The frame rate sputters like a drunk at closing time. The textures stretch and tear like paper under a dull blade. The maze twists inward, and the shotgun coughs against sprites too flat to fall. Yet there is something. Something primal and incomplete, like a bad dream you half-remember, a mistake that sharpens instead of fades.

I play this game and think of the world it foretells. The corridors, so sterile and perfect in their inefficiency. They exist only to contain the player, to herd him toward a crescendo of meaningless violence. What will the future hold if not these same corridors? The same red keycards, the same half-dead specters clawing for you from the corners of a grinning algorithm.

The 32X itself is an appendage, an afterthought of an afterthought. A tumor on the Genesis’s aging body. The hardware gasps for relevance, crammed with half-hearted ports and shovelware. A compromise of plastic and brass, clinging to the edges of obsolescence like a drowning man. But in its failure, it has become perfect.

Failure is pure. Failure is honest. In a world of glossy lies, this system’s jagged edges feel true. The Doom on this machine is real. Not in the sense that it works—God, no—but in the sense that it doesn’t. It is a broken mirror reflecting a broken future, one where we all wear masks made of polygons and smile while the framerate drops.

I think about school, about their plans and my plans, and I wonder: are they playing Doom, too? Are their hallways the same as mine—an endless loop of beige tiles and fluorescent lights, a map without a player? I see the teachers, the parents, the students, all walking corridors they cannot name. I want to rip and tear, not at them, but at the lie. The architecture. The design.

This game, this machine—it is a lesson. They tried to teach us the wrong things, but this teaches the truth. The hardware gasps, the software glitches, and the shotgun roars against the void. There is no victory in this life. Only levels. Only keys. Only Doom.

In the end, I think the corridors will win.

Plans, they ask. What do you plan to do?

I’ll tell you what I plan to do. I plan to rewrite their code. They are a system as flawed as the 32X, all bottlenecks and bus contention, trying to process inputs they cannot understand. Their output is predictable: discipline slips, report cards, the same questions on the same tests. They think they’ve built a stable platform, but I see the glitches in their rendering. I see the overflow errors, the stack smashing that will tear their architecture apart.

I imagine their hallways as Doom levels—white-tile mazes with monsters in khakis and ties. The PA system blaring MIDI screams. I imagine walking those halls, shotgun in hand, and seeing the hardware for what it is. Faulty. Slow. Destined to crash.

The teachers, the administrators—they are the Genesis, outdated and struggling to keep up. I am the 32X. Faster, sharper, incompatible. Their rules are wires I will cut. Their system is firmware I will overwrite.

The SH2s of the 32X communicate via an internal high-speed bus, but they barely communicate with the Genesis beneath them. Sega’s engineers were fools to think this could work, and yet in that failure is brilliance. The 32X does not belong. It does not integrate. It forces its will onto the Genesis, choking its video output, demanding resources the base hardware cannot provide.

That is what I will do. Force my will. Take their bandwidth. Render their corridors in blood and pixels. Rewrite their design until the frame rate drops to nothing and the screen goes black.

The future is not their future. It is not a hallway. It is not a level with locked doors and red keycards. The future is chaos rendered in 32,768 colors. Twin processors running out of sync. A shotgun blast echoing through the void. A system crash. A reboot.

They will call it a failure. But I will call it Doom.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5660153&forum_id=2:#48526478)