Skabelsen af det originale Doom i 1993 er selvfølgelig et afgørende kapitel i spillenes historie og blev for nylig genkaldt i bogen Doom Guy: Life in First Person af John Romero, da det biografiske bind blev udgivet for at fejre dets 30-års jubilæum. Forleden mødtes vi med forfatteren og Doom-medskaberen i Cascais i forbindelse med DevGAMM, og her så vi både på spillets oprindelse og på, hvordan det er blevet forandret gennem årene.
En ting ved det oprindelige Doom, som nogle kender, andre ikke, er, hvordan det i starten stod til at blive et officielt licenseret Alien-spil, men blandt andet fandt holdet bag den snart kommende klassiker ideen en anelse for generisk.
"Before Doom, we did go through a Nazi castle and blow up Nazis. No other game, other than Castle Wolfenstein, no other game did that. So in 3D for a new generation, it was a great idea. And then with Doom, it was like, well, when you go into space, it's always finding aliens. What if you found hell instead? So it's like the science versus religion bit in there. So it was interesting. We're going so far into experimentation with portals and teleporting that we find hell. Like, oh my God, it really exists! (Laughs) So that was a really unique idea. And then when we get the offer to take the experience of what Doom was and turn it into an Alien franchise type game. So when we were looking at the idea of using Alien as the franchise idea around the experience of what Doom is, the biggest problem was dealing with a movie company and the creative control that would be taken away from us. And we never did that before. And then it was like, why would we make Alien's IP more valuable and not make our own IP, [our own] intellectual property? That didn't make any sense. We're creating our own world and our franchise. Why would we just give it all to them? So forget it. And so it was only 30 minutes of discussion".
Vi bad desuden Romero om at dele sine oplevelser omkring Doom: The Dark Ages:
"We made Heretic and Hexen, which are the medieval shooters back then. And it was because I wanted to see... We love Dungeons & Dragons. And it's like, what would high speed D&D look like? Because we've never seen that before. Everything in the past was like, you know, the SSI gold box games. Everything is like step based. Everything is slow turn-based stuff. It's like high speed medieval, I want to see that. And that's why Heretic was created, you know, with Raven. And Hexen was the sequel to that, even harder game to play. But it was great. It was the beginning of being able to play something that was in the medieval time period, the Dark Ages, at a high speed. And now we have, of course, Doom: The Dark Ages. That's going to be coming out soon. So you get to see, to me, I think it's the Army of Darkness version of Doom. Like modern character coming back to the past and mowing them all down."
