rockpapershotgun.com: Are you a German teenager? Then do we have some good news for you! After a short seventeen year-long wait, you are now legally allowed to buy a copy of Doom. And, indeed, Doom can now be stocked in normal shops, not just ones ominously deemed ‘adults-only’ – which was basically putting the game right up there with porn.
As of yesterday, Germany’s Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (Bundesprufstelle) has removed Doom – and Doom II – from its list of ‘controlled’ games, following an appeal by id’s owners Bethesda. Their reasoning? Because the Bundesprufstelle thinks Doom is ‘now only of artistic and scientific interest and will not appeal to youngsters’, according to the BBC.
WHAT.
Alright, so it’s not Call of cocking Duty, but I’m pretty sure most any youngster could have a good time with good old Doom. I’m pretty sure some of them did, when it re-released on Xbox Live a couple of years back. Lunacy! This is Doom. Doom is a great time.
Still, the important thing is that teenagers are now allowed to buy a brightly-coloured, 2D monster-shooting game from 1993. I know Doom’s success went some way towards damning the mainstream games industry to an often tedious obsession with shooting pretending men, but it sure didn’t deserve a 17-year-long stigma.
All that said – you still can’t buy it if you’re under 16. And any version of the game containing the Wolfenstein 3D secret missions remains ‘controlled’ due to the Nazi stuff in ‘em. Them’s the breaks.
Germans! Are you now able to access the Steam re-release of the game, or do those wheels turn too slowly?