Doom was released in the late 90s, a videogame remembered as one of the “first” first-person shooter games to ever be made. It has stuck around, propped up by the presence of quiet but persistent modding communities. As someone who is otherwise starting from absolute zero, I was able to jump right into supplying my own textures and level designs. Doomer takes its name from one wojak variant; the image of a sadistic, dark-eyed, cigarette-smoking young man. It samples just one of the many images and memes from my camera roll, all of which pull from the depths of the academic industrial complex. I thought I should do something with them. Everywhere I looked, Instagram or Discord, was a cycling of the same images anyways – I wanted to spin them somewhere they didn’t belong.

I mean, there’s a certain joy of seeing Nick Land, Hunter Biden, and a hot anime babe draping the scenery as you unload a rifle into a mutant alien creature.

Doomer, as a whole, is a nice little time capsule of the late-2020’s memescape. I imagine it’ll be even better to play a few years from now.

https://donotresearch.net/posts/doomer-the-game

“People spend their entire lives and they don’t make any art this good.”

Joshua Citarella

“Yeah, it’s a videogame about Instagram dot com. Absolute meme psychosis.

Excerpts from this work was used in probably 5-6 different instances by Do Not Research, whether online or in-print. Was in some Rhizome presentation or something. I was likely being difficult at this point as it was during full blown Covid lockdown. All I can say is the game was downloaded thousands of times in the first few weeks and that’s all that mattered.

Oh, yeah – you can download it for Mac here or for Windows here. Takes a little bit of know how to get it running but – hey – you’re trying run a DOS game in 2023.

The original trailer (somehow pulled from Youtube for ‘violence’) is up on Vimeo – which is, of course, a shot-for-shot remake of theirs. Despite them pulling down the trailer, a full playthrough is available on Youtube.“