or that a studio had like broken up and that somebody had gone somewhere else. And then he ended up making a different game

that had like all of this hype, wasn't it called Gun? Daikatana. Oh, Daikatana, that's it. Yeah, there was a game called Gun though. Right, different. But yeah, no, Daikatana was the Ion Storm John Romero game that was much promised and under delivered. But yeah, that way, no, 100%.

I mean, John Carmack and Romero both were kind of celebrities but John Romero, I think, maybe partly because of ability to self-promote, but also because he just had a rock star look to him. Ended up becoming something of a game developer celebrity in the era when there weren't a lot of those. You would only know Sid Meier because he was on the name of the box on Civilization,

or Roberta Williams because she was on King's Quest. Like, John Romero's name wasn't on your copy of Doom. Like, he was in the credits, but, like, suddenly he was in magazines, and that was so strange. Like, I didn't know the names of the people that made Street Fighter, and Street Fighter was a far more important game to me.

I guess Boon to Bias were kind of like, they were kind of forefronted a little bit with Mortal Kombat, but yeah, it was, yeah, we were 100% absolutely astute observation. John Carmack also, considered by a lot of games enthusiasts, the most talented games programmer of all time, one of the by a lot of games enthusiasts, the, you know, the most talented games programmer of all time, one of the most influential programmers of all time. That was this thing for me, like, especially looking back on it, it was in a way more of

a technology company than a development studio or as much a technology company as a games company, you know? Because you kind of like look at their output, yeah, Doom is an unimpeachable game, incredible video game. But the technology is really what's driving that. And some of their later output is, some of the other Doom games are kind of more the same. And then you get to something like Doom 3.

And what's really impressive about Doom 3 is the engine, as opposed to the game design, which felt maybe a little bit dated by the time that game came out. Here's a John Carmack quote that I like. Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important. Now, I don't agree with that,

but I do think it's interesting that's kind of his driving philosophy, and that explains a lot of why a game like Doom just does not have a story. It should be present in both mediums. I agree. When I sat down and played Doom today, I was a bit like...

I felt an emotion that I can't identify, which was, I think, gratitude, because I started the game and then I was playing the game. And I had a gun immediately and I was shooting things. And so much of the on-ramp of gaming now is like, there's like 10 minutes before you can fucking play a game and your main mode of interacting with the game is slowly dripped out to you.

It's not like, oh, I could use this gun for the rest of the game and I start with it. Like now it's like, okay, look, you're gonna unlock abilities in Assassin's Creed and eventually you'll be able to jump off of a thing and stab somebody in the head, but until then you have to sneak around. And I get that that percolation of gameplay

is part of a successful dopamine loop, but playing Doom and just starting and immediately shooting things, I was like, oh, thank, this feels good. Oh, no, I agree with you there. I mean, like too many games now are clogged with too many mechanics, unnecessary skill trees, and then just, like you were saying, the onboarding taking so, so fucking long to actually get into things. And I feel like an asshole if I skip all that stuff.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, but I also do, I mean, there are also just different approaches to game design. There are story-rich games. I mean, we were just talking about Celeste earlier, which I think that game does not, as great as the gameplay is, that game does not work on the same level

If you remove its story, so right, but I more just brought that up not to Agree or disagree with it, but more just say like that was kind of the governing philosophy of the studio It was just like gameplay focused and it was in an era where I feel like a lot of PC games were just like Hey, we're gonna make a deep lore rich RPG, or we're gonna make a really expansive strategy game where you can really get in the weeds. They were almost just making like pure arcade-y gameplay. Doom kind of almost just feels like an arcade game, right?

You just hop in there and you just start blasting. Yeah. It also, because it was violent and so iconic, it also became like the focal point It also, because it was violent and so iconic, it also became like the focal point of a lot of like congressional hearings, especially in the wake of Columbine, because the Columbine shooters were, I can't remember if this has been rescinded

since that they weren't actually gamers, but that that was the legend that happened in the news media at the time of the Columbine shooting. And the truth is they weren't huge gamers, but they were so, like so married to, in the media, to doom and to quake. And that was what, quote, trained them to be killers. And so there was all of this pushback all of the sudden in like 1998 1999 against doom specifically.

It's kind of crazy that because you know, doom comes out in 1993, the Columbine High School tragedy happens in 1999. So there's a there's a huge amount of time between the two things. But yes, it was connected to doom largely because of Eric Harris who was the the the ringleader there Who to kind of like like it ended up I read a whole book on Columbine I didn't we don't need to dig deep on this you read a book on Columbine. Yeah, I read a book on Columbine. Yeah on Columbine. We don't need to dig deep on this.

You read a book on Columbine? Yeah, I read a book on Columbine, yeah. It was great. It was really, really, it was like a super fascinating, well-researched thing that kind of just like did knock down a lot of the myths that came out in the aftermath, the immediate aftermath and persisted because that's just like what got circulated in the media. But the doom thing was real. He, like Eric Harris was an avid doom player know, Doom player and Doom modern to some degree,

I believe. The thing that was not true is that there wasn't a thing where he, like, had a custom Doom level where that was like the high school or that he'd been, like, rehearsing the attacks in. Anyway, but yes, there was, like, a moral panic in the aftermath of Columbine regarding not just Doom but first-person shooters at large so-called murder simulators you know just just one of the one of the things they found to go after just because they were searching for anything yeah I mean but it's also anything but guns we got to do

something about this game where you can kill aliens and demons. Anyway, that was a grim tangent. Nick, so were you, when this game comes out, I became fixated on it. I played it all the time. I downloaded other, or not downloaded, bought, share-wared other games that were Doom-esque. Yeah, Doom clones, they called them of the era. Nowadays they call them Doom-likes, but now, like back then it was Doom clones

and it was kind of derisive at times. Yeah, I played A Million Hours of Rise of the Triad, which is a Doom except the enemies beg for their lives before you kill them. No, please don't. They would get down on their hands and knees and like wave at you and then you could execute them. But the thing is, this is the thing.

The game didn't reward you for showing mercy because if you didn't execute them, they would stand up and take their gun out again. It's like what value system are you conveying with your gameplay? Kill or be killed, baby. Don't trust. Yeah, don't trust. Yeah, kill, I guess so, yeah. After this game comes out though,

I'm looking for the next Doom experience. And so I'm playing a lot of these first person games, but you Nick have always struck me as somebody who likes a more methodical, lore heavy, introspective, patient game. Did Doom change your trajectory at any point and like get you into that arcadey Twitch feeling or was this like a one-off for you

that you were then like, huh, all right, well, I'm going back to my other stuff. No, I look, I've always liked action games. I like platformers more than shooters or combat focused games, but I do like games with combat in them. and doom's design was so novel and so good that I got heavily into doom played the shit out of doom and And and also doom 2 and then later final doom which was you know

Kind of a pseudo sequel slash complete edition of the whole experience after quake comes out There is a fantasy first person shooter called Hexen. Did you ever play that? Yeah, I forget the chronology of it. That might have predated Quake, but yes, I did play Heretic and then Hexen, and those were both the Raven software games that were fantasy, like high fantasy. The thing is, I didn't like those games as much as I wanted to because I wanted them to be more like paste-like RPGs, but they felt like shooters where you just had a wand instead of a gun

There was a there was blood which was like a super horror themed one and there was Shadow Warrior Which was which I had never played either these games, but I know when that one was kind of like more of a You know martial arts sort of themed thing that had like you know some weird one-liners And I think the protagonist was called low weighing. So it was just like kind of like this weirdly offensive sort of thing. Also redneck rampage was another one, which was like, it was just like you just I forget if you were a heck going around shooting guys or if you were shooting other hicks or maybe both, but it was just like they were that they were just sort of like all these derivative

sort of games that tried to. It's the same thing that we're saying with Rise of the Triad, where it was like that was just like, hey Doom, but it's like more violent and more disturbing. And it's just like, well, what works about Doom is it is an extraordinarily violent and bloody game. It's really grisly, but it's fun and it feels new. And so all these derivative games just tried to heighten the violence and the gore factor and it just like it kind of missed they kind of missed the mark that makes a lot of sense to me because like having

messed around with more of the the newer entries they they're very fast they play they probably play like the way. You're talking about like Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. Yes, yeah. They play very fast and like, even though it is like, yeah, like you were saying, obviously very violent, very bloody, gory stuff. It's almost like, it's almost so fun,

it's kind of funny, kind of, where you're just kind of blasting through things where you're like just kind of like blasting through things. You're like, this is just ridiculous. This is crazy. Like it's so over the top that like like I think the same thing too about like fatalities too. They're so over the I was like at a friend's my friend Connor's house not long ago having like a video game fighting tournament thing and we were playing the newer Mortal Kombat and the fatalities in Mortal Kombat 1 are so nasty and so over the top that we were like in tears laughing. They're so funny how ridiculous they are because you can't comprehend that level of... It's so ridiculous it's not even real.

But that's probably what they're going for at this point. Right. I feel like that's partly what they were going for in the original Mortal Kombat, like Homelander, like punching T 1000's titanium skull out of its head. It's great. It's really, really fun. But like with this, with the yeah, with Doom Eternal in particular, like there's like a setting where you can like because like it's pretty fast. And you can turn it you could Heather would hate this This modification you could turn down the speed

In that game just a little bit if you want like if you want to feel like you have some semblance of control of what's Going on because it's just like it's just it's just crazy stuff something I like about the trajectory of the first game, of the original rather, is that like, I just think it's kind of funny that you start in space and then end in hell. That's pretty, cause those are two opposite places. It's really good. Yeah. That's really funny to me. Yeah, it is funny. It's also funny that Doom has such a long shadow that he is a downloadable or he was a battle pass skin in Fortnite.

Right. That you could be Doomguy. Right. And of all the references that those kids don't get, Doomguy has to be high on that list. I wonder, or is Doomguy just sort of known? Is Doomguy stuck around enough in the Zeitgeist, partly because of the name Doomguy, I have no idea. Back to the original game, I mean, the music is really good and the sound design, all by Bobby Prince,

and a Vietnam veteran and former lawyer who did a bunch of sounds and music for eight games. But you know, what I think of is like, yeah, there's sort of this metal soundtrack, which is really good. But then also just things like the imp howls and the shotgun sounds are like, so visceral.

Yeah, it's so visceral. And that's a big part of the doom aesthetic is just how violent and nasty it sounds. It's scary at times. I mean, that's the other thing that's hard to convey, but it was like these, it was like kind of a scary experience to play. It sounds like it hurts to not just get shot as an imp,

it hurts to be one. Like the existence of being an imp is pain. If you're playing Doom now, I think that you can't aim vertically does make it feel odd. That's the weirdest thing. Yeah. Because you know, predated mouse look as a convention, which is basically the same thing you're doing if you're using dual analog sticks and a controller.

You also can't jump, which is strange. Yeah, but so that starts to come around as far as id games go in Quake, which comes out in 96. And there were some other games that had versions of it, but it was like, its absence in Doom is a thing that makes it feel like, you know, less like a modern game. Well, there was a point where Matt's playing it on the 32X and you come across your first enemy that is up on a platform above your head,

and I think you said, how do I aim at him? And I was like, I think you just shoot. And and yeah, your your gun is pointed like at the wall, but the bullets are hitting way up in the air. Yeah, it's basically like a like a, you know, Z axis auto aim where it will just it will just shoot something on a higher plane. It's like you're in the movie Wanted, where you can. It is very much like you're in the in whatever direction you can it is very much like you're in the in

What direction you want you're right? It is very much like the movie wanted with the curved bullets Everybody knows what the movie is everybody knows that that's I think immediately what I was thinking was there a wanted video game We could curve bullets video game. I don't know it should have been a wanted No, you remember 2008's Wanted? Starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy? James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman's in there as well. Morgan Freeman and I think Chris Pratt is a small part, not one of the main guys in there but he's like his office friend. Um, look, I remember the

lot of movies as cool. There is a video game. It's called Wanted Weapons of Fate, which I think also misses like because the movie is based off of a comic book and it's not anything like the movie is very different than the comic book, of course. And so then I think the game is just then further in that direction. It doesn't look like it's great.

Is the game, does it look like the game's adapted from the movie or is the game also adapted with the comic book? Can you tell? It looks like it's more adapted from the movie. Got it. Yeah. I was thinking about the other games

that would fall under Doom clones. One of them is Marathon, which was Bungie's, I think their first FPS game. That was a Mac exclusive, so I played it on my own computer, but my friend's dad had a Mac, so I did play it on his computer. It owes some to Doom, it also owes some to Ultima Underworld. It's got elements that are a little bit more adventure gaming, not just pure FPS, but it is, you know, Bungie developed and it's a game that ultimately leads to the Halo franchise, even though it was kind of like a, because it was on a more niche platform, it was not

as widely played. System Shock, another one, basically like the game that leads to the existence of the immersive sim genre. Duke Nukem 3D, of course, which we've talked about on the podcast. It's funny, Duke Nukem 3D comes out around the same time as Quake, and Duke Nukem was so comparatively crude technologically because Quake had a fully 3D engine, but Duke Nukem was just like had a lot more charm and character to it. So I feel like it ended up having a little bit more, you know, impact on the zeitgeist at the time,

obviously, like Quake is at a longer tail. Quake was like, oh, I'm in a dark tunnel, fighting a thing that kind of looks maybe like two triangles and legs. Whereas Duke Nukem, it was like, they had taken a photograph of a woman from 10,000 feet away, blown it up so that she was dancing in front of you

in like a fake strip club. And you could only tell that she was a woman because it was like, if I walked 10,000 feet away, I would think it was a woman on my screen. But like, the comparison between the two is, I knew the environments I was in in Duke Nukem 3D. I was like, oh, this is a club. Yeah, I'm in a strip club. There's a pig who's also a cop.

There's like a pig mutant cop. And that makes me laugh because I'm 13 years old. And then I can offer money to the stripper and say, shake it baby, and then I can blow her away. And that's all you want as a teenager. Yeah, whereas Quake, you're like, I am in a nightmare. Yeah, it's very Lovecraftian. Yeah, and I don't recognize any of the locations I'm in.

I can't tell, like if there was no gravity, I wouldn't even be able to tell what was up and down. The other thing that Duke Nukem did was it heightened like, you know, you could like blow up a building in Duke Nukem 3D, so that felt like something new. And then there were things like, you know, you had a gun you could use to freeze somebody, like the weapons were a little bit more cartoony,

you had like a shrinking gun. And so it kind of heightened things in that way. And so that's partly why it felt fresh, even though, you know, the humor is just lines stolen from, you know, other IP. And then Unreal comes out in 1998, which is, you know, most notable for debuting the first version of the Unreal Engine, which is still with us.

Super consequential game for that reason. And one of the most famous video game covers in a video game magazine, which is, I believe it was, it was Next Generation magazine that had a picture of the Unreal, the original Unreal monster. And it was like, yes, this is a video game. Right, yes. And you look at it now and you're like,

what else could it be? But at the time people were like, oh my God, you can see that it has a face. Heather, did you ever mess around with the cheat codes in the original Doom? Because I like it with like, especially comparing it to Grand Theft Auto, which we talked about at the top of the episode,

Doom was so big in like, I Doom got mentioned on friends, which is like it's like it was like that level of awareness and the general culture in a time when people weren't you know, would video games were not nearly as mainstream as they are today. Friends, by the way, was a sitcom that aired in the kids. The kids know friends. They got they get the ranch You know friends ranch doesn't care about us ranch. You know friends. I know friends. Okay, great Who's your favorite friend Chandler? Yeah Chandler Chandler is the one who mentions doom on

Also plays crash team racing in another episode anyway Like Grand Theft Auto it was it was played I think by a lot of people who don't otherwise play games, and as such, people just came in wanting pure power fantasy. And so you just type in the cheat code and then you could just fucking do whatever. I didn't mess with the cheat codes in Doom, to my knowledge.

I did mess with them in Rise of the Triad. Because in Rise of the Triad, you could enter god mode and your gun would be replaced by a glowing hand that would be extended out in front of the Triad, you could enter god mode and your gun would be replaced by a glowing hand that would be extended out in front of you and you would just like gesture towards people and they would like burst into flames or explode. And I was like, that's a great implementation of a power fantasy is that like,

you don't even need a gun anymore. You could just like look at people. In Doom, like you know, you'd hop in, you'd bring up the terminal, you'd type in IDKFA or IDDQD and you basically IDKFA, which I think was, what the fuck was it? Kill fucking everything. I think it might have been that.

So it's a kill fucking all of them? I think it was, that was what the acronym stood for. But IDDQD would turn on God Mode and IDKFA would give you all the weapons and armor and ammo. And then you could just like fucking massacre all these Keiko demons and so forth. And then also IDDCLIP, which would let you walk through walls, was the no clip version. Also introduced the terminology of Clipping I feel like people didn't never taught like like that's where people when gamers started saying saying clipping to refer to the idea of passing through a

Sorting errors in in games. I think as a result. I think clip now and Came to mean the opposite of what originally met. I think it's one of those linguistic things What were you were you no clip? Yeah, no clipping. Is passing through an object. Yes. Yeah. Whereas clipping used to be passing through an object.

Or vice versa. Like you're clipping into something. Right. Yeah. I don't fucking know. I don't know. Well, you want me to think I'm gonna know something? I don't fucking know.

Just the way people knew about clipping in like the mid 2010s, early 2020s was through the like YouTube interactive horror sequences called like The Back Rooms. And it would be like, I know clipped into a nightmare place. Right. And all of that language sources its etymology from Doom. I mean, it's the first place I heard it.

And I think that's as such, it's probably where it made its way onto, into forums and into gaming lingo at all. I think we gotta talk about the shotgun, great shotgun, great feel to it in Doom. Amazing when you first get the chaingun. Also amazing when you first get the chainsaw. Chainsaws have become such a staple of video games.

I mean I think they probably would have anyway just because of their presence in horror, you know, the horror genre. But I don't know, there's something about the Doom chainsaw that kind of I feel like just established that there's gonna be a chainsaw in something. I mean, Gears of War having the chainsaw gun is just like naturally is like a direct line from it, right? Yeah, yeah.

And the first time you see the chainsaw in Doom, if you're playing like sort of organically, is through a window. So you're like, oh shit, I think that's a chainsaw. But you have no idea how to get to it. I think for me, for my money, chainsaw may be a very impractical weapon, actually. I don't think I'd actually want to use a chainsaw in close combat now. Yeah, too heavy. You got to you got to swing that thing.

You're more likely going to chainsaw your own leg or arm off. I'll tell that to the chainsaw lobby. I Mean I'm trying they won't they won't let me they won't let me speak I keep trying to get I keep trying to filibuster and they won't let me do it I think the best way to wield a chainsaw isn't swinging but to kind of like push it backwards Against your own like stomach or chest like you and then just run at people God it's fucking hate to get chainsaw. I would do that one out like that against your own like stomach or chest. Like use the force of your body. And then just run at people. Yeah. Yeah. God, I'd fucking hate to get chainsawed.

Me too. I would not like it. I would fucking suck. Yeah. Really bad. Cause if you survive, it's a long road to recovery. Yeah. And whatever I got chainsawed,

it's never gonna be the same afterwards. Yeah. Gonna be all fucked up. It's not gonna be like, you're just like, hey, how'd you get that scar? I got fucking chainsawed, but I'm doing it right now. How small would a chainsaw have to be for you to touch it? Like with my finger. Yeah, just to try it a little bit Like it's a paper clip size chainsaw that's running is that too much is that too big cuz you'd be like ow

Or or is it or is it it's okay because it'd be like basically a paper cut. I hear the paper, like it's on. It's on, it's a paper clip sized chainsaw. Would you touch it and be like, I wonder what that's like. I feel like I'd try it out on like a sheet of paper just to see what happened.

Okay, I'm looking for the size at which you touch the chainsaw. I just reach my finger out and say like, yeah, what's that chainsaw like? You gotta think about this though, right? Cause like any sort of like mechanical blade is going to hurt. Like even like, if you clip yourself

with like a electric razor or something, that fucking hurts. Right, I don't wanna touch a running electric razor. So I guess probably pretty fucking small. The point of a pencil. Little tiny baby chainsaw. Heather, just tell us how small your chainsaw is and just hit Nick with it already.

I guess if a running chainsaw is the tip of a pencil, I might touch it out of curiosity. Yeah, there it is. So there's the size. Yeah. Now we know. How small does the chainsaw have to be? This was a new segment

Here's the thing five millimeters. I guess again. How big would that be? How big is a tip of a pen Nick was always gonna touch it no matter what? The rocket launcher rocket launchers become again such a thing in video games I think largely because of doom One of the craziest things in Doom is that when you shoot a barrel and it explodes, that the monsters explode in the, like away from the direction of the barrel. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Like there's like a physics to the way the explosion rips through them that kind of knocks them sideways. And that was a magic trick when you first played Doom. Yeah, and I mean, again, just explosive barrels in general, I feel like become more standardized because they're so present here.

I mean, this established so many conventions that just exist in games. Also just like, the other thing about the Doom games is they're just so fucking dumb. Like the BFG is like the ultimate weapon you get and stands for big fucking gun. It's like the big fucking gun, 9,000. It's dumb as shit, but it's great.

It's at that right threshold for it being dumb and awesome. Or you're kind of like, this rocks. So Matt, you messed around with Doom 2016, Doom Eternal. Yeah. I definitely played Doom to the direct sequel, which again was just kind of more of the same. I messed around with some Doom 64, which I think for a lot of, I think Doom 64 is maybe

a bigger game than it gets credit for because I think a lot of people, gamers who didn't necessarily have access to PC gaming, but were playing GoldenEye on you know, on their Nintendo 64s were like, okay, let's mess around with this Doom 64 game. Let's see what all the fuss is about Doom. You know, I think it just being on that platform and that sort of establishing that you could play a console FPS. I think it made it maybe a little bit more of a consequential game than you might think. Doom 3, I remember playing when it came out and I remember how hyped it was for it.

And the thing about Doom 3 is like, it was like a just really stunning technological achievement and then there was a lot of artistry to it, to its art direction. But I just, the game just kind of felt dated when you were playing it. I guess my big thing is like, Doom is so arcade-y. Doom 3 tries to have a little bit more, be a little bit more fleshed out beyond that, but it does kind of honor its roots to a large degree.

By that point, you'd had Half-life and maybe even half-life 2 I think half-life 2 did predate doom 3 and those games felt so like more expansive and had such better realized worlds and like actual characters in them like they felt like such Such deeper more immersive experiences while still being FPS That again, it just kind of felt like that franchise kind of got left behind until its modern reinvention. It's hard to encapsulate everything about Doom because again, it's like talking about,

doing an episode about Street Fighter II. It's like, how are you, can you possibly be comprehensive about everything when you're talking about a game that is somewhere in the top 10 in terms of most influential games ever made? The fact that you can download it and play it today on a PlayStation 5, like, there are so many other games

that were released in 1993 that you cannot just go on PlayStation 5 and be like, I'm gonna play this. That's how big the shadow, the footprint of Doom is, is that this morning I was like, oh, I bet I could play this on PlayStation. And there it was, like sure enough, like free to play. Yeah, I mean, it became something of a moom, right?

Meme? Yeah, it became something of a meme, right? A Doom meme, a moom. A moom. That's pretty, you know what? It was a mistake, but I'm gonna let you have that. That's pretty good. It became something of a moom that, you know, can you run doom on it?

Right. Yeah, just like the idea that people just started to try to run doom on absolutely. There's a subreddit There's a subreddit. It runs doom. That's just for trying to get I believe I saw it running on a refrigerator Let's not get too crazy because maybe uh, maybe some of this might come up in a segment later or something. Oh because maybe some of this might come up in a segment later or something. Oh, okay. I mean, later it could be now. Maybe it's going to come up in a segment right now, maybe. Let's hear it.

Wait, are any of the thoughts on Doom, like, I just want to make sure we haven't missed anything major or someone, everyone got a chance to say everything they were hoping to say. I would like to say that I've made a big show of not being scared of video games here in the modern world. Yeah. Doom was the last video game I remember being actually scared of. Again, it's hard to convey this because you look at it now and it looks so quaint and silly, but it was, I think, a large part again due to the sound design, it was a scary experience

if you're playing this as a kid in 1993. Yeah, I as a child, I'm playing Doom and I would go to bed and I would be scared a little bit. Yeah, and I think because it doesn't have, I think a big thing is like games now just have so much more sophisticated lighting. Yeah. And like there isn't, this game doesn't really convey like the menace of darkness in the same way, just wasn't technologically capable of doing it. So that's part of why it feels a little bit more cartoony. And also the palette is part of that.

But still, it was just like, at the time, it felt so much more visceral and so much more intense and just immersive by nature of its first person perspective. And that's what made it so terrifying to play. I would like to speak on the movie just for a quick second if I can please So yeah, we covered the movie back in the premium DLC days of the show available on patreon.com slash get played and the movie is to doom as

Spirits within is to Final Fantasy Where it's sort of like it's just called that and it doesn't really have that much in common with it as Spirits Within is to Final Fantasy, where it's sort of like, it's just called that, and it doesn't really have that much in common with it, like aesthetically or anything like that, and it's fucking, it's dog shit, it's really, really bad. Bad movie. And then there's a second one called Doom Annihilation,

which I have not seen, but from what I gather, it has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than the original movie, which not hard to do. The original one has 18%. Right, yeah. And the Doom Annihilation straight to DVD movie has like a five out of 10, 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it seem like it could be an Oscar contender comparatively.

Well, I'm glad that we're not still doing the old format because we don't ever have to watch it. No, we'll probably watch it at some point. Yeah, let's watch it. I think we should watch it. It'd be kind of funny if we watched it. It would be funny if we watched it. No. How about a segment?

Let's do a segment. Let's do it, Matt. Okay, I'm going to name an item and you're going to tell me if you think doom can run on it. It's time for doom or boom. Okay, and so how this is going to work is if you think the item that I name can run Doom, you'll give it a Doom. You'll say Doom.

And then if you don't think it can run Doom, you'll say Boom, because the idea of it running Doom will make it blow up because it doesn't work. Now Matt, I have to ask because this seems really familiar. This seems basically just an inversion of the existing boom or doom from the Costco guys. Is that what this is a riff on? It's exactly what it is, Nick. Okay, got it. Got it.

Having a little fun. So doom or boom? Yeah. It kind of seems different enough where like we can't get in trouble. No, it seems like its own thing. And can we do the boom thing if we say give something a boom? Yeah, I think that's a we can do the boom for sure. Got it. What does that mean? Yeah. Okay. Okay, here we go. Let's get into it. Here we go. Can doom run on a Game Boy color?

I'll say doom doom. color. I'll say doom. Doom. You're correct. It cannot run on a Game Boy color. Somebody got what it can't. Wait, explain it. Doom. Doom means it can't. Oh, wait. No. Whoops. I forgot. Incorrect. It cannot run on a Game Boy Color, actually. The individual cartridges for the Game Boy Color don't have enough processing power. Somebody did a modified cart and got Wolfenstein running on one, but they had to add stuff to an existing Game Boy cart. So as is, you cannot do it. So no points so far. Can you run doom?

within the game Sonic Mania I'll say doom. I will also say doom Which means yes. Yes, you guys you can play doom in Sonic Mania it with a mod you have to mod the game But you can it can be done and it takes some, but after that it's fine. You can do it. Okay, great. So now you both have a point. How about this one?

Matt, it feels like your source for this is a dream you had. What if you could play Doom in Sonic Mania? Oh man, you know what? Sonic Mania is great, but you know what would be cool? If you could play Doom in it. That'd be sick. It'd be so sick.

It'd be awesome if I had a girlfriend. And that girlfriend was Tails? Yeah. This next one, a pregnancy test. Can it run Doom? What kind of pregnancy test? Like one with like a sort of digital output. Okay, so we don't have a brand,

just have a pregnancy test? Just pregnancy test. I'm going to say Doom, because I think the likelihood of Matt naming a pregnancy test as a thing to throw us off seems less likely than that you could run Doom on a pregnancy test. Yeah, it's hard not to metagame it a little bit. I think I would also lean Doom here.

You can you can do it. There's there's a certain type of pregnancy test that has like a tiny sort of, you know, computing display. But it's like it's just like a digital one. It's not like the two line, the two line. Man, can you imagine you pee on a stick? And then Doom shows up, Doom. You know, oh, my God, what happened? What's going on with me? I don't think I'm pregnant

I think something else is happening. My urethra is a portal to hell Okay, how about this a gas pump display I mean, I feel like I've just seen this so I'll say doom I'm gonna just so that we get some variation here I'm gonna go boom boom do you want to do it that way Heather do you want to know the other way I don't you guys are referencing something I don't know at some point I'll do a boom and you can kind of get the gist okay I found no compelling evidence that you can do it at a gas pump display. Wow. Wow! So Heather gets a point?

So Heather gets the point. Holy shit. Wow. What's the score? It's, um, I think it's 4-3, Heather. Got it. Here we go. How about this? A vape. A vape? A vape.

A vape. Yeah, how about a vape? Maybe I don't know what a vape is, because I'm picturing a vape. Does a vape have any, how about a vape? Maybe I don't know what a vape is, because I'm picturing a vape. Does a vape have any sort of readout? Some of them do. Some of the fancier, high-tech ones can be maybe a more advanced model.

So this is a vape with a screen. I'm going doom. I think this probably is a doom, but I'm going to try to see if I can start this point. I'm going to say, but I'm gonna try to see if I can stay at this point, I'm gonna say, boom! So it's just like an emphatic boom? Yeah, kind of a flex there. Oh, you got a flex.

You gotta kind of do a flex too. Yeah. It is in fact not a boom, it is a Doom. There's a vape with a sort of, yeah, a display that can be programmed to run Doom. How about this? So now, yeah, a display that can be programmed to run Doom. How about this? So now, yeah, another point for Heather. We got five, five, three here.

The PDF. This one I feel like I've seen, I'm gonna say Doom. I'm also gonna say Doom, cause I feel like I've seen it. Okay, yeah, you can't play Doom in a PDF. This is kind of crazy. So the thing about this game is like, it's not really about winning.

It's kind of like, it's kind of just crazy information sure yeah a PDF That's for typing and looking at stuff. It's for yeah, it's for distribution. It's for reading. Yeah more like BFG I Give that I give that He called his own shot, and he took it I love it Okay, what about this, a Sega VMU. Oh boy, if you can't run on a Game Boy Color, but then I wonder if there's some sort of, hmm, like are you running it off of maybe the Dreamcast

and getting it up on the VMU, is there some sort of Cluj work around? I'm gonna hate myself for getting it wrong because I love the Sega Dreamcast. But I'm gonna go boom. I feel like you would see this running on a VMU. Boom. I guess I'm not quite picturing

how it's technically possible, but I'm gonna say doom. Can't do it. Wow. You can't run it on a damn VMU. Sorry Heather. Wow. But you are correct.

No, I get that right. You were right, but sorry that the VMU can't do it, a damn VMU. Sorry, Heather. Wow. But you are correct. No, I get that right. You were right, but sorry that the VMU can't do it, I guess is what I mean. That's okay. This is a strange segment. I'm so confused. Look, we do lose something when two thirds of us are in the room and one of us is somewhere else.

There is like a, your guys are like, I don't wanna say where I am. You're not that far away from me anyway. There is like, there's a bit of a distance. It definitely feels like you're on the other side of a webcam and sick. Yeah, no, 100%. Yes, and yeah, so my mind is infected.

But. But. But. But. I got one more for ya. Great. An iPod shuffle. What's the score?

Heather wins, no matter what. Okay, so I should just say what's in my heart. I think probably Doom. I bet you can't read it on an iPod shuffle. I don't think the shuffle has a screen. Oh, does the shuffle not have a screen? Oh no, that's the Nano. The shuffle does have a screen.

I have no idea. I'm gonna say doom also. You can't do it, the shuffle don't got no screen. Oh! Wow, the shuffle is the one with no screen. I did a little trick. Wow, you got us. I was hoping you wouldn't remember

which one didn't have a screen. That hurts me more than the Dreamcast is that I don't remember that the shuffle has no screen and the nano does, god that sucks. The nano has a, yeah, it has no screen in the Nano does Yeah, the Nano the Nano has a yeah has a screen yeah, but the shuffle the shuffle was the one that was like a little clip on Yeah, yeah pretty cool design actually honestly. It's the same size of the fucking Apple watch Yeah, they're like the whole thing was a screen actually yeah And that's doom that's doom or boom we won't do it again because it's kind of only time

It would be would make sense to do it. But I had a little fun making that. That was a lot of fun. I'm looking at this right, I'm looking at the subreddit now, the it runs Doom, or it runs Doom. And yeah, they got a Nex Turbo Color workstation running it. They got a Motorola Razor with Doom on it. There's a supermarket waitingr with Doom on it.

There's a supermarket waiting scale with Doom. See, it's always crazy stuff. This is kind of great. I love it. I'm sure that people have run it on the back of an airplane. Yeah, this one I've seen Google Sheets, it's running in there. Digital picture frame.

Running on Apple's lightning to HDMI dongle. I'm gonna sound like the fucking whale here for a second. People are amazing. It's great that people do this. I don't know, it's amazing that people think of the show. I'm glad you didn't say I want a meatball sub and want to jack off. Hey, that's this week's Get Played. Our producer is Rachelle Chen. Ranch yard underscore underscore sard. You back up streaming ranch.

I am. And I just finished Resident Evil 7 last night. Wow. Speaking of scary games, what do you think? I loved it. Wow. I thought it was very fun. What's next?

I don't know. We're going to spin a wheel. What you're going to spin a wheel? You're going to use RNG of your own? Ranch number generator? I love it. This is like if Jigsaw like, you use RNG of your own wrench number generator. I love it. Like if Jigsaw like used one of his own puzzles to do something for himself. It's like, what the heck?

The reverse bear trap on yourself. You doing? I've put a reverse bear trap on my own head. You're like in the room. You're like, what? If it if it goes off before I can undo it, then I'll tell you what your game is. Otherwise, you can leave. I think you're in the weeds, dude. Our music is by Ben Prenty, benprentymusic.com.

Our art is by Duck Brigade Design, duckbrigade.com. We're gonna be out of town for the next couple of weeks, but we will be releasing new episodes out of our backlog. So they won't be timely, but they will be new. And then we'll be back in June, first week of June with our Mother 3, We Play, You Play. You can find our merch at kinshipgoods.com, link in the show description and also check out

Get Animade, our sister show on Patreon. Matt, what are we doing this week? It's, it's, it's animahem, baby. We're, we're, we're trucking right along and who knows what we're gonna watch. It's gonna be sick. Cause you guys suggested all the, the anime for the, for the wheel and I know y'all are a bunch of freaks.

Yes, that's right. Those are listeners suggested anime that are selected. We select one episode per random and watch it live on the show and React to it one episode per week per week randomly randomly yes That's over at patreon.com Slash get played and hey, you don't got played. What's that doom? Wow than 10 million times. I think I just sold 10 million units That's I'm not a journalist, I don't know.

Yeah, we don't fucking know. What do you want us to do, know something? We don't know anything. 300 million units. Ha ha ha. That was a HateGum podcast. Hey, I'm Tony Hale. I'm Matt Oberg.

And I'm Kristin Schall. And we're going to be hosting the new podcast, The Extraordinarians, where we are going to be interviewing extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things, things that we have never and probably will never do. We talk to people who have broken records on slacklines suspended by hot air balloons. We're talking to people who have done multiple flips on trampolines. You'll have to tune in to find out how many flips they did. Subscribe to Extraordinarians on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever

you get your podcasts and watch videos. There's new episodes that we release in every Wednesday. We do. I've never seen you cry before. I know. I don't know how I feel about it. This is upsetting for all of us. They don't let us prank for lunch.

They do. The podcast is so competitive, they make you just talk and joke. Guys, we're watching a spin out. Please subscribe. Oh, man. Extraordinarians. about murder. But more importantly, it's also about two women becoming very good friends in their 40s. Which can really happen, and it has happened to us.

It's true. Because life has imitated ours. And then it imitated life. Time is a flat circle. And now. We're making a podcast that's about making friends. And we're inviting an incredible guest like Vanessa Bear. Wow, I have so much to say.

Lisa Kudrow. Feelings. They're a nuisance. Nick Kroll. I just wanted to say hi. And Matt Rogers. I'm like on the verge of tears. Feelings. They're a nuisance. Nick Kroll. I just wanted to say hi. And Matt Rogers. I'm like on the verge of tears. So good.

So good to join us and hopefully become our friends in real life. Take it out of the podcast studio and into real life. Along the way, we are also going to talk about dating. Yep. Spousing. True. Parenting. Career-ing.

Yeah. And why we love film. And Louisa and It's the Greatest Movie of All Time. Shouldn't need to be said. No. We said it. It's just a all time. Shouldn't need to be said. No, we said it. It's just a true thing. So please subscribe to Here to Make Friends on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts,

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