Shoot Club: The Doom 3 review
TomChick - Columns - Comments - 08/05/04
One of the guys was pretty young. When I asked him how old he was, he said twenty one.
"You're twenty one?" I said. "How do you know about Doom? You must have been, like, eleven years old when Doom was out."
"Dude, what do you think I've been playing since I was eleven?"
"What's your favorite weapon in Doom?" Trevor asked him. The guy thought it about it for a while before saying 'shotgun'. How can a shotgun be someone's favorite weapon? There's one in every game.
"Mine too," Trevor agreed.
"No, wait, I changed my mind. Chainsaw."
"Oh yeah, chainsaw! Totally."
"What's your favorite level in Doom?" the kid asked.
"Hey, there's the chick that helped us," Trevor said as Monica walked out to her car. "Hey, check it out. We're the first ones in line!"
She took a few steps towards us. "What's that?" She had no idea what Trevor just said because he blurted it out so quickly.
"We're first in line for Doom 3 at midnight. Remember us? We're the guys who were asking you about it earlier. This is the line."
She glanced at her watch. "You're going to stay there until midnight?"
"This is nothing. Ask how long I was in line for Phantom Menace?
"What's that? Is that a game?"
"Ha, that's funny. I was in line for two days. Ask how long I was in line for an Xbox?"
"How long?"
"Fifteen hours. This is nothing."
"So you're going to wait here until midnight?"
"Yeah. It's Doom 3. I'm totally psyched. We all are." The four of us stood there, totally psyched.
"Well, I heard they didn't get the shipment today," Monica said. "We won't be selling it until Wednesday afternoon."
We fell into a shocked silence. Then she grinned. "I'm just kidding. I just saw them taking them out of the shipping cartons in the back."
Trevor still mentions Monica from time to time, although he doesn't know that was her name. He pretends he's going to go ask her out. He maintains she was flirting with us.
Trevor and the 21-year-old give each other high fives. "Those are our copies of Doom 3," Trevor said. "The copies we'll all be installing," a glance at his watch, "in about four and a half hours."
Actually, I should mention that I won't be installing anything. I already had a press copy, so I was just there because of the persuasiveness of Trevor's enthusiasm. I had been in line with him for Phantom Menace, for an Xbox, even for the opening night of Godzilla. Yeah, that Godzilla. The one with Matthew Broderick. But I've long since learned that what we're waiting for doesn't matter. We're in it for the thrill of the communal wait, that shared moment where fellow victims of hype come together for the moment of truth.
In fact, I had already finished Doom 3. But Trevor didn't want me to say anything about it. He didn't even want to know if I liked it. "You're too picky," he had told me. "I just want to know if a game is fun or not. And I don't trust you in that department. You're too harsh. You need to lighten up. Plus, I don't want you to give away any spoilers."
But that didn't stop Trevor from buying the latest issue of PC Gamer with the world exclusive first review. He'd thumbed through the six pages repeatedly, holding the screenshots close to his face and peering at them as if looking for clues. "I think there are some new kinds of monsters," he noted.
"'You will never experience a dull moment'," he had read out loud from the review, "'or even a less than mesmerizing one. Doom 3 is a masterpiece of the art form.' How about that? Dude, that's the way to do a review."
By the time Best Buy closed their doors for regular business at 9pm, there were about fifteen people in line. As they arrived, most of them went up to Trevor to ask what time he got there. He told them with pride that he'd been there since "a little after five", which wasn't technically incorrect. Kevin came out periodically to give newcomers yellow wrist bands signifying their eligibility for T-shirts.
"How many is that?" Trevor kept asking.
By midnight, there were eighty six people in line. Kevin addressed the line from the front, explaining that they would let in a few people at a time. Trevor was champing at the bit. He let out a whoop when we got in. There were about ten employees standing around and they all turned to see what that noise was.
"Doom 3," Trevor yelled, as if by way of explanation.
"So have you played it yet?" he asked the girl at the cash register while she scanned his copy.
"Not really," she said, ready to go home.
Kevin was standing at the door with a box of T-shirts. "Thanks for coming out, fellas. What size do you want?"
"Extra large," said Trevor, beaming. Kevin handed him a rolled-up T-shirt. It was black, of course. Then Kevin looked at me.
"Large, I guess."
"We only have extra large," he said.
"Oh. Then extra large."
"Wait, did you not buy Doom 3?" Kevin saw that I wasn't carrying anything.
"No, just him."
"Then you guys have to share a T-shirt."
As we walked out to the car, I muttered to Trevor, "I thought it was the first hundred people in line." Not that I really wanted an XL Doom 3 T-shirt, but it was the principle of the thing.
"You can wear mine if you wash it afterwards," Trevor said, already opening the box to get the manual. On the way home, he made me drive with the dome light on so he could read it.
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