Bathroom Reads #18 (Finale): DOOM Books + Honorable Mention: WORD FREAKS

 

The majority of my friends are more than aware that I'm a big fan of the DOOM games, with the first one in particular being a giant obsession. Like a lot of teenage boys in the early 90s, I read up about it with rapt interest in all of the gaming magazines of the day, and when I got my first PC in 1998, one of the very first games I got was the ULTIMATE DOOM for Windows 95 edition. Great monsters, great level design, great MIDI music, just a classic game . . . I still rank it in my Top Ten Favorite Games of All-Time list even to today, and one of my annual traditions is replaying all four episodes of the first game in December (for whatever reason, in my mind I always associate DOOM with the holiday season, perhaps because I purchased it in that time frame back in 1998, and remember first playing it around Christmas time). Obviously, a game as influential and popular as DOOM has spawned a fair number of books, some of which I'll look at here today. 

MASTERS OF DOOM, by David Kushner, is a very interesting and captivating book that was first published in 2003 (I think I myself got it around 2007 or thereabouts). It covers not only the making of DOOM, but also the story of id Software itself, and does such a good job depicting what that company was like in the 90s that John Romero himself put off publishing his own memoir for the longest time, because he thought Kushner had done such a thorough job at it (his memoir, DOOM GUY, finally came out last year, and I highly recommend that book as well). 

Another book related to DOOM that I greatly enjoy is Dan Pinchbeck’s Scarydarkfast. Although put out by an academic publisher (the University of Michigan Press), and thus more scholarly in tone than Kushner's book, Pinchbeck’s book is extremely readable, and doesn't get super-bogged down in tedious/impenetrable academic-speak. I like how he adroitly sums the game up here: “In academic terms, DOOM is based around the core activity of lining up objects with the center of the screen and removing them by pressing the shoot button. You start in a complex environment, and you simplify it by removing agents and pressing all the buttons there are to press and collecting all the objects there are to collect . . . the game is all about simplifying the environment, with extreme prejudice.” In a number of brief chapters he traces the development of the First Person Shooter genre, looks at the games id Software created that paved the way for DOOM, briefly gives a history lesson of how id came to be, before launching into some slightly technical chapters analyzing the game’s development process, the DOOM engine (id Tech 1), the game’s code and integers, the game’s soundtrack, and how it was received by the press and public. Later chapters talk about the DOOM modding and multiplayer scenes, along with its ports and sequels (a lot of attention is especially devoted to DOOM 3), but to me, the meat of the book are the three long chapters in the middle, a “Shot-by-Shot” walkthrough/analysis of the game’s three episodes (though sadly, the underrated Episode Four only gets a brief mention).  A lot of the things and little details about the game that impressed me (like the "Crucifixion Room" in the "House of Pain" mission) were things that Pinchbeck was impressed with as well. 

For the record, my Top Three Missions from ULTIMATE DOOM are "Deimos Lab" (E2M4), "House of Pain" (E3M4), and "Gateway to Limbo" (E3M7). I'm also a big fan of "Against Thee Wickedly" (E4M6). 

HONORABLE MENTION ENTRY: WORD FREAK by Stefan Fatsis 

This is a book that, unlike the others I've covered in this series, I don't take into the bathroom with me on an annual basis . . . more like a biennial one, you could say. Despite my love for words, I'm a lousy SCRABBLE player and am not especially a fan of the game, but Fatsis' book is a fun read, and his depictions of some of the eccentric personalities found among the competitive SCRABBLE players is often very amusing to behold. 

* * * * 

Well, I guess this is the final entry for this era of my Bathroom Reads series. Obviously, should I add other books to my bathroom rotation roster in the future, there will be additional entries to cover those. Having finally read many of the books covered in this series "for real/officially" in 2024, I think in 2025 I might give some of those old books a break and maybe add some new blood to the roster.