The 1993 classic first-person shooter Doom was one of the most influential games of all time, and also aroused a huge amount of controversy over what was (at the time) considered a highly realistic simulation of graphic violence and killing. Doom consequently sounds like an extremely unlikely contender for a zero kill run for obvious reasons, but as it happens: Doom is apparently one of the many counter-intuitive cases of violent games in which a pacifist run is possible, and possibly even a zero kill run...
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| Well... you can put that thing away if you want, because apparently even Doom is a zero kill run... |
Despite being loaded with violence, games modeled on the Doom engine tend to have a final objective based on reaching some key area and throwing a switch or activation device of some sort, rather than blowing holes in specific monsters...
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| The object in the center is the "yellow key," one of many keycards needed to get through Doom levels. |
As the Wikipedia article on Doom states: "
The objective of each level is simply to locate the exit room that leads to the next area, marked with an exit sign and/or a special kind of door, while surviving all hazards on the way. Among the obstacles are demonic monsters, pits of toxic or radioactive slime, ceilings that lower and crush anything below them, and locked doors which require a keycard, skull-shaped key device, or a remote switch to be located." This ironically means that players can actually avoid partaking most (if not all) of the in-game carnage that caused Doom to become so controversial in the first place...
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| An example of one of the locked key-enabled doorways needed to complete a level in Doom |
Veteran Doom players have apparently been doing this for a long time, and coined the term "UV Pacifist Run" to describe the ambitious undertaking of playing the game on the "Ultra-Violence" (second highest) difficulty level setting without slaying a single monster— though tricking irascible hellspawn into attacking each other apparently is considered acceptable.
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| Doom's retro in-game shareware advertising page... |
A replay of Doom isn't one of our own imminent prospects, but the classic Doom game's 3d engine undoubtedly had a long legacy, and a lot of well-known "FPS" (first-person shooter) games were directly built on the Doom-engine's foundations. Dark Forces, Heretic, and Hexen (all some of our ongoing pacifist run prospects) all feature extremely similar engines to the highly influential Doom engine, for example, and future generations of FPS engines that were used in stealth games were also heavily influenced by the Doom engine.
