have you ever heard anyone say something like, "man, the 90s were weird, you had to play DOOM with only a keyboard because it didn't have mouse support. They added that in later releases", because if you have heard someone say something like this, they are wrong. You can send them this video. They are wrong.

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Video game myths, a cornerstone of gaming culture ever since people started discussing their own experiences in games. Nearly every single person’s gaming experience is different, and unless you’re some Tool Assisted Speedrun robot, no one person plays a game the EXACT same way someone else does. When it comes to single player games, while most everyone will experience the same story, the way they tackled the same gameplay issues can vary wildly. If you played the last of us you might have played through this clicker room methodically, stealthily using every single tool from the game’s sandbox available to you to get past this room, or you could’ve just killed all the clickers. Even in difficulties or games that are meant to be a challenge, people’s experiences vary. It’s common knowledge that Jackal snipers on Halo 2’s legendary difficulty are little bit tricky to deal with, but in that same vein there’s someone out there who had zero issues clearing the Jackal sniper alley on legendary. There’s probably someone out there who fought Malenia in Elden Ring, and found that easier than fighting Morgott, that was just their experience.

So what does this have to do with DOOM? Well like any incredibly popular game, the first DOOM has an extremely large community and fanbase surrounded around it. And with that comes a multitude of myths and rumors surrounding the game. You can go down the list of popular video games and find myths or rumors about all of them. Minecraft has truly unbelievable things, like Herobrine, or extremely believable things like a completely untrue myth about Sugarcane growing faster on sand instead of dirt. A lot of how myths spread, is through word of mouth like this, be it internet word of mouth, or real life word of mouth. One of DOOM’s largest word of mouth myths revolves around this, a mouse.

I can vividly remember a time where I booted up DOOM on my school laptop, and was playing it while waiting for my mom to pick me up from school. On whatever free emulator website or whatever I was using play DOOM, I selected the “modern controls”, which allowed me to move around with WASD and a mouse. My principal at the time came up to me and talked about how much of a throwback it was that I was playing DOOM, but I was playing it wrong. He went on to explain that because DOOM came out back in the early 90’s, it wasn’t meant to be played with a mouse, and the original way to play DOOM was only using a keyboard. And hey I believed him, bro was like 35 years old in 2014 talking about how this game was one of his favorites ever growing up I have no reason not to believe him, besides the fact that DOOM being a keyboard only game was completely false.

DOOM being a game that was built around only the use of a keyboard, or even that you could ONLY control it with a keyboard is completely false from the ground up. For some reason though this myth persisted for much longer than it ever should have, surely there was someone out there who remembers playing doom with a mouse and keyboard, perhaps that person even used WASD before it was ever wildly popularized.

It’s just crazy to me that I only learned about this because of a Doomworld forum post turned into a website that I happened to come across last year. The evidence is crystal clear, The DOOM manual itself recommends that when you’re comfortable playing the game, you might want to try out Keyboard and mouse simultaneously for fine control while aiming. If it’s in the manual, surely it’s possible, and while some people may not say that’s enough evidence, it’s a good thing there’s even more.

John Romero himself, original designer on DOOM, said the game was made with a mouse input in mind, as was Wolfenstein 3D, which came out before DOOM. The original release date installer of the game for version 1.0 on DOS includes a configuration for Keyboard and mouse, you could even configure the keyboard to use WASD and bind your actions in the game to whatever keys you felt like. The last piece of evidence, is literally built into the game on the demo loop, and it’s clear that if you look, this is gameplay using a mouse. With how quick these turns are, it would be highly unlikely that this gameplay was recorded with a keyboard only control scheme.