23 October 2003
Doom 2 wasn't really a fair game. In single player, even on the lower difficulty modes, it wasn't really feasible to try to finish a level straight through without getting killed. Unlike the monsters, ammo and health were usually in short supply.
Instead of playtesting the game, and try to achieve some sort of fair but challenging difficulty, id chose to take the easier route, which is to make the game as difficult as possible, but let the player save and reload whenever they feel like it.
For those who have played old roms on console emulators, you know how much easier these games are when you have the save state/restore state feature. Games that were extremely challenging before can be easily beaten when exploiting that feature. Face it, being able to save and reload whenever you want is essentially cheating.
— kuro5hin: The Goldeneye Method of Gaming