Plot
Doom, a science fiction/horror themed video game, has a background which is given in the game's instruction manual; the rest of the story is advanced with short messages displayed between each section of the game (called episodes), the action as the player character progresses through the levels, and some visual cues.
The player takes the role of an unnamed space marine who has been punitively posted to Mars after assaulting his commanding officer, who ordered his unit to fire upon civilians. The Martian space marine base acts as security for the Union Aerospace Corporation, a multi-planetary conglomerate, which is performing secret experiments with teleportation by creating gateways between the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. The manual makes it clear that Phobos is considered by space marines to be the dullest assignment imaginable: "with no action for fifty million miles, your day consisted of suckin' dust and watchin' restricted flicks in the rec room." This all changes when the UAC experiments go horribly wrong. Computer systems on Phobos malfunction, Deimos disappears entirely, and "something fragging evil" starts pouring out of the gateway, killing or possessing all UAC personnel. Responding to a frantic distress call from the overrun scientists, the Martian marine unit is quickly sent to Phobos to investigate, where the player character is left to guard the hangar with only a pistol while the rest of the group proceeds inside. Over the course of the next couple of hours, the marine hears assorted garbled radio messages, gunfire, and screams, followed by silence: "Seems your buddies are dead."
As the last man standing, the player character's mission is to fight through the entire onslaught of demonic enemies by himself in order to keep them from attacking Earth. In order for the game to be completed, the marine must fight through Phobos, Deimos, and then Hell itself, each presented as an episode containing eight distinct levels, along with an optional ninth hidden level for each one. Knee-Deep in the Dead, the first episode and the only one in the shareware version, is set in the high-tech military bases, power plants, computer centers and geological anomalies on Phobos. It ends with the player character entering the teleporter leading to Deimos, ending with him getting overwhelmed by monsters, if not killed. In the second episode, the Shores of Hell, the character journeys through the installations on Deimos, areas of which are interwoven with beastly architecture, warped and distorted by the hellish invasion. After defeating the titanic Cyberdemon, he discovers the truth about the vanished moon: it is floating above Hell. After climbing down to the surface, the third episode, called Inferno, begins. After the huge Spiderdemon that masterminded the invasion is destroyed in the final mission, a hidden doorway back to Earth opens for the hero, who has "proven too tough to be contained". In the game's final cutscene, the camera pans over a verdant field complete with flowers and bunny rabbits, only to reveal a burning city and a bunny's head impaled on a stake: the demons have invaded Earth, paving the way for Doom II: Hell on Earth.
The Ultimate Doom, the retail store version of the game, adds a fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed, occurring after the three original episodes of Doom and before Doom II. This episode was developed by independent master level designers with id's approval, and was designed for expert Doom players seeking a major challenge. It is considerably more difficult than the original three episodes.
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