D_BUNNY gave me mild trauma

This is kind of a silly story, and I even feel stupid talking about it because there are definitely things people go through that are so much worse. Call me a pussy if you want. I'm not making comparisons, I'm just sharing what I know.

I do fight for anti-censorship as often as I can, because I think it's highly important that raw factual data and information should be accessible to all those who seek it. However, from the perspective of an adult that is roughly the age most id software employees were at the time they created Doom, I'm able to look at the game with a level of clarity I didn't have when I started playing it, and see that they probably should have been a little more responsible.

I played Doom for the first time when I was probably way too young to be playing violent video games. I loved the game a lot, I felt like I was in it. It's the first video game I remember playing. Doom came out 10 days before my third birthday, and I think I got to try it maybe a year after that. I couldn't play the game without my older brothers giving me the cheat codes. (the blood on the doom guys face was scary) With iddqd on very happy ammo, the arrow keys to move, ctrl to shoot, and spacebar to open doors, find secrets and operate switches, I could get by. I liked shooting the bad guys. The blood and gore was cool! Probably spending an hour per level or more, the game was intuitive enough for me to solve and get through.

The ending of Doom is really confusing, to put it one way. Did I even win? Who the fuck is this rabbit? Who did this? The Spider boss? Can the Spider Mastermind even reach this rabbit with those scrawny arms and pull its head off like that? How did anything I've been doing for the last 10 hours connect to this at all? Whaaaat!?

It doesn't make any sense now and sure as fuck didn't make any sense to me as a child. It corrupted my experience with the game. I was horrified. I had to quit and leave the computer to go outside. I distinctly remember the mouth agape, with the opaque layer of blood in the rabbits front teeth, the blood dripping from the fur, and the dangling muscle fibers hanging out of the harmless animal's neckhole, complete with the sound of the broken lullaby music that played exactly at the right time. It really fucked me up bad.

I used to have a brown pet rabbit around that time that looked just like daisy. His name was Rascal. I don't really remember having a lot of loving memories of Rascal. I've carried him and pet him a few times. I would occasionally drop carrots and celery into his cage in the backyard for him to nibble on. He bit me on the finger once or twice I think. I remember my brothers thinking he was an asshole. I've always gotten along with animals mostly. I love the way they read your intentions and your energy without any verbal communication. So a happy ending with rabbits frolicking in a field seemed appropriate until the game fucking shattered my young and naive feelings of security like a jack-in-the-box that fires bear mace into your eyes.

For many years, I've taken baby steps to revisiting that cutscene just to get over it. I would often avoid Inferno entirely, then later I would play the episode only up to E3M7 and quit before ever facing the Spider Demon. Other times I'd quit swiftly, mid-death animation, after defeating the spider demon before the end had a chance to come up. Eventually I got to a point where I could read the ending text but quit before the cutscene started. This took a long time for me to get to.

The music especially corrupted my experience. Just listening to that one distinct part of the track, even in a media player by itself without the visual still made my skin crawl. When I'd attempt to listen to it, I'd have to pause the music at the point the jingle starts to crossover into that creepier darker side. It wasn't necessarily unlistenable. It wouldn't physically hurt me. I wouldn't make me cower into the corner and cry. But it was distinctly unpleasant and the sinking feeling in my stomach when it came up just didn't feel like something I had to make myself feel.

I did eventually get over all of this (I think.) I don't actually remember the exact moment where I could sit through the entire ending of Doom; music and all, without having to wince. Contrary to what tv shows and movies make it seem, getting over an irrational fear never really feels like an accomplishment. It's just an inconsequential return to normalcy and is no cause for celebration.

To this day, I understand the logical nature of the game. I viewed the individual data lumps of the music and the art independently, and I'm not pretending the ending cutscene is any more than than these arranged data lumps with programmed instructions set up to give the visual of an animated mini-movie. Even looking at it in that cold and calculated way, divorced from feeling anything for this arrangement of pixels that so happens to be shaped like a dead rabbit, the combined experience of watching the cinematic play out in front of me still rings in a defensive thought. "ummm.. couldn't I be doing anything else right now...?"

I don't remember the last time I watched the cutscene in game in full. For some reason there's something different about watching it in a youtube video than having the game run in full screen on my PC. While I don't literally expect the scene to make me feel any worse than I have in the past, I can't fully escape the worry that watching it may make me feel ill again.

I have no animosity towards id software for this. I'll always love Doom, and it's an unintrusive and easily avoidable part of the complete game. I'm not demanding an apology or that it be removed from the game or even that they need to make a public statement to address it. There's no real reason to do it after the fact. I'll always think it's important to have to own your own mistakes, and id software shouldn't be immune from that. But it is something that I can only describe as 'mild trauma' that stuck with me for a very, very long time for a video game ending that really didn't need to be there in a commercial product.

This may be a reach, but hopefully this will help some of you see the connection between offensive and/or "political" content to our games, but also our Doom mods. It's not a rule but rather an act of courtesy to take the responsibility to understand how the content you create might effect the experience of your player in a needlessly negative way.

I think i described it all the best I could but if you're curious we can do a little bit of a Q. and A. here about the legitimacy of my "trauma" and I can go over the details, judgment-free, to the best of my ability. Ask me anything.