Brutal Doom

 

 

Brutal Doom | BRUTALV21.PK3

Marcos "Sgt_Mark_IV" Abenante

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room. I’d debated for ages as to whether to write this or not; ultimately, I decided, if I was going to be giving more coverage to one of my favorite games, I was going to have to do this eventually, whether I liked it or not. It’s just too big not to. So let’s talk about Brutal Doom.

Screencaps are from the Brutal Doom Hell On Earth Starter Pack (now known
as Extermination Day) and using dreagonait's HUD Visor Doom 3.0.

Brutal Doom is an ultraviolent gameplay mod for Classic Doom (not counting Doom 64, though there’s a version for that too) that greatly expands the amount of blood and gore in the game, significantly overhauls enemy behavior and gunplay, and introduced the glory kill. It’s one of the most popular game mods ever made, directly influencing (and later being influenced by) the sequel to the game it’s a mod for. It’s also one of the most controversial.

Now to be fair, Doom and its community are no strangers to controversy. From the original game being effectively put on trial in Congress in 1994 to the community furor over Team TNT’s Evilution getting picked up for a publication deal, controversy has been a part of the Doom experience for almost thirty years. (And that’s not even counting recurrent internal strife at id Software.) The Columbine massacre of spring 1999–25 years ago to this day — thrust Doom and similar games into the spotlight once again when it came to light that the perpetrators were big fans of the game, with Eric Harris having made several levels for it and other games like Quake. While the rumor that he had designed a level recreating the school and replacing monsters with students and teachers was completely unfounded, Harris did create a level, “UAC Labs” (UACLABS.wad, if you’re so inclined) that added extra gore to the enemy death sprites, and in addition to threatening to blow up people who make unauthorized edits to his work, the readme states:

You can see how in hindsight that’s a little concerning.

So what does all this have to do with Brutal Doom? Well, if you’re very clever, you’ve already seen where I’m going with this, drawing a line between the enhanced gore of Brutal Doom with Harris’ clumsily-edited bloodier death animations. And so, yes, I am saying that Brutal Doom comes from a similar kind of place.

This isn’t to say that Marcos “Sgt_Mark_IV” Abenante, the creator of Brutal Doom (for a given definition of “creator,” since the mod is largely built on assets from other community members that initially went uncredited) is definitely a school shooter in waiting, but combined with his history of racism, edgy behavior, hypocrisy, egotism, and a generally toxic personality that’s gotten him banned from most of the Doom community, he is unquestionably the public face of a certain type of Doomer — reactionary, hostile, and either openly bigoted or loudly tolerant of others’ bigotry, essentially the 4chan wing of the community — that has generally been pushed out of the wider community in recent years and forced to congregate in less moderated places like the Doomer Boards. In short: the kind of people you’d probably find on a watch list, if not being identifiable in J6 footage.

“So Brutal Doom’s creator is a horrid person, so what?” you might ask. “Whatever happened to separating the art from the artist?” Well, for starters, I don’t believe that’s really a thing. Like, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown culminates in a wealthy pedophile getting away with his crimes — but sure, let’s “separate the art from the artist.” Brutal Doom, its content, and its development process all speak to the kind of game that Abenante wants to see and culture he wants to foster. Certainly, his own stand-alone game in development, Brutal Fate, would suggest this as well.

But okay, let’s talk about the mod itself. After all, most of the controversy around Brutal Doom is due to Abenante’s public behavior (and, to a lesser extent, the way Brutal Doom served as the gateway for a lot of new entrants to the community who as a cohort were mostly unsupervised children who barely understood how to use their computers, let alone the internal workings of Doom modding.) Surely, there’s nothing inherently problematic in the mod itself that isn’t already in the base game, yes?

Well… yes and no. While yes, Brutal Doom is at heart a gore mod, it has quite a few other features, mostly relating to the gunplay, with things like modern aim-down-sights, reloading, headshots, reduced player speed for more “realism,” and the like. All this is fine, really — there’s plenty of other mods that do similar things, like Hideous Destructor and Protocol: Disposable. But that’s not really what anyone plays Brutal Doom for, is it? It’s the gore-soaked violence. And sure, you could argue, and many have, that Doom is a violent game — and it is. But that doesn’t make Brutal Doom’s violence not concerning; it’s a matter of scale and presentation. In vanilla Doom, when you kill an enemy, they’ll go through a brief death animation — sometimes relatively gory, usually not — and that’ll be the end of it. Brutal Doom revels in violence and cruelty. The core focus seems to be watching enemies suffer as you dismember them; I’ve watched pinkies take ruinous wounds to their body and keep on charging, I’ve seen zombies crawl around on the floor as their guts spill out into the empty space where their legs used to be. This goes beyond the level of Mortal Kombat-esque parody and into the realm of wondering if Abenante — or someone — might not be getting off to this. It’s a hard thing to really quantify, to be sure; everyone has their own standards for how far is too far, everyone has their own lines to draw. But playing Brutal Doom left me with a sense of unease; I got the feeling that the kind of people this mod is made for are also the kind of people who rallied behind Destructive Creations after the reveal for Hatred, the notoriously edgy Postal 1 clone (not that Postal wasn’t itself notoriously edgy, but it had a dash of smirking, self-aware satire that the uncompromisingly grim and straightforward Hatred lacked.)

On a purely mechanical level, Brutal Doom isn’t a bad mod. The gunplay is fun, the expanded AI makes for interesting scenarios, and I admit a smirk at the irreverent humor of aggroing enemies by giving them the finger. But I just can’t look past the cruelty in the violence. And maybe that’s irrational of me, maybe the argument that a mod that adds more violence to an already violent game isn’t something to clutch pearls about is correct. But I don’t think it is; other violence mods, like NashGore (which predates Brutal Doom and brings the violence more in line with Duke Nukem 3D than anything else) don’t have that feeling of wrongness to them.

The more I played of Brutal Doom, though, the more I started to get bored of it. Eventually you become numb to it, and you realize: it’s so banal, isn’t it? It’s the violent fantasies of every maladjusted teenage boy who thinks he’s a ninja. There’s nothing here that’s actually interesting. Playing Doom with a reload key and ADS doesn’t inherently make Doom better. The violence after a while is just boring — here’s the next mutilated imp, here’s the next crying zombie. Even the glory kills — the one element that the 2016 Doom remake famously lifted, ironically much to Abenante’s hypocritical vexation — are boring: they’re too long, dragging the gameplay to a halt as we watch what’s essentially an overcooked fatality sequence.

I suppose what makes Brutal Doom important is its impact on the community. On some level it was the mod that brought gameplay mods to the forefront — Doomworld’s Cacowards for 2011 expressly created a new gameplay mods category just to recognize Brutal Doom. And in the years since there has been a very active cottage industry of mods ranging from Final Doomer to Doom4Vanilla to — ah, well, I’ve tried to catalogue some of them but there’s just so many! It also brought a lot of people to the community, some of whom stuck around and became valuable members in their own right. Brutal Doom’s success brought what was once considered an ancient game back into the mainstream, and what was once a quiet community that mostly only ever got the spotlight because of joke mods is now part of a much more expansive universe in the ascendant boomer shooter community.

Brutal Doom is still getting updates; forks like Project Brutality build on what Abenante started (whether he likes it or not.) Regardless of how we may feel about it, the legacy of Brutal Doom is undeniable, and I can’t argue in good faith that it did nothing positive for the community. But I also can’t argue in good faith that the mod itself is anything more than a curiosity, a novelty at best, one that quickly wears off and leaves you wondering just what kind of person its creator is.

-June <3

They're gonna rip up your heads
Your aspirations to shreds
Another cog in the murder machine