Doom is the alpha and the omega of the FPS, what made id Software the powerhouse it is today, and inspired countless developers across the world with its mod friendly design. They got the idea for fighting monsters with tech from a tabletop game they had (similar story for Quake) and Carmack took a quote from The Color of Money for a title. Green as programmers and level designers, Adrian Carmack (no relation) and Kevin Cloud as artists, Michael Abrash and Dave Taylor as additional programmers, Tom Hall as the creative director, and Bobby Prince as the musician. Beyond John Carmack, the team included John Romero, Sandy Petersen, American McGee, and Shawn C. They made it in a building they called “Suite 666” because id Software was founded and run by turbo nerds. The game was central to the development of the concept of first person shooters, showing a twitchy speed not seen in first person games to that point, and then one year later they defined the genre in its most basic foundations with Doom, a game that was installed on more PCs than Windows at the time. In 1992, id Software used John Carmack’s new rendering technology to release the action packed Wolfenstein 3D.

Note: Screenshots, unless stated otherwise, come from The Ultimate Doom re-release by Nerve Software for PC, which does tweak the graphical fidelity of the original game, but otherwise remains faithful to the original style.

Original doom weapons