Death. Boredom.
That’s what Google I/O 2026 felt like. Speakers droned on about AI tokens. Agents. The whole sleep-inducing lexicon. I was fading into a haze. Until Varun Mohan woke me up. Or maybe he just shocked me. He put Doom on stage.
He didn’t mention it out of nostalgia. No. Mohan showed Google’s Antigravity platform, an AI-driven dev tool. He asked it to build an OS. Then he made it play Doom as a quality assurance test.
It failed. Obviously.
No video drivers. No keyboard input. Mohan told Antigravity to fix it. It added the drivers. Then Freedoom launched. Open source. Free. Running on a machine that couldn’t do anything else yesterday.
Doom is foundational. Demons. Action. Pure, unadulterated fun.
The presentation around it? Lifeless. A parade of features nobody asked for. Lori Grunin at CNET said it best in her I/O roundup: “a lot … that looked problematic at most and dystopian at best.”
These two things—Doom and Google’s AI ambitions—belong in different universes. Hearing them in the same sentence feels like a typo. Or a cry for help. AI doesn’t have the creativity to build something lasting.
Let’s talk about 1993.
Id Software dropped Doom. It was complex. Vast. The levels weren’t just hallways. They were landscapes. Locked doors. Hidden chambers. Elevations changed mid-level. This was before GoldenEye 64. Before the genre settled. Doom brought tight spaces. Narrow hiding spots. Lighting that actually scared you because enemies were lurking.
People still study it. Communities still mod it. The design logic holds up.
And the art. Unique. Sci-fi met heavy metal. A collision of Dungeons & Dragons, Ridley Scott’s Alien, and the band Slayer. It shaped everything that came after.
Imagine Halo. Without Event Horizon. Without Doom.
Impossible.
Current AI tools don’t have that vision. They chop up past works into mince. They reassemble it into something that looks new but feels hollow. No forward thinking. Just derivatives.
I watched presenters hype Gemini’s ability to write emails. Brainstorm family activities. [checks notes]. Boring. uninspired. Nothing there pushed a boundary.
Doom borrowed from older media sure. But it transformed them. Created something new. These tools just echo what’s already done. Wrapped in a weird creepy sheen.
They will never have the ingenuity for Doom’s staying power. Just noise.
