Recent Transmissions
13 entries in codex
It takes a brave soul to ask the question "What if Doom was an incredibly slow-moving tactical shooter?" In fact, it's not a question I ever thought I'd want an answer to—we aren't exactly short of grim-faced, hyper-lethal first-person shoo…
When I first played Half-Life at the tender age of 11, I found it a terrifying experience. Admittedly, I was scared of pretty much everything at 11. Wasps, heights, loud noises, football (or more specifically, everyone finding out how bad I…
t this year's QuakeCon in Gaylord, Texas, a number of id Software's OGs and founders are in attendance for a retrospective talk and reunion, and it looks like legendary programmer John Carmack took some time to refamiliarize himself with th…
Doom, one of the most influential videogames of all time, was famously distributed via the shareware model: The game's first chapter was completely free, and if you liked it, you sent id Software some money and they mailed you the remaining…
You can play Doom on a vape, a printer, an oscilloscope, a pregnancy test, an ATM, and inside Doom itself, but can you play it on a Commodore 64? The old 8-bit powerhouse was discontinued just a year after Doom's 1993 release, and while it …
Human ingenuity is a powerful—sometimes terrifying—thing. Throughout history, no matter how basic the tools available to us, we have always found a way to build the weird obsessions that appear in our minds. You know, like Stonehenge, or th…
We often talk about Doom—the original 1993 shooter from the young upstarts at id Software—as one of the most influential videogames of all time. But the Washington Post, one of the country's most highly-regarded papers of record, has elevat…
In 1984, an upstart retail company called Costco had just opened its first handful of voluminous warehouse stores on the west coast of the United States when it decided to try an experiment. It installed a hot dog cart in front of its San D…
I know my Doom, and its many derivatives. I've been covering it for years. It has almost never left my PC in over three decades, so I do not say this lightly. End of Starchild—a completely free, standalone game from prolific musician and in…
If there's one thing I respect in this fallen world anymore, it's commitment to a bit. Jim's Music Dungeon on YouTube is Knee Deep in the Bit, having taken hundreds of classic metal songs and made them sound like Doom level music—and he is…
We all know Doom was so popular, so monumental, that it changed videogames forever. As a society, we're still obsessed with installing Doom on increasingly improbable devices, from pregnancy tests to vapes. But sometimes I run into an old f…
The United States Library of Congress got a little cooler today by inducting the soundtrack of the original Doom into its National Recording Registry. The Doom soundtrack, by composer Bobby Prince, is one of 25 recordings now designated as …
Today is the 10 th anniversary of Doom—not the 1993 classic that changed the world, but the 2016 reboot that proved to be far better than I'd dared to hope. We celebrated the big birthday by confirming with Doom co-creator John Romero that …