ENGLISH poet Wilfred Owen wrote Anthem For Doomed Youth in the Somme in 1917. And nearly 80 years later, a generation of kids know Doom only as a computer game. Stranger still, the portentously named game is being used to train US Marines to fight the modern equivalent of the war that killed Owen.
Marine Doom was developed by the Marine Corps Modelling and Simulation Management Office in Quantico, Virginia. Project leader 1st Lieutenant Scott Barnett says MCMSMO is dedicated to high end computer war simulations. He was given the less arduous job of finding something cheaper for the troops to use a computer game.
"After testing a large number of games," he explains, sounding suitably exhausted, "we finally found in Doom a game that had potential." Many armchair soldiers will already know about the 18 certificate game Doom, installed on 20 million PCs. Playing Doom, you star in your own private war - you take on armed monsters, and literally shoot them to bits.
At the height of its popularity, Doom regularly overloaded office networks as employees played "deathmatch" games - a kind of computerised paintball - against each other.
To create Marine Doom, Lieut Barnett and his programmers downloaded a Doom "editor" from the Internet to take away the monsters, dungeons and computerised weapons, and replace them with enemy soldiers, miniature hand grenades and tiny attack rifles. In its new form, a group of four Marines takes part in a simulated attack, armed with nothing more lethal than a joystick. They are, however, deadly serious.
"We see the game being used as part of the Marine's training prior to going out into the field," explains Lieut Barnett. "They learn the basics, like what to do when they get ambushed from the right or left. It's also very good at teaching how to avoid friendly fire, which we can't do in real life) When we have Marines sitting in a ship for six months off the coast of Bosnia or Africa we want them to have something to do with that downtime."
Doom was created by id Software, whose marketing director Mike Wilson isn't surprised that the games company has become an IT supplier to the US Marine Corps. "I spent some time in the military," he says, "and the simulation games they were playing five years ago couldn't hold a candle to Doom technology. Or Pong [often regarded as history's first video game] technology, for that matter."
Meanwhile, id Software recently produced Doom's successor, the more advanced shootem up Quake, which allows players to move in three dimensions, to jump and even to crouch down and take cover. The raw material for the next generation simulator is there if the Marines want it, Wilson says, but there is no way that id will abandon its lucrative games business to become a military specialist.
According to Wilson, the id geeks would be happy to engage the US Marines in a deathmatch game of Doom if they want some extra product training. If Wilson is afraid, he is not letting on. His tactical assessment: "They would have to find a new definition for `acceptable losses'." Although many of the younger marine recruits "grew up with games, right through school", you will not be surprised to learn that Lieut Barnett's wargame is not universally popular with his fellow troops.
"Among some of the older Marines there is still the mentality that if the corps is not out in the mud, then it's not training," Lieut Barnett adds sadly. "We want to preach that training should be fun." The new look fun filled Marines have attracted the attention of the other services, who have contacted MCMSMO wanting to develop their own versions. Negotiations are underway for Army Doom, SWAT Doom, FBI Doom and Secret Service Doom.
But the US Marines are still one step ahead. "We're on to bigger and better things now," Lieut Barnett confides. "We're already making Marine Quake."