Past and Present

A new Doom engineered under new management opened up new opportunities at id Software. Marty Stratton took on the role of Doom's game director in addition to helping manage id's business relationships. A newer hire, Hugo Martin, brought his background in game development and Hollywood blockbusters to bear.

"I started out at Naughty Dog, and then I kind of went back and forth between games and animation," Martin said. "I had a chance to work at MTV Animation and Blur, and a lot of different experiences doing commercial work and cinematic trailers and stuff."

Leaving full-time work, Martin bounced between jobs as a consultant. Right around the time John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead left id Software, he was working alongside Guillermo del Toro as a conceptual artist on Pacific Rim, a Hollywood blockbuster about humans who pilot giant mechs to battle otherworldly creatures that emerge from earth's oceans to wreak havoc. Specifically, Martin helped design Jaegars, skyscraper-sized robots operated by humans as the first and last line of defense.

"Among my experiences, and I was very lucky to get to do some of the stuff I got to do, the thing I enjoyed the most was working full-time at a games studio," said Martin. "I love games, I love making games. I really enjoyed that experience, so I was actively seeking an opportunity to get back into that full-time again, rather than just being a contractor."

Hugo Martin, creative director at id Software. (Photo credit: Bethesda.)

Martin began and ended his search at id Software. He already had an in: In between films, he had been hired as a contractor to do odds-and-ends jobs for id. Martin became increasingly excited about Doom and inquired after full-time positions. Pleased with Martin's work so far, Stratton brought him into the fold as creative director.

"I was champing at the bit to work on Doom," Martin said. "It's amazing. As a creative person, it's the best. It's irreverent, and it's comic book, and it's crazy because it's all cartoonish violence. Pretty much anything in Doom—the style and tone—is stuff that I really enjoy. I feel super fortunate, and I'm so glad to have met these people."

Working in tandem as directors, Martin and Stratton guided the team in choosing which classic Doom tropes to resurrect.

"There was a pretty clear period early in the reboot where we identified a lot of that stuff," Stratton remembered. "We determined, 'We want this to be on Mars. We want the super shotgun.' When we throw ideas up on the white board and say, 'What are the things you say out loud when Doom comes to mind?', you get a pretty quick list: demons, guns, movement, and all that kind of stuff. Then it just becomes iteration. You put things in the game."

Deciding to dust off iconic monsters like Imps, Barons of Hell, and the rotund Mancubus was easier said than done. Doom 3 had alienated some fans who refused to accept any interpretation of their favorite monsters, weapons, and tropes other than their original forms. Once again, id's artists faced the unenviable task of modernizing classic monsters while still appealing to fans who viewed their favorite classic games as sacrosanct.

Stratton and Martin encouraged the art team to forget about Doom dogma and concentrate on silhouettes. A silhouette must be unique and well-defined enough for audiences to instantly associate it with a character. A silhouette's dark contours reveal personality. The Imp is solid yet svelte, indicating agility and power dished out in darting attacks. It rakes with its claws when up close and throws fireballs from afar, giving it a fighting chance against the considerably stronger player-character at any distance. Its original form consisted of brown, leathery skin studded with spikes, so the artists incorporated those features, right down to glowing eyes and a mouth filled with jagged teeth.

As before, Barons of Hell hang out near the top of hell's food chain. The originals were powerfully built, with flesh the color of a blistering sunburn and strode forward on two-jointed legs. Their slow gait complemented their power, and they flung green fireballs from afar and shredded players up close. The new Baron of Hell exhibits seared flesh and towers over players. Still capable of flinging green fire at a distance, Barons close the gap by lowering their horned heads and charging across the screen.

Other classic monsters such as the bullish Pinky demon, the corpulent Mancubus, and the skeletal Revenant paid homage to older interpretations while bringing fresh gameplay quirks to the table.

"I'm a big believer in the three keywords," said Martin, "and this is true for story, gameplay, design, systems, visuals, anything. You write down three keywords, and you use them as guideposts throughout the process. That way when you are deep in details and very close up to things, you always have a reminder of what it is you're trying to accomplish. That was the trick. To basically make them look really sharp, modernize them while making sure they still felt like regular characters."

Symphony of Violence

Every Doom game cultivates certain instincts in players. Doom and Doom 2 bequeath upon them the agility and firepower they need to flit in and out of attacks, circling enemies and pumping them full of rockets. Doom 3 advocates caution. Enemies can come from anywhere at any time, especially from behind, and when they emerge, players fall back on their heels.

"When all the AI attacked you, your first instinct was to run backwards and shoot into the pack," Stratton said. "Guide them around the arena. We were like, 'This is not it.'"

With the new Doom, sometimes referred to as "Doom 2016" by fans to distinguish it from the original, Stratton and Martin endeavored to create the fastest and wildest Doom gameplay loop yet. 

"It took us all three years. Every last minute. Every last second," said Stratton. "Our game was all about combat; that's how we introduced it, that's how we talked about it. It's what we told people we were delivering. It was the most important thing, so we spent every last second making it better."

"If we had 10 bucks to make the game, eight of it was devoted to combat," Martin added.

Doom 3 had faded far enough into the past for id's developers to examine it with a critical eye. Horror was an essential part of the franchise, and Doom 3 had steered harder into it than its predecessors. Very early on, the team wrestled with Doom 2016's division between horror and action. "'They gave us 60 bucks, so let them play how they want,'" Stratton said, referring to a golden rule of game development that id hesitated to break.

After several failed experiments, they faced facts. Doom, as a franchise, was equivocal. There was nothing objectively wrong with Doom 3's tenser, more defensive slant on gameplay and atmosphere. However, they had no desire for their Doom to treat shadows as places to hide and monsters as boogiemen. "It fundamentally ruined that power fantasy, the idea that you are a badass and you're taking the fight to them," Stratton continued.

"You kite enemies into doors when you're weak," Martin said. "That's the solution when the odds are overwhelming. The Terminator isn't kiting bad guys in doorways; the Terminator is running around slaughtering people."

Doom's developers likened their game to chess. Each level is a game board, the player and monsters the pieces. They knew the basic rules they wanted to promote: be aggressive, be fast, shoot first and ask questions later. The next step was figuring out how to implement them.

"We hadn't determined the rules for how the pieces move," Stratton added. "Everybody was all over the board, and it didn't work. It wasn't fun. We needed to develop rules for individual pieces and play into the whole. That took the whole project. We never stopped working on that and making it better."

Glory Kills gave the team its big break. Early in development, several artists collaborated on a short animation that showed players executing a flurry of melee attacks on wounded monsters—like Fatalities in Mortal Kombat, but quick and brutal, intended more for expediency than showmanship.

"That really proved that push-forward combat, Glory Kills—that tight gameplay loop was super fun," Stratton recalled of the proof of concept. "We knew it was going to be good. It was good to get one foot up the ladder very early on."

Glory Kills were not an original concept. "This started in the older version of Doom, the one they called Call of Doom," Martin explained. "They had this sick melee thing where you went up to a guy and did a bunch of stuff to fuck him up. And it was really cool, but it was slow. It was more drawn out."

Monsters must be wounded before players can perform a Glory Kill. Brought to the brink of death, a monster begins flashing and lurching. Players need only approach them and press a single key or button. A burst of violence—ripping off an Imp's lower jaw and punching it in the face, tearing of a Baron of Hell's horn and jamming it into its eye, driving a zombie's skull into the ground—and the enemy crumples and players set off again, speeding toward their next target.

"There are several components that make it work," said Martin. "It makes you feel powerful. It pulls you into the action, so as a general concept it takes the fight to the bad guys. Add the fact that health drops out of them and it's an integral part of the dance. It's an important part of the whole game [loop]."

Fear is a vital component of the Glory Kill system, but not in a fashion typical of Doom. Many players confessed to playing Doom 3 in fits and starts. Its enemies were too frightening, its atmosphere too thick with blackness and brimstone, for longer play sessions. Even older Doom games turned players into prey, such as when beaten and bloodied with no health or armor refills in sight, leaving players no choice but to run away and snipe at enemies from behind walls. Doom 2016's Glory Kills turned the tables by casting players in the role of the hunter.

"At your moments where you're closest to the demons and have put them in their most vulnerable position," Stratton explained, "you've absolutely created fear in them. They're in full-on, screaming, oh-my-God-I'm-going-to-die terror. I don't know that most players would call that out as a moment, but it was, and it really did guide everything."

"I don't know how many times we sat in meetings where it went up and down," Martin reiterated of the process of nailing down Doom's combat. "It would be right, and then all of a sudden you'd play one day, and all of a sudden [monsters] start chasing you and you're running backward and shooting. You felt like you were being chased by a pack of dogs, so we'd tune it."

Glory Kills add percussion to Doom 2016's symphony of violence. Martin, a film buff long before he broke into Hollywood, pointed out how action star Jackie Chan describes fight scenes. The casual observer sees only a flurry of punches and kicks. Chan hears music: when attacks come, and from where; the rhythm of each blow, their sounds painstakingly selected in post-production.

"If you watch any good martial arts film, you'll notice that," Martin said. "We can all picture it in our minds: Bruce Lee movies and kung fu movies, the wind from their punches and the sound they make when they block versus when they connect. It's very rhythmic. We wanted the glory kills to kind of feel that way."

Glory Kills happen in two beats. BOP-BOP. Monster dead. In Doom 2016, quicker is always better. In point of fact, monsters remain prone to Glory Kills only for a few seconds, spurring players to pour on speed. Dally, and monsters shake off their stupor and return to the fray.

Then there are Runes, passive items that affect gameplay in numerous ways. The Blood Fueled rune ratchets up the player's speed after executing a Glory Kill, and Savagery gives them an even bigger boost.

"Some people were like, 'These are going to slow down the fight!'" Martin remembered. "I'm like, first of all they're fast to begin with, but if you equip that rune that makes them faster, and you master that rune, they're lightning fast. They're almost too fast."

Executed demons break open like shattered piñatas, spilling bits of health over the ground—perhaps the most significant layer of Glory Kills. In most games, classic Doom included, weakened players flee from combat. Glory Kills reward aggression by healing players who take a risk and wade into the thick of battle.

Earning health for Glory Kills prompted more iteration. "It gave them a lot of meaning," Martin continued. "Then it was a balance of how much health. Then it was about, okay, so if I can get health for doing this, how much health should I get from shooting guys? What's the balance there? Should we penalize players for shooting guys? Does everything have to end in Glory Kills?"

The team arrived at a comfortable balance of health distribution. Med packs, another classic trope, are sprinkled around each level for players who need them in a pinch, while Glory Kills convert demons into healing source.

More than finding the beating heart of Doom's gameplay loop, Glory Kills signified a turning point in the project's long and troubled development cycle. Veterans leaving, uncertainty over how involved ZeniMax may or may not be, worry that ignoring market trends might lead to financial missteps—all of that was in the past. Like their player-character, Doom's team was racing forward, full stop.

"It was very, very important for the team," said Martin, "and for Marty and me to push the three components of the team together: art, design, and tech. You didn't want people making things in isolation, which always happens. The animators get really into doing these really cool Glory-Kill animations, but then maybe the systems guys are going off in another direction where they're not really pushing a lot of the progression items into glory kills. They're not complementing or accounting for glory kills as much as we would have liked them to."

Pushing Forward

It was important, the directors agreed, for Doom to foster a relentless momentum that drives players forward by giving them tools such as Glory Kills to kill demons fluidly. Like a roller coaster that goes shrieking through every curve and loop and tearing up every hill, perpetually gaining speed.

"Some people criticized Doom 2016 as not having enough horror," said Martin. "In order to have horror, I have to feel vulnerable. There is no horror without me feeling vulnerable and on my heels. The Doom marine is never on his heels. He's on his toes, and he puts other people on their heels."

"And you need to be slow, too," Stratton added. "Our pillars are guns, demons, and fast movement. Moving at however fast, 100 miles per hour through this game, you're not vulnerable. You're not going to get a jump scare when you're just [speeding] through the world. Once we made some of those decisions, we were all in."

Achieving breakneck speeds hinged on level design. Once again looking back in order to see what lay ahead, the developers took cues from classic Doom maps. "Our levels have to be abstract," said Martin. "That was our main takeaway from classic Doom [levels]: they're very abstract and don't necessarily have to make sense."

Martin held up Doom 2 as an example. Many maps were set on earth, but the game's urban environments did not conform to any realistic blueprint. That was due in part to limitations of its engine. Floors, for instance, could not be placed one above the other. More importantly, realistic architecture tends to be dull. Long, straight corridors, open office bullpens, staid lobbies—environments not conducive to fun.

"We need our levels to be very abstract because of where we place key cards, secrets, and the line-of-sight breaks," said Martin. "We had this issue of, oh, you know, every room doesn't make complete sense. When you play certain games, you can say, 'I'm in the atrium now, and there are bathrooms. Look how realistic this is.' That's not really going to work in Doom because, again, the player's so fast. If you put them in that type of space, they're going to be smashing into the walls."

"We have scenes where there are 10 demons or so, and it's always 360-degree combat," explained Stratton. "How much pressure units are pushing you, how much ranged units are trying to run at you—those are things that we iterated on through constant play. We'd go fairly long periods of time where it was like, 'This isn't working. We've got the right demons and the right guns. We're starting to build spaces that feel right. But the combat doesn't feel good.'"

The solution lay in constructing spaces that stimulated players to go fast and hit hard. Doom 2016's levels are rambling arenas that unspool into hallways and alcoves. Players weave in and out of indoor environments, and outdoor milieus stretch out in all directions, giving players ample room to sprint, leap, and shoot. Buildings assembled from tiers of platforms emphasize verticality. The player-character moves like a parkour artist, automatically reaching out to grab ledges and hoist himself up so that players need not bother to slow down.

Doom 2016's intricate level design channels the spirit of Doom' and Doom 2's interconnected maps.

With few exceptions, players are not punished for attempting feats such as jumping from the summit of a building and plummeting to the ground. Realistic damage has a place in some games, but not in Doom.

"That's why I think Lazarus really caught on with people," Martin said. "It's one of the fastest levels in the game. You can just rip through that level and feel like such a badass because there's nothing standing in your way."

Like the maps they inhabit, enemies are organized in strata. Running into a Baron of Hell in Doom is on par with encountering a mini-boss in most other games. Then there are zombies, unarmed and braindead and shambling aimlessly, only taking a swing at players if they happen to cross their paths and stand still.

Kurt Loudy, Doom's AI gameplay designer, likened zombies to white belts in a Bruce Lee movie. Martin loved the analogy; it fit perfectly into Doom's push-forward combat scheme. "Our zombies can give you a good whack, but it wasn't about them being cool or formidable. It was about you feeling cool killing them," said Martin. "You've got to have that dojo full of white belts, that white-belt class that the hero just beats the shit out of. They just make you feel cool because you're just mowing through those guys—and then the Mancubus shows up. He's the black belt."

Zombies shuffle at one end of Doom's monster spectrum. The Mancubus waddles around closer to the far end. Gore Nests occupy the middle. Resembling shrines pieced together from blood and viscera, Gore Nests hold bright-red portals from which demons emerge.

In any other game, they would be objects to avoid. Botching an objective or tripping an alarm would punish the player by unleashing a tide of demons. In Doom, players march right up to them and rip them apart. Nests explode in a spray of blood, the portal detonates, and a wave of monsters converges on the player's location.

"It's like if, in a zombie game, you touch a car and the alarm goes off, that's sweet," Martin continued. "That's exactly what you want. The more direct way is saying, 'Hey, you're badass.' You can do that, too, but the little design choice of the gore nest being something I activate as opposed to being triggered when I get near it, subconsciously says, 'You are one bad dude looking for a fight.' The Doom marine is a full battalion. He's everything you need. We don't need vehicles in Doom; he's a tank. I think that type of commitment was great."

Rip and Tear and Cut and Carve

Late one night, Hugo Martin closed the design documents open on his screen and booted the latest build of Doom. Playing Doom was his favorite late-night ritual. He played because it was fun, but also to keep his finger on the pulse of the latest changes. Within minutes he was navigating the twists and turns of a work-in-progress level and came across one of his favorite weapons, another strand of Doom DNA dating back to 1993.

"I remember this specifically because it was probably a moment in development that stands out most in my mind," he said. "I'm in this fight, I'm using the chainsaw. We've already got the [fuel system] set up. I chainsaw a guy, and health spills out, but at the time, somebody had made an adjustment."

At first, the chainsaw seemed to be working according to their latest design. Unlike its classic counterpart, Doom 2016's chainsaw kills any enemy instantly in a flashy, Glory Kill-like execution. The trade-off is that the chainsaw runs on fuel from canisters scattered around levels, and tougher monsters consume more fuel. For players who save their fuel, the chainsaw becomes an ace up their sleeve for occasions when heavyweights like a Baron of Hell or Mancubus pop up more frequently in later levels.

Martin grinned as his Doom marine carved up a Mancubus into fat, fleshy chunks—and then stared as bullets fountained up from its ruined corpse. "My head exploded," he remembered. "I was like, 'Oh my God, that felt so good.' The idea that in order to replenish my resources—it felt very intuitive. We were already doing that with the glory kills and health. In order to continue using the weapons I want, to replenish my ammo resources, I would once again have to take the fight to them: get up close and personal and saw one of these guys in half. That little moment was a huge spark."

The next day, Martin rushed up to one of the gameplay programmers and described what had transpired. Stratton and several others heard the story and thought it was hilarious. "You're always looking for the spark," Martin said. "We hunt for the spark, and when you find the spark, you dig into it. It's kind of like seeing a little oil leaking out of the ground, and man, you just drill into that as hard as you can to see if you can hit pay dirt."

At Martin's behest, the programmers steered into the chainsaw-refills-ammo mechanic. That, too, was a lengthy and iterative process. In order to spur players to refill their ammo using the chainsaw, the developers removed or reduced other methods of stocking up. Ammo packs stayed, but over time, chainsaw massacres became the optimal method of topping off supplies.

"You got a little bit of ammo when you killed guys [with guns] if you needed it," Martin said, "but we lowered that value as low as it would go, literally right up until the last week of developing the game. I remember I requested one last, final tweak to actually suppress every other way to get ammo in the game in order to allow the chainsaw to shine. I felt like the chainsaw was one of the coolest features in the dance. It wonderfully complemented the dance, and I wanted to steer into it as hard as we could."

As Doom hurtled toward its projected May 2016 release date, some of the developers got cold feet. The team had spent years balancing weapons against enemies and upgrades that expanded their functionality. Filtering the majority of ammo replenishments through the chainsaw, a weapon that ran on fuel that players might not have when they needed it, could cripple their gameplay loop.

Martin understood their concerns. More than that, he agreed with them. Their implementation was a gamble, and a big one. That made it all the more critical to go all-in.

"It's one of my proudest moments: we stood our ground as a team," he said, beaming. "A lot of developers would—and I totally understand this—they would give you multiple ways to refill your ammo, because you paid 60 bucks for the game. You could collect this certain type of wood and that will resupply my ammo, or I could go to a vendor and he would do it. There's usually five different ways to do something. In Doom, there's pretty much one way, and that's using the chainsaw."

When Doom released in mid-May, the developers crowed over glowing reviews. Magazine extracts and websites were passed around the office so everyone could look over scores and read commentary. Martin joined them, watching for one point in particular.

"It's funny because I thought especially hardcore first-person shooter fans, especially fans of Doom, would pick up on how fucking great this is and how wonderfully it complements the dance, and they are going to fucking love it," he said. "And sure enough, they did. I can't tell you how many articles were written where people were like, 'I would just like to write a little editorial about how fucking awesome this chainsaw is.' That made us so happy because that's what we were banking on."

Players and critics appreciated the additional layers of strategy the chainsaw offered. Carving up smaller enemies drains less fuel, enabling players to kill more enemies between fill-ups. But larger demons bequeath larger quantities of ammo, doubly incentivizing fuel. Spotting a Baron of Hell at the head of a swarm of lesser demons is tacit permission for players to pull out all the stops—unload their shells, bullets, rockets, and plasma cells in a glorious explosion of violence. As long as at least one big bad remains alive, and as long as they have enough fuel, they can hunt down the biggest, baddest monster on the battlefield and restock.

"My favorite thing about the chainsaw," Martin said, "and again, we suppressed a bunch of other really cool features to make this one feature even cooler, is that it makes you think. You have to make split-second decisions during the dance to resupply your ammo. To me, that's fascinating."

A Secret to Everybody

Marty Stratton strolled into Bethesda's 2015 holiday gathering feeling confident. Besides giving developers the chance to ring in the holidays, the annual meeting was a sort of show-and-tell. Representatives from studios under the ZeniMax umbrella brought along builds of their ongoing projects and outlined their progress and plans to an audience of peers and higher-ups.

Stratton had good reason to exude confidence. Just a few weeks beforehand, Jason O'Connell, one of the team's level designers, planted an Easter egg in the game's Foundry level. Crossing a bridge, players may notice a lever jutting out from a piece of machinery. Most players, O'Connell surmised, would probably overlook it. Those who pull the level will hear a chime, a cue that something, somewhere, has changed.

Across the bridge, a wall panel slides up. At the threshold, Doom's textures shift. The game's intricately detailed walls and floor turn grainy and pixelated, as if the passage is a portal into another world. Indeed, it is—an older world constructed in 1993.

O'Connell had figured out a way to merge chunks of maps from Doom and Doom 2 with Doom 2016's architecture, creating a fusion of old and new. "He put that in," Stratton recounted, "and I went in there and was like, 'Oh my God. This is unbelievable.' "

Two things stood out to Stratton. The first was how seamless and fun it was to step out of modern Doom and into a slice of the franchise's past, armed to the teeth with new weapons and facing off against modern incarnations of beloved monsters that were stationed exactly where they had stood in the original level.

"Jumping into the past, but doing it with new guns, new enemies, and new moves," said Stratton. "It still felt right: you were surrounded by old Doom, but doing new-Doom things. It was one of those moments."

The second was how surreal it felt to cross that threshold. Although Stratton had not been at id for the development of Doom or Doom 2, id Software had been a fixture in his life for 16 years, starting just a few years following the original Doom's publication. Traveling back in time to revisit pieces and parts from the studio's history was as emotional as it was awe-inspiring, like paging through albums of photos taken just before he had been born.

"It was unbelievable how far we'd come in 23 years or so since the original Doom," he continued. "In a snap you go from the old into the new. We were showing where we were at near the end of 2015, and I showed that moment, and I got so many [positive reactions]. Crossing that threshold was this stark reminder of our progress."