Google I/O 2026 was deathly boring. Audio system talked about AI — in fact — tokens, brokers and different issues that put me to sleep. Till I used to be shocked awake by Google’s Varun Mohan. He took the stage and dealt me a psychic blow I wasn’t ready for when he included Doom in his portion of the presentation.
Mohan confirmed Google utilizing its improvement platform Antigravity to construct an working system and asked it to play Doom as a type of QA check. It could not as a result of it lacked video and keyboard drivers, he defined. Mohan then prompted Antigravity so as to add the mandatory drivers, which it did, permitting him to launch Freedoom, the free open-source recreation based mostly on one of the vital influential video video games ever made.
Doom is a foundational first-person shooter recreation, filled with demon-slaying motion and over-the-top enjoyable, whereas Google’s I/O presentation was a dull parade of unasked-for AI options. As CNET’s Lori Grunin wrote in a roundup of her favorite things from I/O, there was “quite a bit … that appeared problematic at greatest and dystopian at worst.”
Doom and Google’s AI ambitions are thus far aside conceptually that listening to them in the identical sentence aspect by aspect harm. These AI instruments may by no means have the ingenuity or creativity wanted to construct one thing as lasting as Doom.
When Id Software program launched Doom in 1993, its advanced stage design was a significant achievement. The sport featured various landscapes, locked doorways, hidden chambers and even several types of elevation inside a stage. Years earlier than GoldenEye 64 left its mark on the first-person shooter style, Doom launched mazes of dying and destruction with tight hallways and slim hiding areas, and the lighting helped make these ranges, crammed with loads of locations for enemies to cover, really feel actually scary. The ingenuity of its stage design continues to be studied today and continues to encourage communities of gamers and creators who design ranges and modify the sport.
Google’s Varun Mohan.
Doom’s artwork path was additionally distinctive. It mixed sci-fi, fantasy and heavy metallic influences in a means that made it really feel wholly unique. It is basically a cross between Dungeons & Dragons, Ridley Scott’s Alien and the band Slayer. That artistic imaginative and prescient helped form numerous video games that adopted. I can not think about movies akin to Occasion Horizon or video games like Halo ever being made with out Doom.
The present slate of AI instruments, nevertheless, lacks the creativity wanted to push any boundary ahead or create one thing that feels lastingly influential. These instruments depend on chainsawing previous works into mincemeat and reassembling them right into a simulacrum of novelty. There is not any ahead pondering concerned, solely derivatives of what has already been made.
That lack of creativity was particularly obvious whereas I watched presenters attempt to hype up Gemini’s capability to [checks notes] write emails and give you concepts for household actions. There wasn’t something notably inspiring concerning the expertise or the methods Google informed us we may use it.
And positive, Doom was an unique recreation that borrowed from earlier works, nevertheless it constructed on these influences to create one thing new and lasting. These AI instruments haven’t got — and by no means may have — the ingenuity to make one thing with Doom’s endurance. As an alternative, they simply give us again variations of issues which have already been made, lined in a weird, creepy sheen.
For extra from Google I/O 2026, here is what to find out about Google’s Project Aura and what to find out about Ask YouTube.
