By Simon Moore on July 3, 2014 at 4:46pm
The "Doom" Legend
Since 1997, the "Doom" series hadn’t made an appearance with “Doom 64” being at the time the final installment from Id Software.
Flash forward seven years to Aug. 2004, and we were presented with the highly anticipated “Doom 3” and what would be the company's most successful title to date. Shipping well over 3.5 million copies, "Doom 3" received critical praise and commercial success, but the world of "Doom" fell silent once more.
With a reboot of the franchise and casting aside the previous games/stories,“Doom 3” was to be the rebirth of the minions from hell and those who would oppose them. Although as recently as 2012, “Doom” was remastered, but it wasn't what the fans desired. The release of the BFG edition brought “Doom 3” back with polished graphics and put it on the next generation of console, but it wasn’t a step towards a new game.
That changed in June this year at the E3 showcase. The fires of damnation were stoked again as a teaser for a new “Doom” title surfaced and a promise that at QuakeCon 2014 we would find out more.
The Journey
So where has this “Doom” title been and what has been going on since 2004? Very little is known about what this “Doom” title will feature, but there is a patchwork of information and rebooted ideas littering its past. The acquisition of Id Software by ZeniMax media (better known as the face behind Bethesda Software) caused its own problems but ones which perhaps would be beneficial in the long run.
Drifting through the passageways and portals of time and space, avoiding Zombies, Imps, Revenants, and the occasional Hell Knight, we arrived at QuakeCon 2007 when the first proper mention of a new “Doom” title arrived.
John Carmack, the then lead developer for Id Software and now Oculus VR’s chief technology officer, hinted at a prospective title during QuakeCon 2008, but like previous times, the portals fell silent. In April 2009, Todd Hollenshead, CEO of Id at the time, said "Doom 4" was "deep in development." When pressed about the direction the title would be taking in an interview with GameSpot, he provided a rather critic reply: "It's not a sequel to 'Doom 3,' but it's not a reboot either. 'Doom 3' was sort of a reboot. It's a little bit different than those."
Queue Id Software’s acquisition in June 2009, and their announcement that future Doom and Quake titles would be published via Bethesda Softworks it looked like the production had been given some traction. At the previous year’s QuakeCon, Carmack said that "Doom" will “not be another four-year development period” but will have “three times the graphics richness” because it runs at 30 frames per second rather than 60, which "Rage" targets, a title which itself was still in development and would not be released until 2011.
According to an article on Kotaku, inside sources described pre-2011 version of "Doom 4", which was to play out similarly to "Doom II – Hell on Earth," was heavily scripted and cinematic along the lines of the "COD" series. Tim Willits, creative director at Id said during QuakeCon 2013:
Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit. When you played Rage, you got the spirit. And [Doom 4] did not have the spirit, it did not have the soul, it didn’t have a personality.
Onto Feb. 19 alongside the release of “Wolfenstein: The New Order,” Bethesda revealed that access to a beta version of "Doom 4", renamed "DOOM," would be included in all pre-ordered copies of the title. On any platform, a confirmation that the newly titled “DOOM” would be a multi-platform release as originally imagined almost seveb years prior.
The Final Destination
Slip through the summoning portal to June 2014 and the E3 conference. The teaser trailer, (which you can find below) was shown. The promise of greater detail and more information at QuakeCon followed and we are now only a short time away from the event.
An eagerly awaited entry is ahead of us. A franchise that has been popular since 1993, when Doomguy fought his way through the dust covered hallways on Mars is finally making its return after a more than seven-year absence.
Hollenshead interview
