10 Goriest Video Game Weapons - Ranked

10. Doom’s Shotgun

Arguably the first time video game violence felt real was in the original 1993 Doom. While an ageing curiosity now, Doom was a revelation in its day, not least because of the shotgun.

Whatever situation the game might throw at you, as long as you had a handful of shotgun shells, you had a chance. The punch of Doom’s shotgun and especially the visceral, satisfying racking of the slide to chamber a new shell was what kept the children of the early ‘90s slaughtering the denizens of Hell.

Video games today owe an enormous debt to Doom. Perhaps first-person murder was an inevitability in gaming, but it was still Doom that blazed that trail and brought simulated massacre into our living rooms. Many a young gamer cut his teeth watching their screen fill with wodges of pixellated blood, and most of the time it was thanks to the shotgun.

Every time you chuckle inwardly as a shell erupts inside a zombie’s skull, whenever the impact of a spread of pellets rips a ribcage open, it’s Doom you have to thank, and the new horizons its shotgun blasted into our world.