Is Doom the greatest game of all time?

[one_Two]

It holds significant value to the history of games but Doom is maybe #3 or #4 on the greatest list of video games with wolfenstien being above that and Super Mario bros above that and maybe Pong at the very top of the list. Doom is one to the greatest but not THE greatest.

I take it you mean most influential and not greatest.

"significant value to the history of games"

Is that what greatest means? Even with your redefined question can't see pong would be first.

[MrSetharoo]

It holds significant value to the history of games but Doom is maybe #3 or #4 on the greatest list of video games with wolfenstien being above that and Super Mario bros above that and maybe Pong at the very top of the list. Doom is one to the greatest but not THE greatest.

I take it you mean most influential and not greatest.

"significant value to the history of games"

Is that what greatest means? Even with your redefined question can't see pong would be first.

Im probably explaining this wrong :T

[Ænima]

This hair-splitting makes me feel like I'm browsing Reddit.

Either Doom is, in your opinion, the greatest game to ever exist, or not. At least that's how I interpreted this

Do YOU think that Doom is the single greatest video game ever created?

Its influence on the game industry is objective and undeniable, though.

And I don't know where I'd be today if Doom never came into my life, for better or worse. :x I haven't logged anywhere near as many hours in any other game, not just ingame but also all the time I spend modding (or mapping, but pshhh i don't do that anymore).

[SwordGrunt]

For anyone who thinks the engine isn't modern, we need Wadaholic's horror mod linked here.

To be fair we are basically injecting Doom with steroids when using ZDoom.

It's still Doom. The modifications were made possible with id releasing the source code, and Doom itself could be infinitely modded with regular editors before then.

Yes.

[Laggy Blazko]

Personally I have 4 main factors to describe a game quality: Plain fun, ambient, interface and achievement potential.

Most games with "plain fun" are shooters and racing games. They make me think and react fast. Of course, Doom has a lot of "plain fun", but probably the game with more "plain fun" I can think of is Metal Slug. There's a lot of stuff happening at the screen at the same time and you'd better pay attention to everything!
Playing with someone else (either online or not) increases the fun for social reasons.

Ambient isn't just "good graphics", but also music, plot, architecture, special effects or anything that makes you feel like YOU ARE IN THE GAME. First Person Shooters get this right, because you actually see what the character sees. Unreal (the first game, not the tournament series) is a very good example. It really makes you believe you are in a mine or in a Nali temple or in a crashed spaceship. Its "universal translator" lets you know what's going on, and it usually doesn't obstruct gameplay, unlike Doom3's PDAs that make you hear entire recordings just to get a locker code, but they are still cool as they do a very similar job.
Speaking of Doom 3, most maps look, unfortulately, too similar, and that has made me stop playing the game halfway, sometimes.
Doom 2 seems to sacrifice "ambient" in order to get more "plain fun" in terms of level design, but it feels like it wasn't a very good sacrifice. The Super Shotgun has both of them, though.

Interface means mostly good controls or the ability to change them (that's one of the reasons I prefer computer gaming, I like things with tons of buttons =P). I mean, if your game forces me to always use space to jump and WASD to move then i'm not even going to try it. Good bye.
It also means having a lot of options, like graphics quality, FOV, difficulty settings, music volume, etc.

Achievenment potential is the ability to... Well... Do stuff in the game. This is usually what makes a game addictive. If the only point of the game is to win it's not going to be playing it for long. Adding explicit achievenments is a good (and cheap) way to encourage playing the game again to try stuff. Sandbox games rely on this, and I still need to build a 1 km long railroad or visit all biomes in Minecraft, heheheh.
Character progression is another way to keep people playing, and RPGs combine this and Ambient a lot, unfortulately sacrificing "plain fun" most of the time.
Gameplay options and classes contribute to this. I've already played this game? Let's try it again, as a cleric! I've tried this track in this racing game? Let's see how I'll do it while IT'S SNOWING!
And then we have mods. That's the reason I've been playing Doom all these years. I don't need to say a lot about them: They expand gameplay. And we get a lot of them. Sometimes they add character progression, sometimes gameplay options, sometimes classes, achievenments, controls, ambient (maps, music, etc) or just PLAIN FUNNY MODES!

While Doom itself might not be filling all these factors right, it sure gets close, even more with its mods, and I can't think of any game that does it better.

Holy crap!, this must be the longest post I've ever made! Even if not a lot of people read it, I had a lot of fun typing it!