Everything you need to know about Doom Guy’s Origins
No doubt, some serious fans have spent their years contemplating the identity of the marine on the cover of DOOM’s first box art. Or you have not; no big deal. As of today, however, we know who officially inspired the character.
The individual represented by Doom Guy is none other than game co-creator John Romero. That shining mask of masculinity now has a face, and you can imagine it as you’re slaying demons to hell and back.
So happens, when the team was trying to get their model to strike the right pose, it was a bust (no pun intended). Thus, understanding their need for a true box art hero, Romero took off his shirt and struck the pose himself. You can read the story as told on his blog:
“This scene took place in the art room where Adrian and Kevin spent their days creating the STARTAN tech base texture set, clay modeling characters, digitizing them with the NeXTCube workstation, scanning hospital slides for bloody walls, and listening to the screams from the dentist’s office next door.
“The body model took his shirt off and started posing with our plasma gun toy. Don asked us for suggestions so I started telling him that the Marine was going to be attacked by an infinite amount of demons. It would be cool if he was on a hill and firing down into them. The model was holding the gun in various positions and none of them were interesting to me.
“He did this for about 10 minutes and we just didn’t see anything that we thought would look cool on the cover. I kept telling the model what to do but he couldn’t see the scene in his mind.
“Frustrated, I threw my shirt off and told him to give me the gun and get on the floor – grab my arm as one of the demons! Defeated, he deferred. I aimed the gun in a slightly different direction and told Don, “This is what I’m talking about!” Don took several pictures. I moved the gun some, the demon grabbed my leg, other arm, etc. At the end of it we all decided the arm-grabbing pose was going to be the best.
And that’s the story of how the cover composition was created.
I AM THE DOOMGUY.
(at least on the cover)”
Seeing as John Romero’s head also appears at the end of DOOM 2, it’s kind of mind-blowing. Does that mean Doom Guy is looking at himself? Is there some weird meta-narrative going on here? Is the last level the main character rejecting the idea of his head on a pole? No idea.
In other news, DOOM (2016) just received update 6.66 that makes all the game’s DLC free. The game is now back with more content and better multiplayer/
What are your thoughts on the origins of Doom Guy? Let us know in the comments below.