Doom (franchise)
Doom is a video game series and media franchise created by John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud, and Tom Hall. The series focuses on the exploits of an unnamed space marine operating under the auspices of the Union Aerospace Corporation, who fights hordes of demons and the undead.
Doom is considered one of the pioneering first-person shooter games, introducing to IBM-compatible computers features such as 3D graphics, third-dimension spatiality, networked multiplayer gameplay, and support for player-created modifications with the Doom WAD format. Since its debut in 1993, over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold; the series has spawned numerous sequels, novels, comic books, board games, and film adaptations.
Games
Main series
Spin-offs
Common elements
The Doom video games consist of first-person shooters in which the player controls an unnamed space marine also referred to as Doomguy. The player has to battle the forces of Hell, consisting of demons and the undead. In the games, the player's character will often go back and forth through hell. Doom II: Hell on Earth follows after the events in Doom, the player once again assumes the role of the unnamed space marine. After returning from Hell, the player finds that Earth has also been invaded by the demons, who have killed billions of people.Development and history
The development of the original Doom started in 1992, when John Carmack developed a new game engine, the Doom engine, while the rest of the id Software team finished the Wolfenstein 3D prequel, Spear of Destiny.' was released in 1994, followed by two other official releases based on its version of the Doom engine: Master Levels for Doom II in 1995, and Final Doom in 1996.
Doom 64 was released in 1997, developed by Midway Games and supervised by id Software.
Doom 3 was announced in 2000. A reboot to the original Doom, it uses new graphics technology. Doom 3 was hyped to provide as large a leap in realism and interactivity as the original game and helped renew interest in the franchise when it was released in 2004. Doom 3 had its own expansion pack released in 2005, titled '.
After the Doom 4 project development was scrapped in 2013, id Software's Tim Willits said that the next game in the Doom series was still the team's focus, but it has not been confirmed to be titled Doom 4. It was later renamed to simply Doom in 2014. The game became a second reboot of the series, rather than a continuation or origin story of earlier games and was released in 2016.
A sequel to the 2016 reboot, Doom Eternal was released in 2020.
Other media
Novels
A set of four novels based on Doom were written by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. The books, listed in order, are titled Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky and Endgame. All were published between June 1995 and January 1996 by Pocket Books. The unnamed Marine is called "Flynn Taggart" or "Fly" in the novels. The first two books feature recognizable locations and situations from the first two games.In 2008, a new series of Doom novels by Matthew J. Costello, an author who had worked on the story and scripts for Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil, were published. The series of books aim to novelize the story of Doom 3, with the first installment, ', published on February 26, 2008. The second book in the series, ', was released in March 2009.
Comic book
A one-shot comic book written by Steve Behling and Michael Stewart with art by Tom Grindberg was released in May 1996 by Marvel Comics as a giveaway for a video game convention.Board game
In 2004, a board game designed by Kevin Wilson and published by Fantasy Flight Games titled was released.Films
''Doom'' (2005)
In 2005, Universal Pictures released the first live-action film adaptation, titled Doom, which starred Dwayne Johnson.''Doom: Annihilation'' (2019)
In 2019, Universal released a second live-action film adaptation direct-to-video, titled .Television
It was announced that Universal are in development of a Doom TV series.Reception
In 1996, Next Generation ranked the series as the 19th top game of all time, for how "despite the hundreds of copycat titles, no one has ever been able to equal id's original, pulsing classic." In 1999, Next Generation listed the Doom series as number 25 on their "Top 50 Games of All Time", commenting that, "despite the graphic advances since Doom was released, the pixilated Barons of Hell and Cyber Demons still rank as some of the scariest things that can grace your screen."The series' unnamed protagonist, a marine, has had a mostly positive reception. In 2009, GameDaily included "the Marine" on its list of "ten game heroes who fail at the simple stuff" for his inability to look up and down in the original series. UGO Networks ranked him fourth on its 2012's list of best silent protagonists in video games, noting his courage to continue in silence even when he faces Hell's army. In 2013, Complex ranked Doomguy at number 16 on its list of the greatest soldiers in video games for being "the original video game space marine" and "one of the classic silent protagonists". Both CraveOnline and VGRC ranked him the fifth most "badass" male character in the video game's history.
Sales
The original Doom sold 2-3 million physical copies and 1.15 million shareware copies from its 1993 release up through 1999. Doom II sold 1.55 million copies of all types in the United States during the same period, with about a quarter of that number also sold in Europe, a total of some 5-6 million sales for the original duology. Doom 3 sold 3.5 million copies along with many copies of the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil from its 2004 release up through 2007, making it the most successful game in the series at that point. The sales of Doom 64 were not disclosed.The 2016 reboot sold over 2 million copies on the PC alone from its May 2016 release up to July 2017.