(upbeat instrumental music)
- When I look at DOOM Eternal, all I see is this.
(cheerful instrumental music)
Is it because my brain is broken?
Yes.
But it's also because the two newest DOOM games
owe so much of their success to the ancient art
of slapstick comedy.
It's the wet, goopy glue that binds
the whole experience together,
and if you take it away, everything else falls apart.
See, the team it had dialed in the combat design for DOOM
pretty early on in development,
is gonna be fast and relentless like the original DOOM,
but with a new level of fidelity in the edition of
glory kills, a mechanic that stuffs enemies full of
lifesaving resources to be harvested aggressively,
like a pinata full of Insulin.
But as DOOM's Director, Hugo Martin pointed out,
you can't just sustain that level of violence
because at a certain point,
it becomes hard to stomach,
and that's not the kind of game he wanted to make.
So what sort of game did Hugo want to make?
If we dive into Doom's influences,
and its influences' influences,
we can find three keys that it used to unlock its perfect
slapstick tone.
The first one teaches us simply that,
some kinds of violence are funny,
and some kinds of violence aren't.
DOOM wouldn't exist without this rude puppet.
The team haven't specifically sighted him as an inspiration,
but the game's inspirations wouldn't exist without him
or his tiny cudgel.
This is the titular slapstick,
it's a wooden board with an extra flap that claps closed on
impact, allowing performers to do the thing that makes
slapstick comedy work,
and that is loud, exaggerated violence,
without real human suffering.
This technique takes advantage of the ancient human truth,
that when somebody gets donked in the head,
or smashed in the balls,
it is quite often, funny.
But why is it funny?
What evolutionary trait prompts us to take pleasure
in the pain and humiliation of others?
We're not going to find out today.
I don't know, it's just funny,
and when your actors are tiny, wooden puppets,
that don't grimace or bleed, or bruise,
the volume of violence can be turned up
and they turned it up.
And when you look at the way DOOM turned out,
you might think that their approach to
blood and guts, and violence was anything goes,
but the truth is that they were really picky about
what did and didn't make the cut.
Hugo said that a really important role he played,
was protector of the tone,
so he had a video reel made up that showed examples of
what kind of stuff felt right for DOOM, and what didn't.
Anything that felt overly sadistic, disturbing,
or realistic, was out.
Anything that was fast,
a little bit shocking,
and silly, could stay,
which pushes us into the territory of
slapstick comedy violence.
But that move alone wasn't enough,
because even silly violence would get boring,
if there wasn't something there to spice it up.
The slapstick of Punch and Judy,
would continue to evolve into new medias,
like vaudeville theater,
where the art of pretending to hurt
and get hurt was a real moneymaker.
From this scene we got The Three Stooges,
which was doomed for Boomers.
They were a bunch of dumb asses,
who were a menace to themselves and everyone around them,
but they really excelled at adapting the stick to
different environments and situations.
This is cool because it gave their bits a sense of
inventiveness and improvisation.
Like, they were looking at a problem
and finding the dumbest possible solution
that would yield the funniest punishment for their bodies.
(loud clanking)
- Thanks fellas!
- Slapstick is funniest when it fits the context of
the situation,
and when the punishment is tailor made
for the person on the receiving end.
If a guy has a huge cast on his foot,
it's funny to see it get bonked.
If a guy's a neat freak,
it's funny to see him get dirty.
If someone has a beloved rack of
collector's edition thimbles,
it's funny to see it get knocked over.
(loud crashing and laughing)
DOOM and especially DOOM Eternal,
take this to heart.
Every monster you face in the game,
is a perfect slapstick partner.
Their unique characters and shape,
provides the context for the brutal and silly violence.
Cacodemons are big, cyclopic, grinning balloons,
so naturally you hit them with the old Odysseus
and then deflate them.
Mancubi are lumbering, dopey, hungry beasts,
so you feed them something that doesn't sit well.
Arachnotrons are snotty little keyboard warriors,
who hide behind their superior technology.
So naturally, you dispose of them with a classic
stop hitting yourself, or by crushing them
under the weight of their own machinations.
That's what you get for posting.
Just about every glory kill in DOOM Eternal,
is a gag that takes into account the appearance,
or character of the opponent to enhance the impact.
That's some good, nasty slapstick.
But there's still a big gap between the dry slaps of
Punch and Judy, in the wet gushing gore of DOOM,
and that's where our third key comes in.
Hugo describes DOOM Eternal as a sort of spiritual sequel,
to Sam Raimi's 1987 cult hit, Evil Dead 2,
but he's not talking about the first Evil Dead .
The first Evil Dead was a zero budget demonic horror
that did a lot with humble resources,
and had a whole bunch of really innovative, shocking gore.
But a lot of its silliness is a result of its limited means,
rather than deliberate comedic intent.
But Evil Dead 2 would pave the way for DOOM's hybridization
of comedy and horror.
It was influential for blending Hollywood gore effects
and throwback slapstick comedy.
See, Sam Raimi was a huge, huge fan of The Three Stooges.
In fact, most of his films before the first Evil Dead,
were just Three Stooges fan films.
When he had the budget and the freedom to rebuild
Evil Dead from the ground up,
he didn't spare the slapstick.
I'm talking chairs breaking,
and eyeball shooting into mouths,
and a guy fighting his own hand.
Raimi used context and character to shepard the
violence along the path,
that was definitely shocking and gross,
but usually cartoony enough to be palatable.
If showing something would be too realistic
or painful to watch,
they wouldn't show it.
We don't see the chainsaw ripping into Ash's flesh,
but we revel in seeing him plunge it into the eye of
a big, rubbery demon face.
Hugo actually showed this exact scene to his team
to exemplify the tone that he wanted for the game.
(loud pixel projection)
Like the Deadites and The Three Stooges,
DOOM's demons have a ton of personality
and a dark intelligence.
They're not the mindless sort of human hoards of
enemies you get in a lot of horror games, they're assholes.
They taunt and tease and they delight in causing pain,
it makes their eventual embarrassment and destruction
a little more satisfying,
a little less nihilistic.
They only feel as much pain as is funny.
You get the visual fun of somebody getting
their head cut off,
without the emotional baggage of somebody getting
their head cut off.
When Ash decapitates Henrietta,
she keeps cursing him to her last breath.
I do not feel bad about this.
- Swallow this.
(loud screaming)
- DOOM's use of slapstick keeps the game palatable,
while some other violent games might start to feel
like a numbing slog.
There's a moment in most prestige Triple A games,
where the humorless, deadly serious, extreme violence,
just becomes a little much.
The moment that makes me make this face.
In Red Dead Redemption 2,
I accidentally triggered an execution animation
that blasted the top half of a man's head off,
leaving him crumpled on the ground with a
hideously detailed, spurting wound
and the slowly spreading pool of blood,
while nobody,
not even our supposedly sensitive protagonist reacted
in the sligthest.
Imagine that one scene in Pulp Fiction where the gun
accidentally goes off and paints the inside of
the car with blood,
but instead of spending the rest of the movie trying to
resolve that crisis,
John Trivolta and Sam Jackson just turn around
and keep talking about cheeseburgers.
It's like that.
This moment in Red Dead Redemption 2 wasn't meant
to be funny or frightening, or satisfying,
it was just procedural violence,
not serving anything other than the game's obsession with
realism, but in Evil Dead 2 and Doom,
the blood and guts are derived from the needs of
the specific gag,
rather than some fetishistic anatomical accuracy.
Eyeballs make a literal cork popping sound,
as they're plucked from a Cacodemon's face.
Revenants are full of blood even though they're made of
bones; Arachnatrons are big sentient brains,
but when they take damage,
they got rib cages.
DOOM, with all of its constant action blood, guts,
and violence, still manages to feel less shocking
and tonally wrong than a lot of big Triple A games,
and it does it by firmly rooting itself in a tradition of
nonsensical violence,
by making sure that everything that makes the gasp,
can also make them laugh.
Like the slapstick itself,
DOOM is designed to make a lot of noise and get a reaction,
without causing anyone real pain.
(upbeat guitar music)