The new Doom game will come with a bunch of neat tools that make it easier than ever to do your own levels and mods. Creativity and Doom have gone hand in hand for decades—the classic game first came out in 1993, and the first user-created level reportedly appeared in 1994.
Modders still go on building their own levels and creating their own twists on the Doom—my favorite recent example adds a selfie stick and 37 Instagram-style filters to your play experience. My colleague Liz Ryerson's YouTube series, Doom Mixtape, is an eloquent analysis of Doom maps that highlights their inherent artfulness and possibility.
It's cool to see the new Doom (when it comes out next year) will launch with a broad creative community in mind—these tools seem easy to intuit and distinctly un-intimidating, and I'm sure people who do want to do more complicated things will still find ways to do so.
People from IGN made this video showing the new Doom Snapmap tools at E3, the massive annual announcement-fest for commercial video games taking place in Los Angeles this week.
We at Offworld did not actually go to E3, because we decided to stay here and play games about human rights abuses, needy Russian in-laws, Hamlet choose-your-own-adventure, evil Keurig machines and ancient assembly language mysteries, because we are flipping batshit like that. I found out about Doom Snapmap from my pal Alice, who watched a whole presentation full of explosion men to learn about this.
