Doom (series)

Console series

Mobile spin-offs

Common elements

The Doom video games consist of first-person shooters in which the player controls an unnamed space marine also referred to as Doomguy. The player has to battle the forces of Hell, consisting of demons and the undead. In the games, the player's character will often go back and forth through hell. Doom II follows after the events in Doom, the player once again assumes the role of the unnamed space marine. After returning from Hell, the player finds that Earth has also been invaded by the demons, who have killed billions of people.

Development and history

The development of the original Doom started in 1992, when John Carmack developed a new game engine, the Doom engine, while the rest of the id Software team finished the Wolfenstein 3D prequel, Spear of Destiny.

Doom II: Hell on Earth was released in 1994, followed by two other official releases based on its version of the Doom engine: Master Levels for Doom II in 1995, and Final Doom in 1996.

Doom 64 was released in 1997, developed by Midway Games and supervised by id Software.

The Doom series remained dormant between 1997 and 2000, when Doom 3 was announced. A reboot of the original Doom using entirely new graphics technology, Doom 3 was hyped to provide as large a leap in realism and interactivity as the original game and helped renew interest in the franchise when it was released in 2004. Doom 3 had its own expansion pack released in 2005, titled Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil.

After the Doom 4 project development was scrapped in 2013, id Software's Tim Willits said that the next game in the Doom series was still the team's focus, but it has not been confirmed to be titled Doom 4. It was later renamed to simply Doom in 2014. The game became a second reboot of the series, rather than a continuation or origin story of earlier games and was released in 2016.

Other media

A set of four novels based on Doom were written with permission of id Software by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. The books, listed in order, are titled Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky and Endgame. All were published between June 1995 and January 1996 by Pocket Books. Some in the Doom community started calling the unnamed Marine in the games "Flynn Taggart" or "Fly", after the main character of the novels, at least for a time. The first two books featured recognizable locations and situations from the first two games.

Additionally, a comic book was issued in May 1996, produced by Tom Grindberg of Marvel Comics as a giveaway for a video game convention, and original art from that project was put up for auction on eBay in April 2004. It was criticized for ridiculous dialogue and a poor story, as well as erroneous representations of some weapons from the game.

On January 31, 2005, a board game resembling the classic Space Hulk was released, entitled Doom: The Boardgame.

An eponymous film adaptation was released in 2005.

In early 2008, a new series of Doom novels by Matthew J. Costello were published, an author who had worked on the story and scripts for Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil. The series of books aim to novelize the story of Doom 3, with the first installment, Worlds on Fire, published on February 26, 2008. The second book in the series, Maelstrom, was released in March 2009.

In 2008, Id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead has stated in an interview that another Doom movie, possibly based on Doom 4, might be made.

Strategy guides released in printed editions include:

For the 20th anniversary of the series, the Game-Art-HQ community created an art tribute with 20 illustrations of the characters from the game.

Reception

In 1996, Next Generation ranked the series as the 19th top game of all time, for how "despite the hundreds of copycat titles, no one has ever been able to equal id's original, pulsing classic."

The series' unnamed protagonist, a marine, has had a mostly positive reception. In 2009, GameDaily included "the Marine" on its list of "ten game heroes who fail at the simple stuff" for his inability to look up and down in the original series. UGO Networks ranked him fourth on its 2012's list of best silent protagonists in video games, noting his courage to continue in silence even when he faces the Hell's army. In 2013, Complex ranked Doomguy at number 16 on its list of the greatest soldiers in video games for being "the original video game space marine" and "one of the classic silent protagonists". Both CraveOnline and VGRC ranked him the fifth most "badass" male character in the video game's history.