We're reaching fever pitch on Doom III

SO IT LOOKS like we’re down to waiting just a couple of days for the gaming event of the Millennium so far: Doom III.
Anticipation is a funny thing. When something is a long way away, and you know you have a long time to wait until you can get hold of it, the wait doesn’t seem so bad. You can busy yourself with other things, concentrate on itty-bitty bits of rubbish in between. As the date looms closer, however, it’s harder and harder to concentrate on other things. Everything moves from your central thinking, out to your peripheral thinking, until your entire mind is consumed by whatever it is you are waiting for.

In a sense, it’s a bizarre feature of our psyche that seems to be programmed right into our innermost brain. It doesn’t have to be computer games: Christmas, a holiday, a night of nookie with a loved one, the feeling is the same. And it’s odd, because it’s such a destructive instinct. It’s entirely detrimental to our survival: can you imagine primeval man salivating over the prospect of his new stone tool, anticipation at fever pitch, then getting knocked off by a sabre tooth tiger? It’s not good.

This leads me to question just how healthy it is for the gaming industry to be centred so heavily on just a few key releases, raising anticipation to such high levels at the expense of other titles being released. Undoubtedly, it’s good for id Software: they get treated like royalty by both gamers and the hardware companies that support them, and they’ll make a fortune from sales of the game and licensing of the technology.