Doom joins The Washington Post’s list of America’s most influential works

The Washington Post placed Doom on its list of the 25 most influential works of American culture, giving the 1993 id Software shooter a place in the 1986-1995 slot of its America at 250 project. The game was grouped with works that helped define the national canon, including Common Sense, the Star-Spangled Banner, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Levi’s jeans, Mickey Mouse and Robert Johnson recordings. It also outpaced Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, The Simpsons, Seinfeld and The Real World.

The list was assembled by critics, reporters and editors after months of arguing, revising and consulting historians, curators and other experts. The package was framed as a decade-by-decade look at the books, music, art and ideas that shaped 250 years of American society.

Gene Park, the Post’s videogame critic, made the case for Doom by tracing how it moved in December 1993. Park pointed to its internet distribution, its spread across college networks and bulletin boards, and the way it reached players without a retail store or gatekeepers. He also singled out the 3D world seen in first person, self-published distribution and user-generated content as part of the game’s foundation.

Doom, originally released in December 1993, is a first-person shooter that improved graphics, networking, gameplay, authorship and the public perception of game content. It also helped popularize peer-to-peer multiplayer and modular user-created levels, including deathmatch mode.

Park addressed the game’s scapegoating after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting and argued that the violence came from the people with guns, not the game itself.

The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Doom into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2015, and later shooters such as GoldenEye 007, Half-Life and Halo followed in its footsteps.