Accidentally-Correct Writing: Or rather, coding. Due to how the pathfinding works for enemies in games based on the first entry's engine, Most enemies larger than a human have difficulty navigating traditional-looking staircases unless the steps are fairly wide. As most of these larger enemies happen to have either digitigrade legs or very long ones, it can come across as the demons realizing their center of balance doesn't lend itself to human staircases and just refuse to go any further.
Approval of God: John Romero, himself, has given his approval of the Wolfendoom: Blade of Agony wad.
Out of all the nicknames and made-up names, Doomguy seems to be the one which the creators have at least accepted as a Half-Canon Name (if largely for simplicity), as it got numerous nods and actually appeared as the Marine's name in his cameo on the PC version of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3.
This became confirmed for the classic rendition of the character in Doom (2016), where the collectibles are of a Mighty Muggs-style Doomguy all with variations of [noun]guy, from Classicguy to Keenguy. The character in the 2016 game himself is typically referred to as the Doom Slayer to differentiate him from the classic Doomguy... at least until Doom Eternal elevates it to full ascended status and outright confirms that they are, indeed, the same character, which includes billing him as "Doomguy" in a flashback sequence where he actually speaks.
Those pink horned demons that served as the basic melee mook were officially named just "Demons", but "Pinky" has been a popular fandom name for them, which also helps with differentiating them from, you know, almost every enemy that are also demons. Starting with Doom (2016), they were officially renamed to Pinkys.
The novels invented the "Sig-Cow" rifle and AB-10 machine pistol based off of the rifle/automatic-looking weapon being wielded in the cover art for the original Doom videogame; no such weapon actually appeared in the game. This inspired the creator of Brutal Doom to add an assault rifle to the game to replace the notoriously useless pistol. Every official game from 3 to 2016 to Eternal has also included a machine gun or assault rifle type weapon in its lineup, as a middle ground between the pistol and chaingun. Until Eternal removed pistol entirely due to it being too redundant.
At the start of October 23, 2019, the enhanced Unity ports of Doom and Doom II received support for curated third-party mods through its Add-ons menu, providing players a taste of what the modding community has to offer on their favorite consoles as well as on mobile devices and PC, some of which were created by the renowned members of the Doom community.
Final Doom, a pair of Doom II megawads created by TeamTNT (TNT: Evilution) and the Casali brothers (The Plutonia Experiment). The version of Final Doom featured in the Unity ports is based on the rare id Anthology re-release of the game similarly to the GOG.com release.
No Rest for the Living, an official expansion pack for Doom II originally developed by Nerve Software's Arya Iwakura and Russell Meakim for its Xbox LIVE Arcade release, which would later go on to featured in Doom³: BFG Edition and the PlayStation 3-exclusive Doom: Classic Complete collection. It was also one of the winners of Doomworld's 17th Annual Cacowards.
Sigil, a new fifth episode for The Ultimate Doom created by John Romero himself in celebration of Doom's 25th Anniversary.
Double Impact, an episode replacement mod for Doom created by Matt "RottKing" Cibulas and Ralph "Ralphis" Vickers. It is a winner of Doomworld's 18th Annual Cacowards in 2011 and it would go on to be featured as the official fourth episode of Freedoom: Phase 1 in 2013.
Deathless, a Doom megawad created by James "Jimmy" Paddock that was originally developed under the name Griefless as an Episode 4 replacement until it expanded into a full game replacement as part of NaNoWADMo (a play on National Novel Writing Month where WAD authors create a WAD "from scratch" in 30 days). It received an award on the 2017 Cacowards.
No End in Sight, a megawad for The Ultimate Doom created by three contributors of the Doom the Way id Did megawad: Emil "NaturalTvventy" Brundage, Xaser Acheron, and Christopher Lutz. It is also another winner in the 2017 Cacowards.
Back to Saturn X, a series of Doom II megawads created by the BTSX Team that features exclusive textures set, original music, and a new colormap and palette. Its title, episode names, and map names are named after albums and songs from Guided by Voices along with titles and song lyrics being incorporated into the text screens. The first episode received a Cacoward in 2013 while its second episode received one in 2014. The official curated version of the megawads had their references to Guided by Voices altered and its title officially shortened to BTSX with each episode using joke acronyms on their respective title screens (respectively "Better Texturing with Startan X" and "Big Towers, Says Xaser").
REKKR, a Norse and Celtic-themed total conversion for The Ultimate Doom created by Matthew "Revae" Little. It received a Cacoward in 2018. There are some bowdlerization in the curated version as the valkyrie statues are clad in armor when they were originally nude, however, the author does not mind the change and preferred the look of the armored statues. The mod would go on to have a standalone Updated Re-release in the form of REKKR: Sunken Lands through Steam on October 11, 2021 and the ZOOM Platform on December 22, 2021, bundled with a modified version of GZDoom and features a canonical fourth episode in place of the bonus levels from the original mod. A fan of the game created a mod that restores the bonus levels back into its re-release, and Revae has pinned the download for the mod on the game's Steam forums.
Doom Zero, a Doom II megawad created by Christopher "DASI-I" Golden of Iruka Software. It was originally released during Doom II's 25th Anniversary and it was a runner-up in the 2019 Cacowards. It later received updates in 2021 after its release on the Unity ports.
Syringe, a short mini episode by Walker "Pavera" Wright, Tarnsman, Marcaek, and Xaser. It was originally released in 2019 but had an update that coincided with its addition to the Unity port's official add-ons, which was the version that was brought over into the curated version. It became a Cacoward recipient in 2020.
Earthless: Prelude, a 12-level mod for Doom II crated by James Paddock with new skies and sprites by Fuzzball. It is the Spiritual Successor to his previous mod, Deathless.
Arrival, an 11-episode map for Doom II created by Walker Wright and Brayden "AD_79" Hart. It won a Cacoward in 2021.
Anomaly Report, a vanilla-compatible megawad for Doom II created by Michael "valkiriforce" Jan Krizik. Its levels are themed around various visual styles and interior designs. It includes new graphics, music, textures (remixed from ones in Doom II and Final Doom), and a DeHackEd patch by contributed by a few members of the Doomworld community.
Revolution!, a Doom II megawad created by Thomas "t.v." van der Velden, which pushed the Doom engine to its limits with realistic-looking environments. In 2016, musicians in Doomworld forums led by James Paddock collaborated on a MIDI Pack for the mod with a new level added by Thomas van der Velden. The curated version features the MIDI Pack built-in with along with a number of changes to the maps and soundtrack. Originally this add-on was supposed to release in 2021 before Arrival and Anomaly Report, as its internal add-on folder and file name is designated as "14", but it ended up releasing later into 2022.
Harmony, an 11-level total conversion/freeware game based off Doom II by Thomas van der Velden. Despite being originally developed for the the ZDoom source port, it primarily uses DeHackEd for many of its original content. In 2011, James Paddock composed a new MIDI pack for the game which was one of his first MIDI pack projects and he would go on to organize other MIDI pack projects for other noteworthy level packs that lacked them initially, such as the aforementioned Revolution! and the Plutonia MIDI Pack for Final Doom.
Base Ganymede, a vanilla-compatible megawad for Doom by Adam "Khorus" Woodmansey. The mod initially went through different stages during its development as episodic standalone releases between 2009 and 2010 until it was completed 2012 as Base Ganymede: Complete, containing the third and final episodes along with the previous episodes in one megawad. It has own a Cacoward in 2012. Khorus has created various Doom levels since 2005 has also went on to contribute a level for Back to Saturn X Episode 2.
Scientist, a total conversion for Doom II by Roland "Scientist" van der Velden. The mod was originally released in 2005 based off the similarly named mod from 2002 that features 11 maps with 9 new maps made for the former with 10 deathmatch levels based off the single player levels. It also features a custom DeHackEd replacement of the Wolfenstien 3D SS Soldier and Cyberdemon with the eponymous scientist who serves as the antagonist of the mod. The 2023 Unity version of the mod was updated with new graphics, sounds, music, enemies, and redesigned levels.
Banned in China: The Nazi references in the two Wolfenstein 3D-themed secret levels are removed from several different ports of Doom II so they can be sold in Germany.
When the game was released in Japan on DOS/V (a DOS system with native Japanese language support), it bore the title "3D Alien Busters DOOM". This version is the only one to be distributed by SoftBank with Imagineer, the game's original Japanese publisher.
The Chinese title, still used to this day, is Huǐmiè Zhànshì ("Extermination Warrior", or "The Annihilating Soldier").
Fandom Life Cycle: It became a mainstream phenomenon a few years in, to the point it took a while for first-person shooters to stop being called "Doom Clones", and the community was still active a decade after release. The franchise also got new fans with Doom³ and Doom (2016).
Keep Circulating the Tapes: Actual copies of the infamous comic are extremely hard to come by; luckily, the comic in its entirety was mirrored on the internet, and id Software has had no issue with this.
Long Runners: The series has been ongoing since 1993, and has six full games and a dozen-odd episodic expansions as of 2021. Plus various spin-off media like novels, comics, films, mobile phone games, and even a tabletop game.
Missing Episode: The first Cacowards in 2004 were presented as the "11th Annual" Cacowards, with the opening text ending with "don't try to figure out what happened to the previous ten",note The "Top 100 WADS of All Time" could be considered the first ten retroactive Cacowards since those hundred (plus two) mods are split into sets of ten, one set for each year from 1994 to the list's creation in 2003 and every further edition of the Cacowards continued the joke until 2016's "23rd Annual Cacowards"; after that they're just labeled by what year they were written for.
Series Hiatus: After releasing four games and four expansions from 1993 to 2005, the series went on a more than eleven year hiatus (bar a few mobile phone games, a couple bonus episodes, and guest appearances by Doomguy in other games) before resuming a regular release schedule starting with DOOM (2016).
Doom
Absurdly Short Production Time: The much-maligned 3DO Interactive Multiplayer port was infamously put together in just ten weeks. According to Rebecca Heineman, the sole staff member for the port, the CEO of Art Data severely underestimated the amount of time and effort that game development required, even for porting.
Creator Backlash: The developers of Doom agree with fans that they shouldn't have had the Spider Mastermind come after the Cyberdemon, and probably should have switched their positions due to the stronger impression the second made.
Defictionalization: As noted on the Doom page, Covers Always Lie in that the original game's cover depicts the Doomguy wielding an automatic rifle (which never appears) and with a buddy running to his aid. In the books, Fly wields a 10mm single-shot rifle called the "Sig-Cow" and is backed up throughout the invasion by a fellow Marine, although they have been genderswapped into the female Arlene.
Divorced Installment: The game was initially planned to be a licensed title based on Aliens, but id Software pulled out of negotiations with 20th Century Fox over concerns about the team's creative freedom. They opted to turn the idea into Doom, mixing influences from Evil Dead 2 and a Dungeons & Dragons campaign they had recently finished. Nevertheless, one of the first mods for the game was an Aliens total conversion.
Dummied Out: A couple of things that were supposed to happen in the original games were effectively dummied out by coding errors:
The "Ouch Face" was an expression for the status bar head in the middle of the HUD that was supposed to show if the player received more than 20 damage at a time. In practice, the code was written in such a way that it would only appear if the player took damage and gained at least 20 health during the same tic, something that was extremely unlikely to occur without the player actually trying to make it happen. The "Ouch face" is fixed in many source ports (such as Boom and ZDoom) and was officially fixed in the 2019 Unity ports after an update.
The message "picked up a medikit that you REALLY need!" was supposed to appear if the player had less than 25% health when they picked the kit up. Unfortunately, the code checks the player's health after applying the health change for picking up the medkit, meaning it is impossible for the player to have less than 26% health as far as that code is concerned; as a result, the message is never displayed at all (this is also fixed in various source ports and the official 2019 Unity ports).
There was also the BFG. The classic BFG is probably the most complicated and illogical weapon ever put in an FPS, largely due to it holding over all of the mechanics from a scrapped alpha version of itself. This "billion fireballs gun" fired a ragged burst of 40 projectiles and was scrapped because it "looked like Christmas" and slowed the game to a crawl. The final version of the BFG in the games still does shoot 40 projectiles in one sense; they're just bullet-like tracers that come out after the projectile lands than actual visual projectiles themselves.
The BFG is dummied out in its entirety from the Super Nintendo and Sega 32X ports of the original game, because any maps (or areas in maps) where pickups for it actually appeared were cut.
There exists a small grey stalagmite sprite in Doom files that is not used anywhere and cannot be placed in any level editor. The Skulltag (now Zandronum) brought this sprite as a full decoration.
The Lost Soul was supposed to have a corpse instead of exploding upon death. In the level editors, one can find the dead Lost Soul class that has no sprite and does not do anything. Therefore, many modders tend to replace it with something different.
Initially, an Easter Egg game of Asteroids was to be accessible from the computer map, but this was almost entirely cut. Some references to deleted files remained in code.
Since Doom and Doom 2 practically use the same executable, any Doom II content is technically "dummied out" in the original Doom from v1.666 onward (with the original one forcefully disabling Doom II specific content in custom maps). The lack of such protection caused problems in betas v1.5 and v1.6, where the super shotgun could be obtained by an all weapons cheat but either crashed the game or prevented you from selecting the regular shotgun.
In the PlayStation port of Doom, a press release for the game shown that alongside the new Nightmare Spectre, Nightmare Imps were planned to be included in the game, with a screenshot of one in-game. Nightmare Imps were removed from the released game for unknown reasons, though the capabilities for them still exist in the game's coding (as Nightmare Spectres were created by a special "nightmare" flag that, when applied to a monster, made them translucent with subtractive blending while doubling their HP, which could technically be applied to any monster in the game). Nightmare Imps would later be implemented in Doom 64, though were implemented differently by having their speed and attacks be twice as fast instead of having their HP doubled.
According to Aubrey Hodges, the person who created the sounds and music used for PSX Doom, the Archvile was planned to be in PSX Doom, and he even created new sounds for the Archvile, before the Archvile was removed from the game because it proved too memory-intensive for the PlayStation's RAM and the developers were unwilling to compromise the Archvile to include it. All instances of the Archvile in the included Doom 2 maps were replaced with a hanging meat hook texture.
The Spider Mastermind has an extra set of animations where it waves its stubby little arms around, that go unused in the released game. It was originally supposed to have a secondary magic attack, but the idea was scrapped because nobody could come up with an idea as to what that attack was actually supposed to do.
"Spawning Vats" was designed by Tom Hall as the first episode's hub, back when the game was intended to be a nonlinear quasi-RPG. After Hall left and id Software redesigned the game as a linear string of levels, they removed all the exits to other areas (along with the NPCs and other RPG elements) and just dumped it into the WAD, resulting in a sprawling maze filled with dead ends and empty rooms that resemble previous maps.
Executive Meddling: The infamousSega Saturn port is a result of this. It originally used the Saturn's 3D hardware, resulting in a better looking and more advanced port than the original PC version. However, Carmack wasn't a fan of the system's 3D rendering style, particularly the fact that it resulted in some texture warping, so he demanded the game was redone with software-based rendering. The result was a rushed port that ran on a low resolution and had a poor framerate because the only option they had the time for was hastily ripping out the Sega 32X's software renderer and running it on hardware it wasn't designed for. Carmack has admited it was the wrong call.
Later repeated with the Game Boy Advance version. Doom I was developed using a custom engine that was largely playable, only needing some additional optimization to hit 30 FPS. However, John Carmack later demanded that they scrap it in favor of reusing the Atari Jaguar port, resulting in a poorer performing game, although not to the degree of the Saturn version. The Doom II port, on the other hand, was ported by a different developer which was allowed to use their custom engine, resulting in a better performing game as a result.
Follow the Leader: While its existence owed primarily due to the term "first person shooter" having not yet been coined, there's a good reason they were called "Doom clones" for a good while — nearly every other game in the genre made between this game's release and that of GoldenEye (1997) take some very obvious design cues from this game, such as the mazelike level design, a progressively stronger weapon hierarchy, secret areas, simple enemy AI, and basic "get to the end" objectives. This is evident even in the best-received FPS games following Doom, and as a result this term is still occasionally used to refer to games clearly inspired by it as there were many of them.
Genre-Killer: The popularity of Doom is cited as one of the reasons the Adventure Game genre declined so quickly in the second half of the '90s.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: An accidental example, with Bethesda mistakenly pulling Doom and its sequel from the Xbox 360 store when the 2019 ports were released. This was quickly reversed in the next day or so after complaints.
Easily, the biggest Killer App in all of PC gaming history, with over 4 million copies sold. Before Doom, PC games were a niche hobby, a small subset that was to consolenote or, to put it in more periodic terms, "Atari/Nintendo/Sega" players what video games were to the general populace. Doom made PC gaming mainstream, and let the world know that those computers they were using for their essays and spread sheets could do something that not just matched, but even surpassed what those boxes next to their TVs could do. It singlehandedly made the PC the new Nintendo, and only after its success can you watch a movie or TV show and see anybody playing video games on their computers as opposed to sitting by the television playing on a console. Corporations and universities had to ban the game because people playing deathmatch were creating too much network traffic. For a few years in the mid-1990s, Doom was the must-own game. Even to this very day, it's the first (and often only) title that comes to non-gamers' minds when they think of PC games, with Call of Duty only recently supplanting this honor.
Doom was indirectly the Trope Maker for Windows as a serious gaming platform. Prior to Windows 95, you were limited to Solitaire and Minesweeper and the occasional more advanced title like Myst. And then Bill Gates read the result of a study that found that Doom was installed on more computers in the world than Windows was. Intent on remedying this, Bill made damn sure that Windows 95 would have its own natively compatible version of Doom, itself of which also served as a Tech-Demo Game for the newly released Windows Games SDK, soon to be renamed DirectX. Furthermore, another major design goal that the programmers at Microsoft had was ensuring the original DOS Doom could also be launched from Windows 95 with no hoops to jump through; it was reportedly a big day at the office when they succeeded.
Sandy Petersen, the developer responsible for creating about half of the maps in Doom and Doom 2, is on record as thinking his best map design-wise was E2M9: Fortress of Mystery. However in the countless forum threads out there asking people what their least favorite Doom map is or what they think the worst map is, a very common answer will be E2M9 with few defenders for it; people criticize it for being a poorly executed gimmick map with no substance to it and likening it to something that you would see as a "baby's first wad", with it consisting of just two plain rooms, one with four Barons and the other with ten Cacos, that can be completely ignored while the player rushes to the exit, which is only "blocked" by the player having to press a few switches as they get all the keys within the exit area. Petersen however, defends it as "a little gem of creature and unit balancing" and says it has to be Pistol started to experience "the correct effect [he] was shooting for", though Pistol starting the level does little to sway its detractors, since the level can still be finished within seconds without the player having to fire a single shot, and even then killing all the enemies just takes rudimentary exploiting of infighting.
In the Doom mapping community, this is a problem known as "magnum opus syndrome", that frequently happens with community mapping projects, where contributors will try to stand out by submitting the most grotesquely huge map they can muster overwrought with mapping tricks and excruciating difficulty. Players naturally though rarely see such maps in the light that the mappers do, leading to backlash against these sort of maps and a community push towards focusing on more digestible smaller maps in community mapping projects. The most notorious example of such is Citadel at the Edge of Eternity from the first Community Chest, a map so large that its UV Max speedrun record is nearly as long as the complete Doom II UV Max record.
Manual Misprint: The manual claims that berserk packs are "time based". They actually last until the player exits the level,note technically speaking, its timer is programmed (presumably by mistake) to last over four years in real time, but it might as well be permanent and the red hue that appears for about 20 seconds after picking one up is just cosmetic. The README files for v1.666 and later versions do accurately state that the duration is "one level".
Multi-Disc Work: The original Doom on DOS was released on multiple floppy disks; two for the shareware version and four for the full game. Its sequel and The Ultimate Doom were later released on five floppy disks. Later re-releases and compilations during the 1990's and early 2000's later packaged the games and more on CDs.
Newbie Boom: Doom brought a lot of people into PC gaming, much to the irritation of Adventure Game fans who made up the majority of PC gamers up to that time. These new gamers had little patience for the intellectual, intricate (or more often incomprehensible to someone from Earth) puzzles that point-and-click adventures offered. There's still a hatedom toward the game from adventure fans over this.
Official Fan-Submitted Content: As of the Unity ports' January 2020 update, they are now receiving curated versions of several notable mods and addons.
Shortly after the Columbine school shooting, it was discovered that both boys were fans of Doom, which led to claims that Eric Harris made custom WADs based off of the school for "training". While Harris did make levels (including a set of levels with graphics that made the game Bloodier and Gorier), none of them are modeled off of Columbine High, and when taken on their own reviewers have called the "Harris Levels" average to sub-par.
A popular theory regarding the Mancubus' pain sound is that it was a heavily edited clip of Elmer Fudd saying "Quiet". However, when a member of the Doomworld forums contacted composer Bobby Prince about this theory, the latter simply noted that the Mancubus sounds were animal noises taken from a stock sound effects CD (specifically, a pig). However, Bobby did take the time to experiment with Elmer Fudd's voice clip and found it amusing how it can be made to sound almost identical to the Mancubus pain noise with a little slowing down and pitch shifting, referring to it as the "Fuddcubus".
It's commonly stated that the reason that the Atari Jaguar version has no music was because the game was so taxing on the system that it rendered the inclusion of music impossible. However, Sandy Peterson later commented that id would have had to pay additional royalties to the game's composer in order to include music, and they decided it simply wasn't worth it due to the low sales expectations for the Jaguar port.
A popular theory floating around for years was that the digitized hanging corpses were based on actual photographs of Benito Mussolini's hanging corpse. While other games (such as the burnt corpses in Half-Life 2) have used real graphic imagery, in this case it was actually G.I. Joe toys from the 1960s that were digitized.
Port Overdosed: According to The Other Wiki, Doom has been officially released on over 20 platforms as of 2020. And those are just the official versions. Thanks to id releasing the game's source code, porting Doom to other machines has become a hobby community in itself. As a result, Doom has been ported to (deep breath)... printers, digital cameras, subway stall card-readers, 90s graphing calculators, a Nintendo Game & Watch, a GPS, a thermostat, an iPod Nano, oscilloscopes, ATMs, fridges and even a piano. It has even been played on a pregnancy test!note Though this one is a slight cheat - the pregnancy test's hardcoded CPU can't run Doom, but its tiny one-colour LED screen can display the game. The modern source port GZDoom even allows you to emulate other games inside it, so you can play Doom inside another Doom. If it has a processor and screen of any sort, someone, somewhere, will use it to run Doom. As John Linneman of Digital Foundry put it, Doom has become the violent equivalent of "Hello world!".
Visual effects artist Gregor Punchatz was hired by id to create four stop-motion models to use as reference for monster sprites in the game, but only one of them, the Spider Mastermind, ended up appearing in the original Doom; the other three (the Revenant, the Arch-Vile, and the Mancubus) were left unused until Doom II.
Tom Hall, co-founder of id and the original lead designer, designed a fair number of levels before his departure from the project, most of which were included but two of which were cut; one of the cut levels, "Refueling Base", ended up being added into Doom II.
Tom Hall's "Doom Bible" describes some elements that didn't make the final cut, but ended up appearing in later installments:
One of the weapons planned to be found in episode 1 was a "sawed off shotgun", with "a wider radius of damage". A Sawed-Off Shotgun with a wider radius of damage is what Doom II's Super Shotgun is.
Another weapon of the Doom Bible is the Unmaker, a weapon made from demon bones. A weapon made from demon bones is featured exclusively in Doom 64 without a given name, and was Fan Nicknamed as the Unmaker for its visual similarity to the Doom Bible's draft. The later-created modern port of 64 has since ascended this and calls the weapon the Unmaker in its achievement list; Doom Eternal does likewise with its Unmakyr, which bears a similar appearance and function to the Unmaker, only with pristine plate metal instead of demonic flesh.
Stock Sound Effect: Tons upon tons of the original game's sound effects are stock ones, or edits of stock ones. This video details the Origins of several such sound effects. Amazingly, due to Doom's popularity, a lot of these sounds are commonly thought to be from Doom, such as the iconic door sound effects.
The reason the 3DO port of the game was so lousy was because it was programmed byone person, who was forced to rush out at a breakneck pace of ten weeks by a company head who had no idea what went into porting a game between platforms (she was only given a PC copy of Ultimate Doom and some JPG assets to start working from). On top of that, the publisher decided to have 250,000 copies of the game printed; it only managed to sell 10,000 copies, meaning that the port ended up proving a Creator Killer as well.
The Sega Saturn port got hit with this as well. Originally, developers Rage Software created a custom engine that made full use of the system's formidable 2D rendering abilities, and would have run at double the frame rate of the PlayStation version while losing only a couple of graphical features. Unfortunately, John Carmack of all people vetoed the use of this engine, as one of the downsides of using the Saturn in this way was texture distortion, which was a deal-breaker as far as he was concerned. This resulted in the development team having to hastily tear out the rendering engine from the previous 32X version (the Saturn used the same CPU and a very similar graphics chipset to the 32X) and slap it in, resulting in the finished product suffering from poor performance and noticeably inferior visuals to the PlayStation version.
Doom I for the Game Boy Advance, developed by David A. Palmer Productions, was originally envisioned for the Game Boy Color before being shifted to a more advanced console. Lacking documentation from id, the developers initially created their own custom engine that was largely complete and only need further polishing to reach 30 FPS. However, John Carmack managed to locate the source code to the Atari Jaguar version and demanded the developers use that instead, scrapping their custom engine. While the game sold well, Palmer believed that the performance could have been better had they been allowed to use their custom engine. He also believed that this caused the Doom II GBA port to be given to another developer, Torus Software, which was allowed to use their custom Southpaw engine.
Tom Hall, one of the lead developers, had plans to wove in a more detailed story for the game and introduce several fleshed-out characters. John Carmack was heavily against this idea, claiming that doing so would over-complicate the game, believing that the concept of "Shooting demons on Mars" would be enough to keep the players invested. It was, but the creative differences led to Hall resigning from the company before the game was finished.
John Carmack: Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
Several weapons planned for the first game included a 'Dark Claw' (which would've drained life from enemies), 'Probjectile' (same as the regular pistol except it gives you enemy stats), 'Spray Rifle' (same as the shotgun, but wider shots), a bayonet (another melee weapon, attached to the rifle that would have been the player's default weapon) and the 'Unmaker' (a weapon that would've done more damage depending on the enemy types). The Dark Claw finally made it into Heretic (as the powered-up Gauntlets of the Necromancer) and the Unmaker into Doom 64.
The game was originally supposed to take place on a tidally locked world (the design docs are inconsistent on whether it's a moon or a full planet) named "Tei Tenga". The UAC's purpose there, rather than teleportation research, was supposed to be mining a substance called "Fire Dust", and the "Anomalies" that bridge the first two episodes in the released game were supposed to be the poles of Tei Tenga, where said Fire Dust was first excavated from. In the released game, all that remains of this are the names, as above the end of Episode 1 and start of Episode 2 being "Phobos/Deimos Anomaly" respectively, and some monitors in the first episode still having text reading "UAC BASE TEI TENGA".
Several possible player characters were planned, who had their own strengths and weaknesses (one was good with bullet-based weapons and dealt good damage, but did worse with missiles; one was a Jack of All Stats with low speed; one was fast and good with the pistol, but didn't do well with the bayonet and recovered less health from medkits; and one was fast and evasive, and good with the bayonet, but had low health), as were NPCs, particularly "Buddy Dacote", who would have disappeared during the initial nastiness at the beginning of the game, reappearing at the end of the first episode only to be brutally murdered by a demon (hence his last name, which was an acronym for "dies at conclusion of this episode"). At best, the release version of the Doomguy bears a resemblance to Dacote, sharing a similar backstory (Buddy was reassigned to Tei Tenga for showing up a superior, Doomguy was reassigned to Phobos for assaulting a superior) and a similar fate (dies at the end of Episode 1, though Doomguy fights his way back out of Hell across the second and third episodes). Tom Hall later took the multiple characters idea to Rise of the Triad.
The game was also planned to have six episodes, the same as Wolfenstein 3D ended up with, though past the first one little is known about any of them other than their names (with the planned third episode lending its name to the released first episode), and the released game has only ended up, at most, with five (three included in the original release, Ultimate Doom adding a fourth, and John Romero much later creating SIGIL for the game's 25th anniversary to act as a fifth episode).
The alpha versions included treasure items similar to Wolfenstein 3D, which were scrapped when the points system was removed.
The Sega Saturn version had the potential to be one of the best console ports of the '90s, were it not for an Executive Veto from John Carmack. See the Troubled Production entry above for more detail.
The Spider Mastermind has additional sprites for a secondary magical attack it could have used alongside its built-in chaingun. The sprites went unused because the developers couldn't decide on what to actually have that magical attack do.
The Easier Than Easy difficulty setting was originally going to be named "I Just Want To Kill." Presumably it was changed to "I'm Too Young To Die" as the developers thought that sounded more sarcastic, though late enough into development that the graphic for that difficulty's name on the menu is still labeled as "M_JKILL".
The BFG was originally going to work by shooting forty little red and green orbs at the target all at once (hence why the BFG uses 40 cells per shot in the final game). It was changed mainly because having that many projectiles on screen at once would slow the game to a crawl every time you fired it. Romero also commented that it was super-annoying to look at, comparing it to flooding your eyes with Christmas every time you pressed the trigger.
As various documents including the Doom Bible have indicated, Doom shifted from originally being conceived as a tie-in to the film Aliens, then into an original sci-fi story filled with more detailed plot, and finally the initial stages of its final form as an all original sci-fi FPS. Tom's notes in the Doom Bible also indicate that he carried certain references (such as character names) from Doom's rough draft into his own original game Rise of the Triad. However, Rise of the Triad is more of a spiritual successor to Wolfenstein.
E1M6 was originally to be designed by Tom Hall, but after he left id over creative differences the level was pulled in favor of one designed by John Romero, which became "Central Processing". Hall's original level would later be repurposed as MAP10 of Doom II, "Refueling Base", giving him the odd distinction of having indirectly contributed to Doom II despite leaving before even the first game released.
E4M7 of the Ultimate Doom was originally supposed to be a separate map for Inferno, a custom nine-map episode based on the eponymous cantica of The Divine Comedy, and had the name of "Chiron".
Working Title: Before release, the game was promoted with the full title of Doom: Evil Unleashed, by which it was even still referred to in some early reviews.
Karl Urban does not think highly of his time on this movie.
The film is also this for Dwayne Johnson. In a 2009 interview, he described the film as an example of "trying and failing" to do a good video game adaptation as well as a cautionary tale of what "not to do," and also called the movie a "stinker" on Twitter while promoting Rampage (to the chagrin of the official Doom Twitter).
Rosamund Pikewent on the record in 2021 stating that she feels some embarrassment and guilt over the film's outcome since she believes she didn't do sufficient background research into the Doom world and what it meant to fans. She also stated that she applied her lessons learned regarding the importance of understanding the fan culture surrounding an adaptation to her prep for her lead role in The Wheel of Time (2021).
Deleted Scene: A nuclear explosion sequence on the Mars facility was filmed but not used in the final cut.
Disowned Adaptation: John Romero and John Carmack do not think fondly of the film.
Executive Meddling: The reason why the demons were changed into mutants. Apparently, the producers were religious evangelist types who demanded all Satanic elements be removed from the film. Why such types would produce a movie based on Doom of all things is a question for another day.
The RRTS Squad is comprised of Brits Raz Adoti (Duke), Richard Brake (Portman), Yao Chin (Mac), Ben Daniels (Goat), Deobia Oparei (Destroyer), and Al Weaver (The Kid);
Other Brits in the cast playing Americans include Dexter Fletcher (Pinky) and Ian Hughes (Sanford Crosby).
Originally, it was announced in 1999 that the film would be made and that Arnold Schwarzenegger was cast in the lead role of Doomguy. Unfortunately, a Real Life incident involving two teenagers who had played the video game, playing about with a chainsaw, resulted in a tragic accident. Since one of Doomguy's weapons in the video game is a chainsaw, the film with Schwarzenegger in the lead role was dropped at that time. The film was finally brought to the big screen in 2005.
The film passed through several studios throughout the 1990's and early 2000's, including Warner Brothers, Universal and Columbia, before the rights fell to Universal once more in 2003 and production was put on the fast track.
Stillborn Franchise: When the box office goals weren't met, the sequel was dropped quickly.
