Doom is a lot like Lord of the Rings, which is a lot like Superman. You don’t have to admit you loved Doom. In fact, you can pretend you never even heard of this videogame about a floating gun that shoots as many demons as the player can find. It was so popular that the US Senate tried to ban it. It kicked off a historic trend in games, but there are only two things you really need to know about Doom:

1. It was not the first first-person shooter ever made.
2. Every first-person shooter after it for years was called a “Doom clone.”

You see, Doom made history, but didn’t invent its formula. Wolfenstein 3D came earlier, was also a game about shooting bad guys while in first-person perspective, and was made by some of the same people. Others came before it. But Doom was so successful that it popularized its concepts. It was many people’s first exposure to this sort of game, and many more people’s first highly memorable exposure.

Now, Doom was specifically about a space marine shooting his way through hordes of demons. But if you made a game about a dystopia cop shooting his way through mutants? It was a Doom clone. You were hunting through the jungle with a bow and arrows to fend off dinosaurs? Doom clone. You were a wizard using spells to blow up monsters? Doom clone. Everything was a Doom clone.

Until suddenly, nothing was.

Eventually so many games were about protagonists who solved problems by shooting them and whose eyes served as the camera that everything wasn’t viewed through the lens of Doom. There were so many “ripoffs” that nothing was a ripoff. There was enough space in this saturated field that innovation spawned recognizable identities. New games were in conversation with each other. These games were now called first-person shooters (or FPS for short). They weren’t ripoffs anymore. They were a genre.

In this funny way, Doom is a lot like Lord of the Rings, which is a lot like Superman, which is a lot like Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling couldn’t even imagine trans rights; she damned sure didn’t think up magic schools. But for a time, every book with a magic school was a “Harry Potter ripoff.” This was particularly galling to writers who were doing their own thing, or whose work was responding to earlier works like Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall.

When you grow up, you realize art is more about conversation than originality. What lived experiences move you? What bits of stories have stuck to your heart? Those become living, beating organs in our work. Only the delusional believe their art springs exclusively from their own minds.

Why, right now somebody is probably accusing my essay of stealing its thesis from “Everything Is a Remix.”

Despite knowing that most “innovators” aren’t actually the first of their kind, creative types still beat themselves up about originality. We develop sympathy for anybody caught in the tide of someone else’s success. Go to any bar at a Sci-Fi convention and you’ll find an author who is miserable because they have a story that they wrote last year, that’s coming out next year, that’s turned out to be vaguely similar to something that just blew up and is ultra-popular. They feel like their thunder is stolen.

Why are we miserable about writing something similar to someone else? We’re all primates using the same gray matter hardware. We’re largely using the same few languages to convey ideas, and are inspired by a limited number of possible human experiences. Most influences aren’t parasitic. It’s possible to exploit or culturally appropriate, but this isn’t what most of us are doing. What is the blockage?

I’ll tell you. We’re miserable because we don’t want to fall into the gap.

Be an innovator, and you’re heroic.

Be part of a genre, and you’re giving a hungry audience what they want.

But if you’re a ripoff, then your reviews will be full of bile. It doesn’t matter how well you executed on it. It’s a funny circumstance where second place can get the worst prize.

One remedy is to recontextualize novelty. Novelty is great! Who doesn’t like seeing something they’ve never seen before? But novelty is just one of many factors we can enjoy in a work of fiction.

From my own experience, I remember when Meg Elison announced Number One Fan. I almost dropped my phone. It was a Horror novel about a novelist kidnapped by a maniac fan—a work clearly responding to Stephen King’s Misery. But the genders of the author and kidnapper were flipped, and I knew that would only be the beginning of how different Elison’s execution would be. Elison is a master of putting humanity into horrible fictional circumstances. She was both compatible with the premise and guaranteed to create something fresh.

Turning this book down would’ve been like telling Jimi Hendrix not to cover Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.”

One can tire of certain derivations. I’m happy to never hear another slowed-down cover of a pop song in a Horror movie trailer ever again. Other audiences are done with Romantasy, or cinematic universes, or open-world videogames. All of this is fine. When I’m done with something, I tend to leave it and explore other art that says something different. I leave it to the people who love it.

And maybe I’ll be back. One can always return to a niche, especially if a new creator breathes new life into it.

© 2025 John Wiswell