In first person shooters these days, a once universal item seems to be appearing with less and less frequency. Whether it’s the steaming whole chicken-on-plate of Wolfenstein, or the white box with a red cross from Doom, health kits have become an endangered species. Muscling in and out-competing these gentle creatures has been the animal known as ‘regenerating health.’ Featured more prominently in recent games, it has beaten its opponent to the point of it possibly becoming extinct.

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There has been a lot of talk lately from developers about User Generated Content. They speak of it in the way all buzzwords are spoken: in excited tones flush with possibility. This worries me in some ways, for reasons you might expect: The danger I see with this sudden new focus on UGC is that some developers may be looking at it as a nice easy way to cut their development costs – put out a bare-bones experience and include with it the tools to let users build their own levels/maps/etc, and just let them handle the rest.  The problem here is that making users do all the work is not the point of user-generated content.  Though developers now may talk about it as if it is something entirely new, UGC has been around for a long time, and in many forms.

The first real introduction I had to UGC came way back in 1990 on my family’s Apple IIe. Sure, our Apple had long since been supplanted by the PC and relocated to a dusty corner of the basement, but that didn’t stop me from turning it on and taking a spin on Marble Madness or Maniac Mansion every once in a while.  One day, a friend of mine brought over a new program: The Adventure Construction Set.  Well, it was new to me, anyway; at this point it was already 5 years old.

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But, nevertheless, DOOM turns 15 today. It’s been a decade and a half since a lone Space Marine first decided that he was all that stood between the legions of Hell and the conquest of Mars.  With a shotgun and chainsaw, he fought his way into Hell, and into our hearts.

DOOM was a big leap forward from it’s FPS predecessor, Wolfenstein 3d, and with a rockin’ soundtrack and explosions a-plenty, there were few gamers (especially of the teenage boy persuasion, such as myself) who could resist.

For me, DOOM also holds a special place as the first FPS I ever played multiplayer; a friend of mine who worked in the school library smuggled a copy onto a couple of computers there, so after school we could all hang out and use the pre-assembled LAN to our heart’s content.  Thank goodness the librarian didn’t care.  DOOM taught me some valuable lessons about trashtalking and telefragging.

Anyone else out there have any warm and fuzzy DOOM memories?  Share them today as we wish it bon anniversaire.