Doom (1993 video game)

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Lore & Background

The initial development team was composed of five people: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Tom Hall. In November 1992, Hall delivered a design document called the 'Doom Bible', detailing a science fiction horror plot. However, John Carmack dismissed the idea of having a deep story, wanting to focus on technological innovation instead. Hall and most of the story were removed from the project, with the final game featuring an action-heavy design by John Romero and Sandy Petersen. id Software published Doom as a set of three episodes under the shareware model, marketing the full game by releasing the first episode free. A retail version with an additional episode was published in 1995 by GT Interactive as The Ultimate Doom.

Reader's Guide

Doom is a first-person shooter presented with 3D graphics. While the environment is shown in a 3D perspective, movement is restricted to a two-dimensional (2D) plane, a technique sometimes referred to as 2.5D graphics. The enemies and objects are 2D sprites rendered at fixed angles, known as billboarding. In the single-player campaign mode, the player controls an unnamed space marine through military bases on the moons of Mars and in hell. To finish a level, the player must traverse through labyrinthine areas to reach a marked exit room. Levels are grouped into named episodes, with the final level of each focusing on a boss fight. The player must manage supplies of ammunition, health, and armor while traversing the levels. The player can find weapons and ammunition throughout the levels or can collect them from dead enemies, including a pistol, a shotgun, a chainsaw, a plasma rifle, and the BFG 9000. The player also encounters pits of toxic waste, ceilings that lower and crush objects, and locked doors requiring a collectable keycard or a remote switch. Two multiplayer modes are playable over a network: cooperative, in which two to four players team up to complete the main campaign, and deathmatch, in which two to four players compete to kill the other players' characters as many times as possible. Multiplayer was initially only playable over local networks, but a four-player online multiplayer mode was made available one year after launch through the DWANGO service.

Did You Know?

• The working title for Doom was 'Green and Pissed', but John Carmack renamed it based on a line from the 1986 film The Color of Money.
• The initial development team moved to a dark office building they named 'Suite 666', drawing inspiration from noises heard from a neighboring dental practice.
• Doom was the third major independent release by id Software, after Commander Keen (1990–1991) and Wolfenstein 3D (1992).
• The game sold an estimated 3.5 million copies by 1999, and up to 20 million people are estimated to have played it within two years of launch.
• Doom's soundtrack was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2026.

The Making of a Demon-Hunting Classic

The project's early creative direction was shaped by designer Tom Hall, who penned a science-fiction narrative for the game. However, Hall and the bulk of his written story were ultimately stripped from the project. The final product instead leaned into a relentlessly action-driven design led by John Romero and Sandy Petersen, giving the game its signature pace and aggression. id Software chose to distribute Doom as a trilogy of episodes under the shareware model, offering the first episode at no cost to hook players into purchasing the full package.

A Pioneering Approach to 3D Combat

Doom presented its first-person shooter experience through what is commonly called 2.5D graphics: the world rendered in a three-dimensional perspective while player movement remained locked to a flat two-dimensional plane. Rather than full polygonal models, enemies and pickups appeared as flat two-dimensional images displayed at fixed angles, a rendering trick known as billboarding. Despite these technical constraints, the game delivered a remarkably fluid combat loop. Players managed ammunition, health, and armor across labyrinthine levels filled with toxic waste pits, crushing ceilings, and keycard-locked doors. Five difficulty settings scaled enemy counts, damage output, and attack speed. On the multiplayer front, two to four players could team up in cooperative mode or clash in deathmatch over local networks, with a four-player online option arriving a year later via the DWANGO service.

Shaping an Industry and a Culture

Critics and historians alike have called it the father of the first-person shooter genre and one of the most consequential games ever made. Its influence extended well beyond the genre itself. Video game scholars credit Doom with reshaping the public's perception of the medium as a whole and igniting the early wave of online multiplayer communities. It spawned a flood of imitators and clones, cultivated a thriving modding scene, and is widely recognized as the birthplace of speedrunning as an organized community. The game's unflinching graphic violence also drew sustained controversy from a wide range of groups. The franchise has since expanded into sequels, including Doom II (1994), Doom 64 (1997), Doom 3 (2004), Doom (2016), Doom Eternal (2020), and Doom: The Dark Ages (2025), as well as the films Doom (2005) and Doom: Annihilation (2019).

From Mars to Hell: A Story Told in Fragments

Doom's narrative is deliberately sparse, with plot conveyed almost entirely through the instruction manual and brief text screens between episodes. In a future setting, an unnamed space marine (later nicknamed Doomguy by fans) has been reassigned to a dead-end posting on Mars after assaulting a superior officer who ordered his unit to open fire on civilians. The Union Aerospace Corporation, which runs radioactive waste operations on the planet, permits the military to conduct secret teleportation experiments that go catastrophically wrong. When a base on Phobos desperately requests reinforcements and Deimos vanishes entirely, the marine joins a combat force to secure the moon. He holds his perimeter as ordered, only to watch his entire response team get annihilated. Stranded with nothing but a pistol, he pushes into the base seeking vengeance, fighting through possessed humans and demons before defeating two Barons of Hell guarding a teleporter. He is then ambushed and hurled into the Deimos research facilities, where he ultimately slays a colossal cyberdemon before descending further into hell itself.