CCRB RECORD No. 0061
Doom (1993)
Determination: Implied — Blasphemy 2
Inverted crosses, goat sigils and pentagrams are the wallpaper of the whole game, not a single scene.
The original Doom carries more inverted Christian symbolism than any later entry in the series, which is the opposite of what the combined record implied. Its corridors are laid with pentagrams, its walls with inverted crosses and goat-headed sigils, and its hell episodes with impaled corpses. Critics writing about the game's reception place this deliberately in the register of contemporary metal — iconography adopted to mark the game as dangerous, aimed squarely at the religious-right culture of the early nineties, and it duly produced the moral panic it courted. What the game does not do is make an argument. There is no church, no God, no doctrine and no theology; the demons are unambiguously the enemy and the player kills them for eight hours. That is why this is implied rather than explicit: the symbolism is deliberate and everywhere, but it is decoration on the villains rather…