Adventures in Dooming: Why Doom is the Perfect Game to Play Fast

Alternative title: Just SR50 Through That Linedef

Doom and Doom 2 are nearly flawless games. Setting aside the triumphs of the game engine itself, the graphics, gameplay, level design, music, etc. are all top-notch. The success of Doom would be reason enough to become interested in speed running it. Lucky for anyone who did, Doom is a highly rewarding game to speed run for an assortment of reasons.

Reason One: History

Doom has been out for 21 years. Doom 2 has been out for 20 years. People have been speed running Doom for 21 years. This makes Doom one of the earliest speed games, and that is pretty cool. Unlike more modern games, there's actually a rich history in Doom speed running. Certain elements and quirks of the game engine were not discovered until long after its release. There's a whole story to tell about Compet-N, the official speed run segment of the Doom community. It's all fascinating stuff and just one aspect of what makes Doom a good speed game. By taking on the mantle of becoming a Doom speed runner, you're joining a pantheon encompassing literal decades. There are speed run records set in 1996 that have never been beaten. Now, don't look at this as evidence that Doom is an old-folk's game. The Doom community has grown and changed over the years. Fans of the game have made their own sets of maps.

Reason Two: Variety

Doom has had a long time to stretch its legs. This has led to two important factors for speed runners: amount of content to speed run and amount of ways to speed run said content. 20 years, two decades worth of fan made maps sit on the idgames archive. There's not a reasonable estimate for how many maps exist, but suffice it to say that you could probably play Doom and Doom 2 maps for the rest of your life. This is great for speed runners. The Doom engine is an amazing engine for speed running in, and if it was just limited to Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom, well, it would get tedious. Just like people get tired of speed running Super Mario 64, once you've played something enough you'll look for something new. Or perhaps you'll look for a new way to do it. Doom has 14 (probably more) ways to speed run a level. That means if you were just looking at the original games, you're looking at 32 maps time 4 games = 128 maps. 128 maps times 14 ways to speed run them = 512 individual speed runs. And that's just for the official content. Remember how much user created content there is? Yeah. You could be occupied for a long time. I'll go into more detail about the various speed run categories in a future article. They're their own topic, really.

Reason Three: Tricks

Here's a sampling of tricks possible in the Doom engine. All of these are relevant mainly to speed runners. You got your wallruns, you got your strafejumps, key bumps, rocket jumps, death exits, Arch-Vile jumps, glides, void glides, linedef skips, thingrunning... All sounds pretty cool right? These tricks are what gives Doom speed running its depth. Most, if not all, of these tricks were unintended by the developers, leading to many maps having ways to skip large sections of gameplay. The cool thing about this, is once these tricks were discovered, speedrunners began making maps that had intentional speed run routes, making use of the various tricks. Many of these tricks are easy in theory, yet difficult to properly execute in a given run.

Conclusion

That's all I really wanted to discuss in this installment. Next time I'll go into more detail about a specific speed running category. I'll leave you with a few gifs of some of the tricks I mentioned.