30 years of "Doom 2": Kill John Romero!
Just ten months after the success of "Doom", "Doom 2" went one better, but the game was indexed in Germany.
(Image: id Software)
It has been 30 years since "Doom 2: Hell On Earth" hit the stores, finally securing world domination for its developer id Software –, at least for a while. The game was not only a competent continuation of the "Doom" success story that had begun the year before, but above all proof that the previously so strictly separate worlds of shareware and commercially available computer games could be merged without any problems.
When you enter the 30th, final level of "Doom 2: Hell On Earth" called "Icon of Sin", you hear an incomprehensible murmur. Every fan of Judas Priest (or many other bands) knows immediately what to do: record and play it backwards! This is also the correct procedure in "Doom 2" to turn the gibberish into understandable words – except that in this case you get to hear the following as a result: "To Win The Game You Must Kill Me, John Romero!"
John Romero, bloody staked youth
It's not something you hear every day. As every fan of shooters knows, John Romero is not only one of the founders of id Software, but also one of the programmers and designers behind the company's early successes. Games such as "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom" owe an important part of their existence to him and his sense of fast-paced arcade entertainment. But why does he want to be killed so badly? That's down to two id graphic artists, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, who scanned a photo of John's head (from a Wired article about the development of "Doom") and hid it as an actual hit zone behind the actual boss enemy of this level (the eponymous "Icon of Sin"). The joke was that when you hit the boss with missiles, you actually hit John Romero, whose face was shown distorted in pain at that moment.
"Doom 2" wird 30 Jahre (14 Bilder)
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)Adrian and Kevin thought it was hilarious and didn't actually want to tell John about it until after the game was out. But as he said on the record, he discovered this Easter Egg by pure chance beforehand – and wasn't angry about it, he was thrilled about it. In fact, he was so excited that he took the joke even further: together with id's in-house musician Bobby Prince, he recorded a voice sample, which Bobby altered and reversed according to all the rules of audio art, and placed it at the start of the final level as a welcome message.
The Federal Review Board for Publications Harmful to Young Persons found this less amusing and included Romero's skull as a "photorealistically depicted, bloodily impaled head of a young man" in its indexing justification.
Hell is coming to you!
At its heart, "Doom 2" seemed to be little more than a collection of new levels, like those that had already been released thousands of times in the year 1 ND ("after Doom"). The only difference was that they weren't built by fans, but by id Software themselves, mostly designed by Sandy Petersen and American McGee. But otherwise it felt more like an add-on to the original than a sequel: there were no obvious technological developments or significant graphical improvements, most of the enemies are familiar, the gameplay (running through levels, killing enemies, finding color-coded keys) is identical. So what justifies the "II" in the name?
To be completely honest, it's mainly id Software's desire to make as much money as possible out of the still revolutionary "Doom" graphics system by following up their shareware success with a part 2 that was only available in regular stores. This approach was not new territory for the small company; the shareware shooter wonder "Wolfenstein 3D", released in May 1992, was followed in September by the commercial quasi-successor "Spear of Destiny", distributed via FormGen.
In the case of "Doom 2", however, "GT Interactive" was used: a company that had only existed since 1993 and which emerged from "GoodTimes Entertainment", a company that had existed since 1984 and was primarily known for the distribution of cartoon video cassettes. The company went all out for "Doom 2", investing several million dollars in marketing and sparing no expense to make the release of the game as grandiose as possible. It was finally released on "Doomsday", October 10, 1994, precisely ten months after the original. The original batch of 600,000 copies was sold out within a month, and all in all, "Doom 2" sold around two million copies around the world. This made it id Software's most successful title ever for many years.
Double the run = double the fun!
In terms of content, "Doom 2" may not have been as overwhelming a revolution as its predecessor, but it would also be wrong to see it as just another collection of levels. Unlike in "Doom", whose levels were a wild mixture of all kinds of themes, the structure of the 30 sections in "Doom 2" (plus two bonus levels) follows overarching themes. The ending of "Doom" had already hinted that the forces of hell had overrun the earth. So a large part of "Doom 2" now takes place on Earth, in military facilities and hinted-at cities, before returning to the maw of hell in the final third to drive out the great evil with a shotgun once and for all.
Or rather with the "Super Shotgun", because this double-barrelled mega-gun was the only new gun in the "Doom 2" weapon cabinet – but what a gun! The "BFG 9000", the "Big Fucking Gun", will probably never be knocked off its pedestal, but many fans consider the "Super Shotgun" to be one of the best weapons in the history of "Doom".
"Doom 2" also features new design elements such as burning barrels, the "Megasphere" upgrade (which boosts energy and armor to 200%!) and seven new enemies. Actually, there are only three, because "Heavy Weapon Dude", "Hell Knight", "Arachnotron" and "Pain Elemental" are modified versions of hell creatures familiar from the predecessor. The completely new characters, on the other hand, not only brought more variety to the game, but also interesting new strategic approaches. The flaming "Arch-Vile", for example, can not only attack from a distance, but can also revive enemies that have already been killed, which causes panic, especially on the higher difficulty levels. The "Revenant" is not only incredibly fast, but also fires homing missiles. And the lumbering, grunting "Mancubus" shoots powerful fireballs from its two arm cannons. Excellent expansions, and in the case of the Mancubus in particular, the "Doom" universe would be unthinkable without them.