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The Washington Post has published a list of the 25 most influential works of American culture, featuring DOOM as its selection for the period of 1986-1995 (h/t: PC Gamer).
Sitting alongside such influential entries as The Star-Spangled Banner, Moby-Dick, and Levi's Jeans, DOOM beat out The Simpsons, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and even Seinfeld for its place on the list, ultimately being selected for its "foundational" role in digital entertainment.
As the Post reporter Gene Park argues in the text accompanying this selection, the 1993 PC game was "a 3D world viewed in first person, self-published, with no gatekeepers and no retail store" and "gave rise to user-generated content years before anyone had a name for it."
Its "spirit of sharing and community, along with its pioneering approach to guiding players through abstract environments in 3D space," Park notes, was also firmly "rooted in the upbringing of designer John Romero, who is Native American (Yaqui, Cherokee) and Mexican," with Romero's partner John Carmack handing "the audience the tools to build their own corners of hell" Making a witty reference to another entry on the list (specifically the recordings of the famous blues guitarist Robert Johnson), Park quipped, Johnson may have 'made a deal with the devil. 'DOOM' asked us to walk into hell and kill the demon with a gun."
In the entry, Park noted the scale of the game's blockbuster success, discussing how it was "installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows 95 at the time" and how "college networks buckled under the traffic", but didn't shy away from also highlighting some of the darker chapters in the game's history.
This includes a period of time in which the game was famously used as "a scapegoat for the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado."
This is an experience Romero has been fairly candid about in the past, referring to it in his book DOOM Guy: A Life in First Person, in the chapter "Columbine". Here, he remembered watching the news in horror, remarking on the "wanton, senseless violence and destruction," but ultimately rejected that "video game violence causes real-life violent events," stating "Playing Duck Hunt and DOOM is quite different than firing a real gun at a real human."
Reacting to the news about DOOM's inclusion on The Washington Post list, Romero wrote on Twitter/X, "What an incredible honour, and DOOM is the only video game on the list! Congrats to DOOM devs, players, modders, and the entire games community. This one is for all of us."
Tom Hall, another id Software co-founder, meanwhile, added, "Wow! DOOM was selected by The Washington Post as one of the 25 Most Influential Works of American Culture! Proud of id's legacy and all the games we worked on. Congrats to @romero @ID_AA_Carmack and @ACarmackArtist."
It should be noted that this isn't the only time DOOM has been recognised this year as an important American work, with the Library of Congress selecting Bobby Prince's soundtrack for the game for inclusion earlier this year.
The latest entry in the DOOM series, DOOM: The Dark Ages, was released last year. However, a new expansion, Revelations, was released as recently as this month. The launch of this expansion coincided with mass layoffs at id Software, the studio behind DOOM, which you can read about here.