When the Cold War abated, military budgets shrunk. Strapped for funds, the U.S. Marines licensed seminal first-person-shooter (FPS) Doom from id Software and built their own version for soldiers to play. Companies like Sega began designing simulation software for defense contractors, since they could do it more affordably. For a few years, FPS games were all called Doom clones since so many of them used Doom shareware (Voorhees 2012, 97). Part of the inspiration for the military’s collaboration with videogame producers was Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985), which depicts videogame interfaces for real military battles (Mead 2013, 58).
Doom ’s world was stripped down and streamlined for Marine Doom. Martian dungeons became “sparse, dust-colored plain punctuated by small brick bunkers, foxholes, and barbed-wired barriers” (Halter 2006, 167). Aliens and demons were replaced by “very human-looking opposing forces, clad in simple khaki military uniforms of a vaguely Communist/Nazi cut” (167). The game’s new purpose was teaching Marines “how to work together in teams and make split-second decisions in the midst of combat” (Mead 2013, 22). Doom served as a basis for further military use of first-person shooters (Stahl 2010, 96). Videogames and military training depended on the same basic logic: “what’s good for the Xbox is good for the combat simulator” (Miller 2011, 110). The U.S. military still depends on commercial companies for its training technology.
In 1993, the U.S. Senate convened a joint hearing of the judiciary and government affairs committees to work on a videogame ratings act, responding to complaints about the violence in Mortal Kombat (1993) and Night Trap (1992). In 1994, the electronic software ratings board was created, making the act unnecessary (Voorhees 2012, 97). In 1997, three students were killed at a high school in Kentucky. In response, activist Jack Thompson filed a lawsuit against the makers of the movie Basketball Diaries and against id Software, the makers of Doom, Quake, and Castle Wolfenstein (Voorhees 2012, 99). Thompson asserted videogame violence is causally related to real-life violence. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the concerns were not. Two years later the Columbine massacre happened, and Doom was implicated.