A quick look back at the creation of Doom on its 30th anniversary [Update]

As some of you might know, today is the 30th anniversary of the release of the first shareware episode of id Software's first-person shooter Doom. One of the game's original creators, John Romero, has released an all-new nine-level episode for that game, Sigil 2, for free this morning to help celebrate the occasion.

It's sometimes hard to believe that one of the greatest and most influential video games of all time was created by just a few people in Texas. Today, we see video games being released that have massive budgets and hundreds of people behind it. The lesson here is that a few folks can create something that can entertain a worldwide audience with almost zero publicity.

Since this is a quick look back article, we won't go into a ton of massive detail on how that team at id made the first Doom game. There have literally been books and documentaries that are devoted to that story. Instead, we will pick just a few interesting bits of trivia about how the game was made.

id Software was well established before Doom came out with the launch of titles like Commander Keen and, of course, the release of its debut FPS game Wolfenstein 3D and its sequel, Spear of Destiny. While Apogee had published id's earlier games, the team wanted to self-publish Doom, which turned out to be a great decision.

The id team seemed to be in agreement that they wanted to make a game that was darker than Wolfenstein 3D. According to David Kushner's book Masters of Doom, it was id's main engine programmer John Carmack who came up with the very basic idea of the player fighting off demons by using technology.

Carmack is also credited with coming up with the name of the game. In Kushner's book, it says Carmack got his inspiration from watching the 1986 movie The Color of Money, about pool hustlers. When asked by someone in the film what he has in his pool cue case, Tom Cruise's character Vincent Lauria states, "In here? Doom."

Carmack wanted to make a lot of improvements in the game engine for Doom compared to the one he made for Wolfenstein 3D. He wanted the game's environments to have a suggestion of height with slopping levels and textures for skies. The lighting in the levels were also no longer flat but had darkness and flickering effects.

Carmack, Romero, Adrian Carmack (no relation to John) Kevin Cloud, and Tom Hall started officially making doom in November 1992. However, mid-way through development Hall was fired from id. Hall originally wanted Doom to have a structured storyline with characters, and even wrote a "Doom Bible". However, most of the ideas were rejected by the team.

Romero also started making levels for the game that the rest of the team felt were better suited for Doom than the military-based style levels that Hall was making. Late in the game's development, id hired former Microprose designer Sandy Petersen to design new levels for the game. In a video from 2020 , Peterson stated he ended up making 20 of the first Doom's 27 levels. Dave Taylor was also hired late in the game's development as a programmer.

Aside from one preview in Computer Gaming World magazine a few months before the release, there was almost no advanced traditional publicity about the launch of Doom before it actually happened, although team members like John Carmack did offer their own "plan file" updates on the internet. In the end, the shareware episode was uploaded to the FTP server of the University of Wisconsin–Madison at midnight on December 10, 1993. There were thousands of people waiting to get that shareware and they almost immediately took down that FTP server.

The rest is truly history. We didn't even get into the development of the game's multiplayer by Carmack, which helped on its own to create its own genre of games. The creation of Doom by a handful of people was remarkable back then and it seems almost impossible to think that kind of game could be made under similar circumstances today. Happy 30th anniversary to Doom!

Update: Check out today's video chat with John Romero and John Carmack on their memories of making Doom.