Quakes

Marty Stratton knew a good sound when he heard it. He had studied commercial music composition at University of Denver and, with bachelor degree in hand, had headed out west in 1995 determined to land a job in the entertainment industry. Writing jingles had seemed a good place to start. Stratton understood musical theory and knew his way around plenty of professional recording hardware and software.

For all his education and ability to generate dulcet sounds, none quite moved Stratton like the rush of quarters racing down the metal chute of a change machine and flooding into its tray. "I loved the arcade. Getting those quarters was the greatest thing ever," he remembered.

Stratton had set aside gaming to devote himself to his studies in college. After he picked up stakes and moved out to Los Angeles, serendipity guided him back to his childhood hobby.

"You're young, you're looking for any opportunity you can get," he explained. "I was friends with a guy who knew somebody at Activision, and introduced me. I think when I started, there were 120 people or something like that. They were smaller than id is now. I started in QA there, just trying to get my foot in the door."

Marty Stratton, executive producer at id Software. (Photo credit: Bethesda.)

Stratton wedged open Activision's door and entered a land of opportunity. Although most resources were diverted toward internal production, management had recently minted a smaller division focused on publishing games in development at external studios. Stratton cut his teeth on quality assurance for a year, then transferred to the group scouting outside teams. Three of their most promising were Raven Software, Ritual Entertainment, and id Software.

All three studios produced first-person shooters and were helmed by some of the still-nascent genre's biggest names: Mark Dochtermann, Jim Dosé, Richard 'Levelord' Gray, had worked together at Apogee and 3D Realms before co-founding Ritual. None were more prominent than id Software, pioneers following the back-to-back-to-back global successes of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake.

"I was the producer assigned to their stuff, so the Quake Mission Packs was my first experience with id, coming down to Mesquite when they were still in the famous black building," Stratton said, recalling early work on the original Quake's expansion packs. "So right around '96 I started working on id games, working with them from Activision on Quake 2, the mission packs, console versions, then Quake 3."

It didn't take long for Stratton to form an attachment to the id team. They were a fun, creative bunch, and he immediately took a liking to their penchant for moving game technology forward in leaps instead of baby steps. In 2000, id Software made him an offer to leave Activision and join their ranks full-time.

"I was just loving working with them, and jumped at the opportunity to be a part of the team," he said.

Shadowy Spaces

Stratton stepped into the role of id's director of business development. His job entailed managing relationships with publishers—a responsibility for which he was well-suited—and evangelizing the studio's games at trade shows. Following 1999's Quake 3: Arena, id's next big project was Doom 3, a retelling of the first two games rather than a direct sequel.

"I'm proud to say that I think we always do gun combat well, and I think Doom 3 was another example of that," Stratton said. "The gunplay was very good; the guns felt great. But stylistically, it was just a different take on [Doom]."

Published under Activision's label, Doom 3 released in 2004 to high praise from venerable critical outlets such as PC Gamer. Long-time fans were more divided. In Doom and Doom 2: Hell on Earth, players moved at ridiculously high velocities through sprawling maps and mowed down demons using chainguns and rocket launchers and space-age lasers. While select maps featured corridors draped in shadows and eerie soundtracks designed to unnerve players, the majority had been crafted as high-octane shooting galleries.

Meanwhile, Doom 3 blanketed every cave and corridor in darkness. Zombies moaned and shambled with hands outstretched. Drawing near candles and streaks of blood arranged in glowing pentagrams triggered bouts of maniacal, echoing laughter from the game's mad scientist-type villain. Monsters leaped out of dark pockets to lunge at players, attacking in packs of three or four instead of swarms of dozens.

Players inched through shadowy corridors rather than raced forward, dependent on the narrow beam of their flashlight to scan ahead of them. Weapons had to be held separately from the flashlight, forcing players to use their torch while exploring and then swap over to their weapon of choice when a monster came hissing or shambling or lunging out of its hiding place. PDAs scattered around maps functioned like key cards, able to be scanned to access gated areas, but the devices also contained emails and voice memos that players occasionally had to sift through to find passwords, bringing the pace to a halt.

In many ways, Doom 3 was ahead of its time. Its blend of action and survival horror predated Resident Evil 4 by nearly six months, and provided a template for Dead Space years later in 2008. Still, although many players took a liking to Doom 3's creative deviations, even developers at id acknowledged the dissonance between the title's slower pace and the legacy of the name on its box.

"If we would have made Doom 2016 as a direct sequel to Doom 3, I think it would have been a little confusing to people," Stratton explained, "or even felt more like it was trying to move things in a different direction because we didn't like [Doom 3]. That just wasn't the case. There are few of us left who actually worked on Doom 3, but we were all really proud of it and still are."

Shipping Doom 3 off to stores marked the perfect occasion for id's team to reflect on what they had made, and ponder their next steps. When Stratton had joined in 2000, the studio had employed just over a dozen developers. By the time Doom 3 launched in the summer of 2004, the team had grown to around 19. While the bulk of the staff laid the foundation for a brand-new id property called Rage, in mid-2006, Stratton and other managers at id shopped around for external teams to write new chapters in the Wolfenstein, Quake, and Doom sagas.

"We had started working on Rage at that point and were very excited about that," said Stratton, "so we felt like, 'We have these great brands. Is it worth looking outside [of id Software]?' We'd done that successfully with Wolfenstein. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a fantastic game, and we'd worked on Quake 4 with Raven. We'd developed a good relationship with Raven, so it was like, let's kind of test the waters and see what else is out there."

Of id's holy trinity of brands, only Doom lacked a home. Stratton, along with artist-turned-executive-producer Kevin Cloud and then-president Todd Hollenshead, traveled to several studios to gauge their candidature for sending players back to hell. Over months of flights and road trips, Stratton and the others agreed that only their team seemed equipped to do justice to Doom.

"It came down to we thought we would do a better job growing our team and doing another Doom than another team would do with it," Stratton explained. "Or, if they were in a position to have to grow their team, we thought we'd be more successful hiring top-notch people than some other developer would be, just based on who we are and the people we had working here. If we were going to do it, we'd do it internally and grow a team around building it here."

The time had come to divide and conquer. While the bulk of id developed on Rage, management slowly filled out a second team to make Doom.

"It was two teams, and it was challenging," Stratton remembered. "It's challenging for any business to grow like that. I actually don't remember how many people were on each team, but we had definitely grown as a studio into multiple teams.

Call of Battle-Doom

In 2008, following nearly two years of in-house work, id Software announced that a fourth Doom game was in production. Details came in drips and drabs. At first, they seemed promising. Todd Hollenshead and John Carmack, the latter still being the driving force behind id's engine and technology development, promised that Doom 4 would follow in the footsteps of Doom and Doom 2.

By April 2013, fans were skeptical. Speaking to anonymous sources close to Doom 4, Kotaku published an expose revealing that development had been mired in restarts and mismanagement. Sources confided that Doom 4 had slowly strayed from its origin as a pedal-to-the-metal shooter to a Call of Duty clone: scripted set pieces, linear progression, and a cinematic feel weighted down by dialogue and character interaction that went far beyond Doom 2's "if it moves, shoot it" manifesto. Leaked footage from an alpha prototype lent credence to Kotaku's report.

More details came to light when Noclip founder Danny O'Dwyer produced a documentary confirming that the Call of Duty-style version had been primed to tell a more realistic story about the effects of Hell's invasion of earth—a similar premise to Doom 2: Hell on Earth, albeit steeped in storytelling.

"Game development is a really big bet, especially in the triple-A space," Stratton explained of the Call of Duty-style project. "You look at the market, you look at what games are selling. You've got a great brand like Doom, and I don't think it's that far of a stretch to think, That could work. And the thing is, it did work in a way."

By the time Rage released to mixed reviews in 2011, not even id Software, a legendary team celebrated for paving its own path, was immune to the realities of market trends. Stratton admitted the commercial success of Infinity Ward's and Activision's Call of Duty games had an impact on Doom 4's direction: The games were simply too lucrative for id to dismiss out of hand.

"I think that for somebody who likes a Call of Duty game, they probably would have liked it," he said of Doom 4. "For hardcore Doom-ists, Doom-is-part-of-my-being fans, which ultimately are our most important fans, I think they would have had a problem with it."

Management shakeups sent more tremors through Doom 4. In 2009, ZeniMax Media, parent company of Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda Softworks, acquired id Software and added the company's venerable properties to its portfolio. Four years later, Carmack abruptly departed id, the company he had co-founded, to assume a leadership position at Oculus VR. (Carmack cited ZeniMax's unwillingness to support the Oculus Rift headset as the primary cause for his exit. Allegations that Carmack absconded with proprietary VR technology that he had developed while still at id led to a bitter legal battle between ZeniMax, Oculus, and Facebook, which acquired Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. The battle is ongoing as of April 2017.)

All the while, id Software struggled to find its footing on Doom. The decision to scrap "Call of Doom" and go back to the drawing board was difficult but necessary. "There's a million little things that go into every decision like that," explained Stratton, "but ultimately it didn't end up feeling like what we thought the next Doom should be. I think that was the fundamental thing that happened."

It would have been easy for Bethesda, ZeniMax's proxy, to can the beleaguered project, or infest id Software with producers vested with the power to force them down a creative path. Stratton said that the publisher deserves credit for giving id the freedom to go back to the drawing board.

"A lot of other publishers, I don't know that they really would have been as supportive as they were in making those changes, because they're hard. That's money spent. You're moving away from a lot of work that was done, it impacts the morale of the team," he said. "I don't think we make bad stuff. It would have come together, but ultimately I think we made the right decision."

In their search for direction, id Software viewed Doom and Doom 2 as its northern star. "We did go through a process of asking, 'What is everything that we think are the best moments and the best elements of Doom as a whole?'" Stratton recalled. "Whether it's Doom 1, Doom 2, Doom 3, or the Doom [4] that we were working on previously, and then try to distill down: what does this mean? What do we keep saying? What keeps coming up? That's really what drove that decision. If we're going to come back, we're going to set a tone for the future of Doom. It really just felt right to use the original as our inspiration."

Almost unanimously, those best moments reflected memories of dozens of monsters flooding onto the screen, a player-character moving at impossible speeds, and an arsenal designed to rip and tear hell's minions to shreds. Not everyone was excited by the prospect of looking back in order to look forward.

"Once you make those changes, there are definitely people who don't like the new direction, or don't feel it's the right way to go about things," Stratton admitted.

Taking Doom back to its roots was only one source of unease within id. Parting ways with studio veterans such as John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead, who had left a few months before Carmack, caused a cultural shift within the studio—a transition that's bound to occur every time veterans leave and new owners step in. Still, most of the development team was excited by Doom's personality shift.

"When you say, 'Hey, our inspiration is Doom and Doom 2,' that's why a lot of people came to work for the company or got into the industry," Stratton said. "That was their first touchstone with making games: making mods, or WADs, for Doom. If you weren't caught up in a lot of the other stuff, it was a pretty easy change to buy into, at least conceptually—that we wanted to use that original inspiration from those games and build on that, and really make Doom something that we thought fans were looking for and wanted to play."

With Rage fading in the rearview and dust still settling from upheavals in management, id pared down its teams from one to two. Despite myriad other changes to its culture, id had seen its best days operating as a small studio—mobile and adaptable, like its shooter characters. Juggling two teams at a company that had historically operated as a single, well-oiled machine was too much to handle.

"When you go through something like that," Stratton explained, referring to rebooting Doom, "the last thing you want to do is divide your focus. We really needed to refocus as a team, and get all hands on deck making Doom the best game it should be and needs to be."