You’d think the first thing I would do would be to get a modern game so I could take advantage of the raw processing power of this beefcake. Now, for the first time in my life, I had something that felt current. And prior to the laptop I had an early-2000s PC that threatened to melt itself into hot slag if you did more than open up a plain text document or play Solitaire.

For the last ten years I’d been using a laptop that could just about play Civilization 5 on the lowest settings before crashing to desktop around the half-hour mark. I was attracted to the linear structure of these games, and the way that linearity allowed the developers to really craft a sense of atmosphere and narrative pacing. Perhaps I was feeling burnt out on the sprawling open worlds I loved so much, which more and more seemed to resemble bloated invoices of fetch quests, bandit camps, and other such inane busywork. I then tried Doom 2016 to ensure that the experience wasn’t a fluke, after which I knew for certain that I was interested. I only ever played action-adventure games and RPGs growing up, but I got a taste for shooters with Wolfenstein: The New Order. Upon finishing Doom Eternal, I found myself with a real itch to explore the single player FPS genre further.