I will never forget the first time I booted up Doom by id Software. It was 1993 and I was ten years old. I had never played an FPS game. The only id games I had previously played were the first six Commander Keen episodes.
Coming from Commander Keen, Doom was a shock to the system — quite literally, especially when I later played Doom II and had to shoot Commander Keen in a secret level (a hard pill to swallow for an eleven-year-old who still loved him). Compared to Commander Keen, Doom was just on a different level. The complex lighting, the sounds (to this day the Doom shotgun packs a punch), the monsters: Doom felt incredibly immersive. Even though it was not a true 3D game like Quake later would be, it sure as hell played like one. As a kid I never noticed that flying monsters like the Cacodemon could not actually fly over other monsters — which made hitbox calculations easier and kept the game running smoother. Enemies consisting of sprites instead of polygons also helped with the framerate.
John Carmack pulled out all the stops to make Doom run absurdly fast even on a 486. Doom ran so quickly that it felt like a racing game. In fact, many consider Doom the birthplace of speedrunning. Thanks to its built-in demo recording, you could easily compare your times with others. To this day people fight for world records. The current world record for finishing all of Doom 1 (Episodes 1–4) is at 20 minutes and 38.367 seconds, and was set in 2025 by ZELLLOOO. The world record for finishing just the first level (the aforementioned E1M1) is at just 8.74 seconds (aconfusedhuman in 2024).
The speedy feel of Doom was no accident, but deliberate design. Where Wolfenstein 3D had lives and collectible items spread across the levels, John Romero simply scrapped both for Doom. Romero argued that lives did not make sense in a game with a save function. Lives were a leftover from console games that would only be a distraction in Doom. Romero had fallen in love with the speed of Doom, and did not want anything to distract from that.
A nice side effect of simplifying the game was that Doom was so easy to play you did not need a tutorial; at least not an explicit one. The first level of Doom, the legendary E1M1 demonstrated the fundamentals without a narrator telling you what to do. The level itself taught you everything you needed to know.
Oh, and Doom was also the game that popularized multiplayer in the FPS genre. In fact, the term deathmatch was even coined by Romero himself.
With so many firsts, it is genuinely hard to overstate how important Doom was. For years, pretty much any new FPS was just called a «Doom clone»; the term «FPS» was not even invented yet. Tim Rogers, in his three and a half hour review of Doom, called Doom «the vortex nexus nucleus at the center of the center of video games, themselves».
Doom indeed did not just influence FPS games. In «’Diablo’: A Classic Game Post Mortem» Diablo developer David Brevik talked about how much he loved the minimalist menu of Doom and how quickly you could actually start playing Doom. When you booted up Doom you were greeted with a menu that consisted of just five items: NEW GAME, LOAD GAME, OPTIONS, CREDITS, QUIT. For a quick round of Doom you would hit NEW GAME, select an episode and a difficulty setting and then you were off to the races already.
When booting up Diablo you were greeted with a five-item menu as well. All you had to do was to select NEW GAME, choose a class, enter a name for your character and that was it.
By contrast, other RPGs made you answer questions for half an hour straight; down to the color of your hair in some titles.
As a kid, Doom and Diablo were two of my favorite games. And though back then I was not aware of it, the brutally simple menus were a big part of why I loved them. Obviously a game with a great menu but bad gameplay would not be fun at all, but the simple menu of both games made enjoying them so much easier.
A simple and clear menu draws you into the game. A complex menu that overloads you with information takes you out of it.
If you think about it the Doom menu style is a good fit for a website as well. A good website should invite you in; and a good way to do that is to not overload you with choices.
Granted, complex sites like amazon.com will not work with a five-item menu. Few sites are as complex as amazon.com though. Most sites are trivial by comparison. And yet most sites overload you with a barrage of links that nobody in his right mind would click on in the first place: who the hell still looks at a sitemap these days? Who is going to click on «Terms and Conditions», besides the kids from South Park (except Kyle, of course, to his detriment)? Add to that search functions that never find anything useful in the first place, popups asking you to accept cookies or change your locations; most modern websites resemble mazes more than menus. Most websites in fact remind me of that South Park episode with the apes and the public swimming pool …
Contrast these overblown websites to the five-item menu of Doom and the contrast could not be more extreme.
Taking a page out of Dooms playbook, we boiled down the new main site of zaunkoenig.co to five items as well: NEWS, BLOG, SHOP, SUPPORT, ABOUT. Everything you could possibly want to do on zaunkoenig.co can be done by selecting one of these five items. And thus we did not add any other link to our main site.
Here is a little game you can play next time you are on the website of a gaming mouse maker other than Zaunkoenig: count the links on their main site. Most sites will display 50 links. And some are pushing close to 100 links. Granted, on some of those sites you can buy peripherals other than just gaming mice. Still, though: 100 links is a lot. Because the funny thing is that that very same website probably will praise its products as being free from gimmicks. Focused on the essentials. But how seriously can you take that, when the very same website touting that is not free from gimmicks? Is not focused on the essentials? It is comparable to a clown, telling you to take him seriously.
On zaunkoenig.co we also tell you that our mice are free from gimmicks. Focused on the essentials. And to show you that we mean what we say our website perfectly reflects that.
These days every gaming mouse maker touts that their mice are optimized for ultra-low latency. And yet some websites out there take longer to load than the current world record for the first level of Doom 1: 8.74 seconds.
Most pages on zaunkoenig.co load in 0.3 seconds. Browsing our website feels very quick; just like how the original Doom felt like a racing game. Even on pages with a high resolution full screen image as the background, our loading times are well under a second if your connection is good; not even on a 3G connection does it take more than a second to fully load the page.
On zaunkoenig.co we not only tell you that latency is important to us; we show you.
It is ironic, by the way, that all those gimmicks that you find on most websites are the same things that make the website slow. So not only do they clutter up websites; they also make them slow. To top it off, most websites these days use something called «Google Analytics». You may have heard that many websites use cookies to follow you around the internet (we do not do that at Zaunkoenig, by the way). In addition to that many websites also follow you around their own site. This tool is called Google Analytics, and it makes every page load ever so slightly slower. Google Analytics observes how you move around the site: do you read a blog article before deciding to buy something? Or do you go straight to the checkout from the main site? Do users get lost easily? The idea is that tracking helps you optimize and simplify the site. The irony, of course, is that a simpler site would not need all that tracking in the first place.
We hope our new website hits you like a System Shock — in the best possible way. Oh, and if you are a fellow Commander Keen fan: do not worry. There are no secret levels on zaunkoenig.co. For now, at least.