Google I/O 2026 was deadly boring. The speakers talked about AI — of course — tokens, agents and other things that blow my mind. Until I was intimidated by Varun Mohan from Google. He took the stage and treated me to a surprise I was not ready for when he introduced Doom in his intro part.
Mohan showed Google using its Antigravity development platform to build the operating system and asked it to play Doom as a kind of QA test. It could not because there was a lack of videos and keyboard drivers, he explained. Mohan then persuaded Antigravity to add the necessary drivers, which they did, allowing him to launch Freedom, a free and open source game based on one of the most influential video games ever made.
Doom is a first-person shooter staple, full of demon-slaying action and high-stakes fun, while Google’s I/O presentation was a lackluster display of unquestioned AI features. As CNET’s Lori Grunin wrote in a compilation of the his favorites from I/Othere was “a lot … that looked very problematic and very dystopian.”
Doom’s ambitions and Google’s AI are so different conceptually that hearing them in the same sentence next to each other is painful. Those AI tools will never have the intelligence or creativity needed to create something as permanent as Doom.
When Id Software released Doom in 1993, its complex level design was a huge success. The game featured different landscapes, locked doors, hidden rooms and even different types of heights within the level. Years before GoldenEye 64 left its mark on the first-person shooter genre, Doom introduced plenty of death and destruction with tight roads and narrow hideouts, and the lighting helped make these levels, filled with tons of enemy hideouts, feel truly terrifying. The genius of its level design is still studied today and continues to inspire communities of players and creators who design levels and modify the game.
Varun Mohan of Google.
Doom’s art direction was also unique. It combined sci-fi, fantasy and heavy metal influences in a way that made it feel completely original. It’s basically a cross between Dungeons & Dragons, Ridley Scott’s Alien and the band Slayer. That creative vision helped shape many of the games that followed. I can’t imagine movies like Event Horizon or games like Halo ever being made without Doom.
The current slate of AI tools, however, lacks the intelligence needed to push any boundaries forward or create something that feels like a lasting impact. These tools rely on past chainsawing operations on mincemeat and repackage them into a simulacrum of novelty. There is no forward thinking involved, only from what has already been done.
That lack of intelligence was especially evident when I watched presenters try to promote Gemini’s abilities [checks notes] write emails and come up with ideas for family activities. There was nothing encouraging about the technology or the ways Google told us we could use it.
And sure, Doom was an original game that borrowed from previous works, but built on those influences to create something new and lasting. These AI tools don’t have — and won’t have — the intelligence to do something with Doom’s staying power. Instead, they just give us versions of things that have already been done, included in a weird, creepy sheen.
For more from Google I/O 2026, here’s what you need to know Google’s Aura project and what you should know about it Ask YouTube.
