Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
I'm not into Doom enough to play mods or player-made levels in general, but Doom has definitely followed me around. Unseen Evil was a lucky find, because Doom 64 certainly has an interesting style.
As for the pitch, I think that in the old days people made a lot out of a little. Doom's aesthetic is exquisitely made once you look past the fast paced, gung-ho exterior, and ponder the mysteries of the UAC and the terror they discovered. Even the simple title screen music, paired with the cover art, has always brought to mind a feeling of moral horror.
But you have to be in the mood to look for things to appreciate. The first time that I really started paying attention was in E2. In the Deimos Lab, near the end after you step on a teleporter, you're confronted with a moving wall which shows faces of the damned. A little further, you see a pool of blood flowing from a gothic face in the wall. The implication, or so it seemed to me, was that Hell was as a place which converts souls into mere blood.
There's an underlying intensity that gets obscured by the now household nature of the name Doom, and probably the old moral panic that surrounded it has made people less attuned to the genuinely strange and frightening themes which saturate it. The Doom experience, at least of the original 3 episodes, is a slowly unfolding, prismatic vision of what Hell really means. Add to this the generally high quality of all its aspects (though the level design never gets as good as E1 again, and the last level was aptly named Dis[appointment]) and you have a game that matters.
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