ThrowbackThursday // Vol. 8: Doom – Yeah, Yeah – Doom

Hello friends, family, and foes,

Welcome back to the wacky and wonderful world of time travel. I am your host Artesian House, in for Artful, who stepped in for Artimus, who replaced Artie, the original substitute for Arthur, some three weeks ago.

I was having a late night chicken wing with my friend Danny Mac last Thursday (no relation), when he told me that there was a new trailer for a new Doom game that I just had to see (I told him, “and hear!”). Seeing as it was near the end of the billing month, and I was approaching my mobile data limit (where 1 GB is not nearly enough to watch trailers in a selfless pub), I had to wait until I got home (where the Wi-Fi is) to connect to the old Bell310 Network.

While he fired up the iMac and got our NBA streams going, I found this new trailer on my cell-phone:

 [Warning!!! This trailer contains extremely disgusting and violent sights and sounds that will most certainly trigger some visceral reaction!!!]

I have to start with the obvious – the sound of whatever it is that cued me to think of mushing brains and their juices (maybe the foley artists squished a pineapple) - this measured sound-tool occupies a unique space in this game’s futurescape-hellsphere where comedy and horror co-exist without a tongue in cheek. For example, with a bagful of the new Doritos Roulette at your side, playing this game will not keep you refrained from eating the surprising snack, but every once in a while when you score a particularly gruesome kill, you might say (with a mouthful of that delicious Dorito mush), “ahhhhh!” or “groossss!” or, and depending on what type of person you really are, “awesome!”

It horrors me, however, to think of some of the language I have heard playing multiplayer games online. You wonder if these kids know what they are saying, or if they just know what words they are not supposed to say and then string them together into slightly coherent sentences – like some of those upbeat poems in Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. Meaning is imposed over the string of words after-the-fact and only because we care that it is Dylan or that a string of words should carry meaning. I swear, that guy could have said anything, actually anything, “penny-zip elephant cheese” and people would find what they were looking for.

Anyway, back to the sound of squishing brains. I couldn’t help but think that maybe I have heard those sounds before and I had to ask, where?  Danny said "Casino," and the scene popped into my head (pun intended). Listen again, to the gruesome sounds of a skull being crushed and again, a proper warning is due – this scene is of obscenely graphic nature, and I only feel comfortable sharing it with you, dear reader, because I know that it is “movie magic” and some foley artist recorded the sound of something other than a cracking skull with bubbly brains (unlike the popular case of that famous Italian cannibal film, where the effects were so real, a judge called the director in for murder):

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To thankfully change the pace of this entry, the new trailer for the campaign mode takes a different approach and uses a cinematic touch that is reflected in the soundtrack. The kill-zone of a multiplayer mode is sounded out by hyper-space-marine-industrial-rock and the story mode has music to guide the…story...for a few seconds before it goes back to that micro-music culture that I just invented: 

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You know what else is fun? Take a listen to all of the trailers for every other Doom game all the way from 1992, up until 2015 in one long trailer-of-trailers that, again, is the result of fan-art and a dedication to the series:

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All of those pre-orders for Doom II – exactly like the Vitaphone system we wrote about not too long ago – selling the image of popularity is just as important as actual popularity, just like selling the image of having money is more important than actually having it – right 50 Cent?!

I am going to pretend then, that I am on a beach!

Take care and I will be back in time,

Art.