Doom (series)



""Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...""

- Terry Pratchett


 * Note - this page is about the games. For the word doom, see Doomy Dooms of Doom.

Id Software's follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D was Doom, which represented a big step forward in the art of texture mapping, and an even bigger step forward in videogame violence. It follows the story of an unnamed Space Marine posted to the Union Aerospace Corporation's base on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. When teleportation experiments between Phobos and Deimos cause Deimos to vanish and a horde of grotesque monsters to invade the Phobos base, our hero is the only human left alive between the two bases. He fights his way through the creatures in search of a way off Phobos, finding himself transported instead to Deimos, now residing in the creatures' homeland, which turns out to be none other than Hell itself.

The release of Doom was met with unprecedented controversy regarding its content. Not only was there a very high amount of frank Satanic imagery (albeit all cast in a highly negative light), it was filled with graphic depictions of zombies and monsters being blown apart, eviscerated, shot to pieces and generally disintegrating into piles of gore. Gameplay was extremely gung-ho -- the makers noted that the manual could have simply read, "If it moves, kill it" -- and encouraged the player to attack with reckless abandon, using such implements as chainsaws, chainguns and the original BFG, a massive weapon which could reduce an entire room of monsters to viscera. Even the player's own face, shown near the health counter as in Wolfenstein, became battered and bloodied with damage.

Despite this, it was indeed a big step forward in First-Person Shooter technology; unlike its predecessor, walls could be at any angle rather than at 90 degrees, a rudimentary form of height was introduced, and monsters outside the room one was in could hear and come after you. Also, whereas Wolfenstein's fortresses all had identical lighting, Doom featured variable lighting, including flickering and glowing lights, adding to the game's atmosphere. The game also introduced the idea of multi-player death matches and co-op missions in a modern FPS, with its developers fully expecting Doom to be the biggest cause of decreased productivity in IT companies the world over in 1993. And they were right.

Followed by Doom II: Hell on Earth, which saw the demons invading Earth, which was a huge success. In between Doom II and 3, Final Doom was released the same month as Quake. It was identical to Doom II, but came with two different Expansion Packs: TNT: Evilution, created by the third party modding group TeamTNT (originally intended to be free until id struck a publishing deal with them;) and The Plutonia Experiment, made by two members of the group in four months' time, generally considered the hardest of the official packs. (Final Doom also included a 32-bit Direct X version of the Doom engine, making it the only way to play classic Doom on many modern 64-bit Windows machines, besides virtual machines like DOS Box or the many source ports.)

A decade later, Doom 3 was released. The third installment, which was more a remake of the first than a sequel, breaks with the first two significantly, with a dark, oppressive tone much more akin to a Survival Horror than anything. It was this incarnation on which the Doom movie was based. This was followed by the Expansion Pack Resurrection of Evil, set two years later. Currently, the game is scheduled to be remade in HD and is to compile the previous two games with the first two, in addition to adding another seven levels to Doom 3's campaign. Furthermore, you can actually wield a flashlight and a gun at the same time. It is set to be released late in 2012.

Doom has been ported to many many console systems over the years. There was also Doom 64 for the Nintendo 64, which was an actual new entry in the series and probably more of a Doom 3 than the actual Doom 3 was (it was released years before, ran on a version of the original engine and continued the story of the first two games). Doom's source code has been released, and, at this point, almost anything with a CPU in it - many cameras and music players, some watches, several appliances, even a graphing calculator has been shown to run it for about half a minute before crashing - has had a version of Doom released for it. The game used a creepy and distinctive sound effect for doors opening, which has been re-used in many Speculative Fiction series for all sorts of things.

Also, a comic for Doom was made at the height of the Dark Age. It's hilarious, probably intentionally so. We hope.

There was also a series of novelizations by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. Four in all, the first two--Knee Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth--were based on the first and second games, respectively. The final two, Infernal Sky and Endgame, went their own direction with the plot. These novels have a small cult following. There are also new novels based on Doom 3.

As for the future of the franchise, there are new mobile products and Doom 4 currently in development.


 * BFG
 * Doom Doors

"Swann: This is the last time. I'm tired of running damage control every time he makes a mess.
 * Abandoned Mine: "The Abandoned Mines" in Doom II. Granted, it doesn't look much like actual mines (then again, no level in the classic Doom games looks like anything) and it's supposed to be located in Hell, but it does have areas that look like giant underground excavated caverns which probably inspired the level design of Doom 3.
 * Actionized Sequel: While Doom I is fast-paced, it is generally willing to have scary moments as shown with several fights through a maze filled with Pinkies and imps while the lights flicker on and off, while the second game goes for the "EXPLOSION TIME" brand of fun people associate with the series. The third slows things right down and adds in more Survival Horror elements to the mix.
 * It is also inverted before Doom 3 showed up: in between Doom II and Doom 3, there was Final Doom and Doom 64. Final Doom was a Doom II style death orgy that had two whole level packs. Doom 64, however, is a horror game with just this spooky droning soundtrack.
 * All There in the Manual: The backstories to just about all the classic series games.
 * Also, the novelizations are the only time "Doomguy" is given a proper name (for those wondering, it's Flynn "Fly" Taggart).
 * Always Accurate Attack: The arch-vile's attack will always hit the target unless it leaves the line of sight before it finishes. Only the marine can effectively dodge it. Partial invisibility won't cause it to miss, but does affect the knockback direction.
 * Ammunition Backpack: As a powerup. Not only does it give you one of each "small ammo pack" (one pistol clip, four shotgun shells, one rocket, and one 20-volt energy cell), if it's your first, it doubles your ammo-carrying capacity (You can carry 400 bullets instead of 200, and so on).
 * Ancient Astronauts: In Doom 3,
 * And I Must Scream: Some crushing floors in the first two games only crush, they never release. If you let yourself be smashed by these and happen to have enough health, you'll remain trapped alive in concrete. Have a nice stay if it's multi-player and no one else can find and kill you to release you. Thankfully, a rather rare bug.
 * And Your Reward Is Clothes: A meta-example: the Xbox Live Arcade port of Doom II offers two Avatar Awards. You'll get a Doom t-shirt for finishing the regular game, while completing the XBLA exclusive episode "No Rest For the Living" will net you a full Doomguy costume.
 * Apocalyptic Log: All over Doom 3.
 * Arm Cannon: The Cyberdemon and the Mancubus, and the Bruiser in Doom 3's ROE.
 * In Doom 3, the BFG isn't so much wielded like a gun as it is worn like a giant glove of death. The only one who actually carries the BFG is.
 * Artifact of Doom:
 * The Artifact from ROE, which is a large heart with bits of metal attached.
 * The Unmaker, apparently carved from Demon's Souls.
 * Also the Soul Cube from the original Doom 3 although that was created to defeat the demons, rather than by them.
 * Ascended Glitch: Oh, wow. Lots. Most of them have been used and abused for speedruns and map-making.
 * If an Archvile resurrects a monster who was crushed by a Descending Ceiling, that monster will become a "ghost" that can pass through (or over) obstructions and is invulnerable to everything except splash damage and other monsters' melee attacks. Once this bug was discovered, several custom maps were designed to produce this effect.
 * Similarly, the shimmery "hall of mirrors" effect that occurs when a texture is missing has been adopted by some level designers to create deep water. It will still glitch if your view is below the water level, however.
 * Also the "voodoo doll" bug, which can be easily created by placing two different start points for a single player. Clever mapmakers have used this bug to create traps which can teleport a player into another copy of himself, resulting in a recursive Tele Frag. Voodoo dolls under triggered crushing ceilings can also be used to cause player deaths wherever the mapmaker wants; for example, simulating bottomless pits by triggering the ceiling if a player falls into one.
 * Because the first two Doom games aren't true 3D, a rocket's splash damage isn't a sphere as might be expected; it's a cylinder of infinite height. This bit of questionable behavior is what allows you to damage Doom II's final boss.
 * It is possible to mess with sectors and sector references to create an "invisible staircase" effect, which was best demonstrated by a map called UAC_Dead. This in fact abuses the same glitch as deep water effect above, just the water doesn't need some of the set-up needed for bridges.
 * If you trigger an action to move the floor up, but the target height is lower than current height, then the floor will move instantly (And the other way round, if floor should be moving down but the target height is higher, it will move instantly too). Combined with "invisible bridge" effect above, this allows for a fake 3D bridge which can be passed over and under, by moving the floor depending on where the player is. This is used in some custom maps.
 * Asteroids Monster:
 * In Doom II, The Pain Elemental will spawn up to three Lost Souls when it's destroyed, in a triangular formation.
 * In the "Doom II RPG" for mobile devices, the Spider Mastermind will explode into three Arachnotrons.
 * Attract Mode: Doom and Doom II (and their kin) play a demo if left on the title screen for a second or two.
 * Back That Light Up: The Game Boy Advance version of Doom had more than one color scheme to compensate for the different lighting possibilities for that system.
 * Badass Boast:

Campbell: Right. You're the control, and if that fails, I'm the damage."

""Virgin blood is best"
 * Unusual for a Doom boss, is quite vocal, shouting demoralizations at you as you fight.
 * Badass Normal: The marine: So Badass that in Doom II, he .
 * Big Red Devil: The Cyberdemons and the Barons of Hell.
 * Bittersweet Ending: The unnamed marine in Doom 3 succeeds in sealing off Hell and survives, and is found by the subsequent reinforcements, but innumerable lives were lost beforehand.
 * Downer Ending: The unnamed marine in the first Doom succeeds in escaping Phobos, climbing down from Deimos and escaping Hell itself, only to find that the demon invasion has already taken hold on Earth, with billions being slaughtered. The End! (The sequel has you saving what's left of humanity and ends on a triumphant note, at least.)
 * Black and White Morality: All the DOOM games, really.
 * Blackout Basement: Some of the areas in Doom 3.
 * Blatant Item Placement: In Doom/Doom II, it's rare that item collection triggers an ambush or trap, but some do exist. However, some items are shown on display (e.g. the armor in E1M1) for no reason.
 * Blood From the Mouth: Doomguy's portrait whenever his health is low enough.
 * Bloodier and Gorier: The Brutal Doom mod. RIP AND TEAR!
 * Hmm. Considering that even the original game got a lot of flak from Moral Guardians all over the world for its violence, that's really taking it Up to Eleven.
 * Bloody Bowels of Hell:
 * A lot of the "hell" levels of the original Doom and Doom II.
 * Hell starts to get its bowels all over the UAC base on Mars in Doom 3. Ew.
 * Body Horror:
 * Happens to and.
 * The original Dooms also have plenty of walls in the hell levels appearing to be made of human flesh, faces, or piles of corpses.
 * Boring Return Journey: The end of Doom II has your character taking the long trek back home after practically.
 * Boss in Mook Clothing: Archviles, Mancubi in Doom 3, Barons of Hell, Hell Knights in Doom 3, Bruisers in Resurrection of Evil. Also, a huge chunk of the custom monsters in zdoom's realm 667 beastiary.
 * Bowdlerise:
 * Swastikas in the E1M4 were changed in later versions to allow the game to be sold in Germany. Also, German versions of Doom II do not contain levels 31 or 32.
 * Doom 3 lacks the cherub enemies in Germany.
 * The Game Boy Advance ports of Doom I and II had all the in-game blood turned green. Ironically, the SNES port of Doom retained most of the original game's red-blooded violence, with only the Satanic symbols being censored.
 * Brainwashed and Crazy: Hinted that this was 's fate.
 * Captain Ersatz: The Spider Mastermind, a brain operating a mechanical spider body, very closely resembles Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If only he'd asked Shredder to make THAT body...
 * Chainsaw Good: Fondly remembered and one of the iconic weapons of the series.
 * Taken Up to Eleven in Doom 64, where the chainsaw has two blades.
 * Doom 3 actually provides an explanation for why a base on Mars, which has no trees, would have chainsaws-they got mixed up with an order of jackhammers for mining.
 * Classic Cheat Code: iddqd, idkfa, idchoppers, and so on.
 * Clothing Damage: As seen in the page image, Doomguy's uniform is heavily damaged in most official artwork. Amusingly, this led to some players thinking that his armor was issued with an abdominal cutout.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: A combination of Fake Difficulty and bastard map-designers, it does not matter how carefully a player clears rooms and watches dark corners as there will always be tiny, function-less, hidden, and effectively-invisible closets containing idle monsters whose sole purpose is to surprise the player from behind.
 * And, to a lesser extent (at least in the base game), there's the fact that due to the way hitscan enemies (ie, riflemen, shotgunners, etc) are programmed, they will always hit you unless you get behind cover (if they don't miss due to spread), even if they're on the other side of the map from you. While this doesn't matter much in the enclosed spaces of the base game, in some custom levels favoring open spaces, this can get very annoying.
 * Container Maze
 * Contractual Boss Immunity: Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds are immune to splash damage. They only take damage from the rocket itself, not the explosion.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: The UAC and particularly its leadership are explicitly capable of operating outside of all ethical and legal restrictions. They're a  The main antagonist,
 * This trope is pretty explicitly appealed to by Sarge when he's trying to convince the player to send the call for reinforcements. The developers were probably counting on players being conditioned to distrust powerful corporate-affiliated characters by the extent to which this trope is played straight in other games.
 * Covers Always Lie: The cover of the first game shows Doomguy holding what seems to be some kind of sub machine gun or small assault rifle, despite the game having no such weapon. It did, however, exist in the alpha--but that weapon was quickly nixed for being redundant with the chaingun.
 * It eventually made its way into Doom 3, albeit with a redesigned appearance.
 * Critical Existence Failure: Hell Knights, Barons of Hell, and Mancubi play it straight. Cyberdemons, Spider Masterminds, and Arachnotrons are more justified with the former launching rockets and the latter two being mostly robotic. All humans and zombies in the original games mostly avert it.
 * Damage Sponge Boss: Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds.
 * Although they weren't bosses (except for the 'Bruiser Brothers' at the end of the first episode) Barons of Hell were considered to have hit points WELL out of proportion with their actual threat level. This led to the introduction of Hell Knights in Doom II, which were about as dangerous (their plasma orbs and claw attacks did the same damage), but only half as tough.
 * Darker and Edgier: Doom 3. Definitely darker (har har), but it includes a storyline and several PDAs one can find to expand on how Hellish (har har) UAC became. It also introduces a lot more Survival Horror elements and contains jump scares, and makes combat a bit slower.
 * just to amplify the difference, you can take a look at the photo gallery. Guess which ones are made in Doom 3.
 * Dead Character Walking: Has such a bug, described in detail here, where a players killed in deathmatch becomes a mobile corpse which runs (okay, slides) around. Kinda creepy.
 * Deal with the Devil: Literally in Doom 3, between Hell and.
 * Death-Activated Superpower: Pain Elementals can summon up to three Lost Souls upon their death.
 * Death by Cameo: In Doom II, John Romero's head is the Big Bad (more accurately, the Big Bad's hitbox, and it can only be found using the "idclip" cheat and walking INTO the boss' brain). And the body of the designer of level 24 of the fan-made Doom II level pack Requiem can be seen upside down on a cross in that level.
 * Degraded Boss: Barons of Hell, Cyberdemons, Spider Masterminds...
 * The Vagary from Doom 3.
 * The first two Hell Knights in Doom 3 (a Bruiser Brothers homage) are much stronger than any subsequent specimens.
 * Demon Slaying: You'd better believe you're going to be doing this a lot.
 * Descending Ceiling: Some cleverly disguised.
 * Determinator: The marine.
 * Devil but No God: Besides the Soul Cube in Doom 3, there's not a holy thing in sight.
 * Diagonal Speed Boost: Strafing and running forward simultaneously is faster than doing either independently.
 * Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Icon of Sin. Did you just blow the Devil's brains out?
 * Digitized Sprites: Many monsters were made from clay and then converted to sprites.
 * Distress Call: How both the original game and the movie start.
 * And what you're spending the first half of Doom 3 trying to send, before spending the latter half.
 * Doing in the Wizard: In the novels, it is made clear very early on that the attacking "demons" are, in fact, alien biological constructs made to look like humanity's worst nightmares. The protagonist was raised Roman Catholic, and is perfectly aware that being able to blast apart actual demons with a gun as if they were simple physical beings doesn't make any sense, so these are clearly fake. He's right. The realization doesn't make them any less hideous or dangerous, of course. It's played straight in the games.
 * The Dog Bites Back: The easiest way to kill the Spider Mastermind is to invoke this by luring other monsters into her line of fire.
 * Do Not Run with a Gun: The player is the only entity in the original games able to fire and move at the same time. Recent mods subvert this.
 * Doomy Dooms of Doom: Of course.
 * DOS 4 GW:
 * Dual Boss: The two Barons of Hell at the end of the first episode of the original game. They get a repeat in Doom 3.
 * Dummied Out: A couple of things that were supposed to happen in the original games were effectively dummied out by coding errors:
 * The "Ouch Face" was an expression for the Doomguy head in the middle of the status bar that was supposed to show if the player received more than 20 damage at a time. In practice, the code was written in such a way that it would only appear if the player took damage and gained at least 20 health during the same tic, something that was extremely unlikely to occur without the player actually trying to make it happen. The "Ouch face" is fixed in many source ports (such as, Boom, ZDoom)
 * The message "picked up a medikit that you REALLY need!" was supposed to appear if the player had less than 25% health when they picked the kit up. Unfortunately, the code checks the player's health after applying the health change for picking up the medkit, meaning it is physically impossible for the player to have less than 26% health; as a result, the message is never displayed at all (this is also fixed in source ports like ZDoom).
 * There was also the BFG. The classic BFG is probably the most complicated and illogical weapon ever put in an FPS, largely due to it holding over all of the mechanics from a scrapped alpha version of itself. This "billion fireballs gun" fired a ragged burst of 40 projectiles and was scrapped because it "looked like Christmas" and slowed the game to a crawl. The Doom BFG might appear to just fire a big ball that does splash damage, but it actually does this:
 * 1) After a delay of just under a second, the BFG fires the green energy ball. It memorizes the direction it was fired in relative to the player at this point.
 * 2) On impact, the projectile deals a large amount of direct (not splash) damage to whatever it hit.
 * 3) The BFG's invisible mechanics come into play now. The weapon fires a spread of 40 Hit Scan "traces" (or "rays") evenly distributed across a 90-degree arc pointing in whatever direction it was originally fired in, from the player's current position.
 * Most people are not aware that you can kill someone with the BFG with your back to them after firing it in a totally different room.
 * Initially, an Easter Egg game of Asteroids was to be accessible from the computer map, but this was almost entirely cut. (Some references to deleted files remained in code)
 * Empty Room Until the Trap
 * The End - or Is It?: The text-crawl endings to the non-PC editions of the original all suggest that demons may have made it to Earth. The PC version makes it abundantly clear with the cutscene following the text that, yep, they did..
 * Enemy Rising Behind: It was possible in Doom although the enemies were generally easier to defend against, but were uncommon. In Doom 3, monster closets are more numerous, and make less noise, making them much more frustrating to some players.
 * Enemy Summoner: Pain Elementals and the Icon of Sin in Doom 2; Archviles in Doom 3.
 * Energy Ball: Plasma Gun, BFG and some enemies (Hell Knights, mostly) fire them.
 * Epic Fail: What did the UAC want to do? Make teleporters. Result? Hell invades Earth. (Doom 3 softens the blow somewhat, as the UAC didn't even want the Mars scientists to pursue teleporter technology.)
 * Actually in Doom 3, the UAC does want to develop teleporters just like in the Classic game. However, once the UAC higher ups learn about the direction Betruger is taking the project in, they send Campbell and Swann to investigate and - if necessary - pull the plug on the project.
 * Everything Fades: Example of newer games having this and older games averting it. In the first two Doom games the bodies of enemies stick around forever. In Doom 3, demons disappear in a fizzly animation.
 * This was probably to lighten the load on the game's engine and RAM usage by cutting down on rendered objects. Some mods do undo this and the bodies of humans and zombies generally remain, unless damaged to the point they disintegrate.
 * Evil Laughter: gives several of those in a demonic manner. They range from cool to goofy to downright scary.
 * give several of those also, when hunting you down.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: This requires being German or knowing a bit of the language, mind, but it's funny in either case. Dragondraikk, an LPer who lives in Germany, explains here.
 * Excuse Plot: Demons have invaded Phobos/Earth/Mars! Go kill them all in an over the top and gory fashion.
 * Expansion Pack: Final Doom contained two of them in one stand-alone game.
 * Ultimate DOOM was a re-release of Doom featuring an additional episode.
 * Resurrection of Evil is a straight, simple expansion pack for Doom 3.
 * Except for the Xbox version, which was sold as a complete game due to being a console release.
 * Exploding Barrels: Doom II has a level full of them-- Barrels O' Fun -- a classic example.
 * Doom 3 has a variant on these with the yellow toxic barrels. Once you shoot them, they simmer for a couple seconds before exploding (though they will explode automatically if caught in the splash of another explosive).
 * Eyes of Gold: Picking up invincibility (or turning on God Mode) turns the Doomguy's eyes gold. Pinkies also have gold eyes.
 * Face Heel Turn: though whether it was before the game began or at some point during it is not made clear.
 * could be a another example too. In a log, it's said he once had been a normal human being but after he went into the portal to Hell and came back, he "changed".
 * Fake Difficulty: A lot of the difficulty in Doom 3 comes from the fact that it's very dark, and the flashlight is the only way to see what you're doing. You cannot use the flashlight and a weapon at the same time. The "Duct Tape" mod drops the difficulty by an order of magnitude merely by letting you tape the flashlight to your smaller guns; it turns out it's a lot easier to play a game when you're allowed to see where and what you're shooting.
 * The SNES port removed the ability to circle-strafe, making bigger enemies much harder to quickly defeat.
 * Fate Worse Than Death: What happens to the souls that power the Artifact? It is Hell's weapon after all, so odds are that it isn't pleasant.
 * Fire and Brimstone Hell: When you do see it. Doom 3's Hell is this, mixed with organic... flesh.
 * Mostly averted in the original game: Hell was mainly made of flesh, marble, wood, and stone. The level Mt. Erebus certainly counts, though.
 * Fireballs: They're most notably fired by imps.
 * First-Person Shooter: It's the Genre Popularizer. They were known as "Doom clones" for several years before the name "first person shooter" became common.
 * Flying Face: Lost Souls, Pain Elementals, and Cacodemons.
 * Foreboding Architecture: Dark areas and/or textures tend to contain Spectre demons.
 * If you see random spider webs and cocooned people lying around, chances are you're about to stumble on some Trites.
 * Game Mod: Lots of them for the original Dooms. Many are still created, even today.
 * Common mods for Doom 3 include some of the following:
 * "Duct Tape Mod," in response to not being able to use a gun and your flashlight at the same time.
 * "Perfected Doom 3", adding new graphics, more excitement and a shoulder mounted flashlight.
 * "Last Man Standing Coop", allowing the player to play the whole game coop, with new game modes and gameplay fixes.
 * For the original games, there are way to many mods to mention them all.
 * Many of the mods for the classic games can be found at the /idgames archive or at the numerous message boards which are still fairly active. An other alternative, would be to use a modern server browser, that comes with an auto-downloader.
 * Ghouls vs. Humans Is a mod that allows you to fight with all kinds of classes and scare the hell out of you.
 * Zdoom Wars is a first person Real Time Strategy that allows you to fight with all kinds of armies from different games.
 * Modder "Scuba Steve"'s Action Doom mods: The original is an homage to arcade action games like Contra and Metal Slug, complete with you being a One-Hit-Point Wonder, while Action Doom 2 Urban Brawl Is a Beat'Em Up like Double Dragon.
 * Batman Doom:Besides sounding awesome, it was a great technical breakthrough in the early doom days.
 * Some mods actually make it to the mainstream media because of the Rule of Fun:
 * The most recent mod, made at the height of the 2010 World Cup, gives the Doomguy a most fearsome weapon: a vuvuzela. The expression on his face is what sells it.
 * It's not the first of its kind. One previous mod added in a stereo. Sounds pathetic? Well, not even demons can withstand a Rickroll, apparently.
 * True Capitalist Doom (Based off of True Capitalist Radio) replaces the protagonist with Ghost, shotguns with "crushing cans", the BFG with a Hadoken, The CyberDemon to play the "FU Texas" song, and so forth. Ghost himself said he liked the mod.
 * Aeons of Death adds literally hundreds of new monsters, weapons, items and even character classes from many other famous FPSes, including Quake, Heretic, Hexen, and even Half-Life!
 * Version 6 also adds six of the player classes from Team Fortress 2, the Postal Dude, of all people, and even the Infected were brought into the fray, along with a Portal Run mode, and Monster Mayhem, which has you dealing with enemies spawning in every-so-often in addition to those already in the maps.
 * Brutal Doom is Exactly What It Says on the Tin -- your weapons have all received a power upgrade (and your wimpy peashooter has been replaced with an assault rifle that can fire on full automatic and is capable of scoring headshots on enemies), the action is much Bloodier and Gorier than the original game with many enemies now capable of being smeared all over the vicinity, the Berserk Pack now gives you the option of doing Fatalities on enemies, and your enemies have received an upgrade as well and are fully capable of ripping you to shreds, making gameplay a lot tougher than the original.
 * Reelism is a not-at-all-serious score-centric round-based survival mod in which an RNG slot machine activates at the beginning of each round to change up the game, altering special effects (such as flight, exploding enemies, or other gameplay-related stuff), weapon spawns (or lack thereof) and enemy types. Things tend to get very frantic, and that's before the boss that appears in the sixth round; as a time-waster that can be played in short bursts, it's a lot of fun.
 * Gatling Good: The Chain Gun. It's been a series staple and can mow down most enemies in seconds. The only time it becomes ineffective is against bosses (except for Vagary and  in Doom 3).
 * Giant Mook: Revenant, Mancubus, Hell Knight, Arch Vile, Bruiser.
 * Glass Cannon: Lost souls, which die quickly for high-level enemies but can quickly eat away a good 20% or so health if they land a hit.
 * Cherubs do an incredible amount of damage for their size. Also Pinkies, that are pretty weak and don't do much damage per hit, but attack nonstop, and fast, if close enough. Combined with the Interface Screw, they can bite away with impunity.
 * Harder Than Hard: The aptly-named "Nightmare!" difficulty, the only setting where monsters you've killed will Respawning Enemies several seconds after they die. The monsters also shoot more rapidly than on all the other difficulty levels. And cheat codes are disabled. The only good thing about it is that ammo pickups contain double the normal levels of ammo...and you will need it all.
 * "Nightmare!" difficulty wasn't even included in the earliest releases of the game. It's very hard in single player mode, but it's fine for co-op multi-player games, which let the players respawn, too. (Without their supplies, though). All levels from the two original games are completable with enough skill and/or luck, but custom levels are often not.
 * It can very easily become Unwinnable in co-op too, because players die and respawn only with the pistol. Even with 4 players, those dinky peashooters are just not fast enough to kill some mobs before they respawn on you.
 * Heroic Mime: The Doomguy (with the exception of the Comic) doesn't seem to have a whole lot to say. This may be because there is nobody to talk to.
 * But he can express himself with the great communicator.
 * In Doom II, he talks to several people through comlinks, albeit offscreen.
 * Heroic Sacrifice: Presumably
 * Hero-Tracking Failure
 * Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: The Marines wear sensible fatigues, but their body armor comes in Day-Glo Lime Green and Peacock Blue.
 * Hit Scan: All bullet-based weapons and the invisible part of the BFG's fire cycle in the first two games.
 * Homage: Doom II also had two secret levels lifted almost directly from Wolfenstein 3D, the second of which ended with an appearance by a quartet of (soon-to-be) dead Commander Keens.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Where the hell is the doomguy keeping all of those weapons?
 * Not to mention the ammo; the player can hold 50 full-sized rockets. In addition to other ammunition and weapons. Without a backpack.
 * To be fair, you can actually find backpacks. Then again these double your ammo carrying capacity. A hundred explosive warheads are rather impossible to fit inside a military grade backpack, and that is not accounting for your twenty kilos of bullets and 6 full boxes of buckshot.
 * Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Teleporting in Doom 3 will result in you seeing a . And occasionally to Hell.
 * Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels
 * In the original games:
 * I'm Too Young To Die. Double ammo, half damage taken;
 * Hey, Not Too Rough. Less enemies;
 * Hurt Me Plenty. Medium difficulty;
 * Ultra-Violence. More enemies;
 * NIGHTMARE! Enemies are twice as fast. So are their projectiles. And they respawn. At least you get double ammo.
 * In Doom 3:
 * Recruit: damage taken reduced to 60%, less enemies;
 * Marine: normal damage taken, normal enemy rate;
 * Veteran: damage taken increased to 170%; slightly higher enemy rate;
 * Nightmare: damage taken increased to three hundred percent, more enemies, and your health constantly decreases to 25 points no matter what. Know that shiny Soul Cube you got at the start of the game? You will need it.
 * Incendiary Exponent: The Lost Soul. According to the Doom II manual: "Dumb. Tough. Flies. On fire. 'Nuff said."
 * Indecisive Medium: The film adaptation has a suspicious amount of scenes shot in "first person".
 * Insurmountable Waist High Fence: Central to much of the level design of the first two games, which did not feature any kind of jumping. Later source ports added jumping, allowing players to skip huge swaths of the classic levels by simply hopping over these obstacles.
 * Interquel: The Ultimate Doom, which was published after Doom II, contained a fourth episode for the original Doom, which occurred before the events of Doom 2.
 * In the Style Of: Bobby Prince's music for the game is based on heavy metal - John Romero borrowed Prince a set of metal CDs for reference, and thus soundtrack is filled with Suspiciously Similar Songs.
 * Jump Physics: You can't jump, but you can fall fifty feet without getting hurt.
 * King Mook: The Spider Mastermind in the original games, Vagary in 3: a Queen Mook, if you will.
 * Large Ham: Betruger. So very much. He starts off overacting, and
 * Laughably Evil: The demons in Doom 3 actually have a sense of humor, believe it or not. At one point of the game, you can download instructions on how to open "Sacrificial Portals" and a few key ingredients:

"Candles must be sorted by tallest in back to shortest in front - never the other way around!""

"YOU WANT TO QUIT? THEN, THOU HAST LOST AN EIGHTH!"
 * The Legions of Hell: Your opponents.
 * Level Map Display: You can always look at a map of what you've explored so far. If you find a computer map, you can see the entire level.
 * Life Drain: A variant with the Soul Cube. When it's flung, it kills the demon and transfers all of its remaining life energy to you. Goes well with the lack of medkits late in the game.
 * Like a Badass Out of Hell: In the first game, he goes from Phobos, to Deimos, to Hell, and then back. In the sequel, he more or less destroys hell. And in Doom 64, he finally decides to stay in Hell to make sure the demons don't try to invade Earth ever again.
 * Limited Special Collectors Ultimate Edition: The Limited Collector's Edition of Doom 3 on the Xbox includes the two previous games. It also added a second secret level to the first episode.
 * Literary Allusion Title: The name Doom was chosen as a Shout-Out to Tom Cruise's pool cue in The Color of Money.
 * Lowered Monster Difficulty: In the backstory, the Redshirt Army with its heavy weapons is completely useless, yet your character can kill lower-level enemies with the pistol or shotgun.
 * But notice how you only start finding heavier weapons in later levels. They're retrieved from your former buddies who managed to survive long enough to get deeper into the bases.
 * Ludicrous Gibs: Exploding barrel, rocket or BFG plus zombie or Imp equals red splatter. Telefrag for everyone.
 * And the Soul Cube. Oh, wow, the Soul Cube.
 * And the Brutal Doom mod, naturally, takes this Up to Eleven, with many monsters, even the more powerful ones, being perfectly gibbable.
 * Mad Scientist: Dr. Malcolm Betruger, to.
 * Meaningful Name: The name of Dr. Betruger in Doom 3
 * Meat Moss: What covers the walls in Doom 3.
 * Mega Corp: Union Aerospace Corporation, and in Doom 3, Martian Buddy.
 * Interestingly, despite the mention that the UAC can operate outside of legal and moral obligations, the corrupt aspect of this trope is pretty much averted through Doom 3. The trouble was caused by a mad lone scientist who was often at ends with the Corporation's board of directors, who are smart enough to realize that uncontrollable demons running loose are not a good source of revenue, unlike a certain other corporation...
 * Menu Time Lockout: In Doom 3, you can log onto a nearby computer and read logs for 10 minutes, in the middle of a heated battle; the battle will continue after you are finished. Not so for PDAs however, so you have to clear the room first to get the code.
 * Monster Closet
 * Mook Maker: the final boss of Doom II spews out various enemies, which can telefrag you if you're not careful. And then there's the Pain Elementals, who chuck Lost Souls at you.
 * The Archviles in Doom 3 are this too, not limited by the number of corpses. Mostly because of Everything Fades.
 * Moral Guardians: Along with Grand Theft Auto and Carmageddon, this was one of the go-to scapegoats for grandstanding politicians for nearly a decade.
 * Multi Mook Melee: Many of the custom "slaughter maps" and Nintendo Hard megawads are mostly made up of these, with some fights in the infamous Deus Vult map (maps 1-4 are parts of the main map, which is map05) or the ever fun "Go 2 It", which involves a brawl against several Arachnotrons and Cyberdemons. The largest of these maps may be the infamous nuts.wad; it has so much enemies it slows down your framerate to a crawl, even if using a computer made 20 years after the original game.
 * My Brain Is Big: The Spider Mastermind and the Arachnotrons.
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast:
 * Nintendo Hard: The Plutonia Experiment, although it pales greatly in comparison to the freely-available Hell Revealed and Hell Revealed 2. Oh, and the entire game on Nightmare difficulty.
 * Not to mention Alien Vendetta, Deus Vult 1 and 2, and the ZDoom version of NeoDoom. The stupid vixens with their ridiculously-high 20000 hit points (and especially the Mega Vixen with her even-more-insanely-overblown 100,000 hit points.) alone sent the difficulty curve skyrocketing through the roof in the later levels in case all the other overpowered custom monsters didn't already do that.
 * Recently, a revised version of NeoDoom had the Vixens' health reduced dramatically. (10,000 hp for the vixens, 25k hp for the mega Vixen boss) They're still very dangerous to fight, though.
 * For an idea of how much HP that actually is for those enemies, cyberdemons only have 4,000. (and spider mastermind only having 3,000. This IS low enough for a point blank BFG-9000 blast to kill it in one shot, BTW.)
 * No Fair Cheating: Using "-turbo" prints a chat message from time to time. In the original, and most ports of it, cheat codes are disabled entirely in Nightmare difficulty, and the game will mock you when you attempt to input one.
 * No OSHA Compliance: Toxic ooze is easily accessible throughout many levels, though some of it is explained in-game by information suggesting this was due to neglect and the happenings of Dr. Betruger.
 * The strategy guide for Doom II practically calls this trope out by name: (in regard to the Radiation Suit) "OSHA may not like it, but to get the job done, you're going to have to handle some toxic waste every now and then."
 * Novelization: Four books based off Doom and Doom II. And two more based off Doom 3.
 * Oculothorax: Pain Elemental and Cacodemon.
 * One-Hit Kill
 * One-Man Army: This may be the current benchmark. Did we mention that he ?!
 * One-Winged Angel: More like Two Winged Demon. By the end of Doom 3, got a body that of a dragon, replacing his former human body. In Resurrection of Evil, he put some pretty good fight with his new powers.
 * Overdrawn At the Blood Bank
 * Painfully-Slow Projectile: Most monsters' projectile attacks move pretty slowly.
 * In ROE you're able to use the Grabber to snatch an enemy's fireball out of the air and hurl it back at it.
 * The BFG 9000, no matter the incarnation. In Doom 3, they travel so slow that you can literally shoot them out of the air before they hit you!
 * Not just limited to the monsters, Doomguy's Plasma Gun in Doom 3 has this defect. Supposedly it balances out how the Plasma Gun has a zero-degree spread when sustaining fire, but it makes the Plasma Gun horribly inefficient when fighting enemies like Lost Souls, Cacodaemons, and to a lesser extent Cherubs.
 * Path of Greatest Resistance: If a room is filled with bodies, you've already been there.
 * Phlegmings: The Hell Knights from Doom 3 have this when they roar.
 * Physical Hell: Doom's entire plot revolves around the idea that teleportation experiments on Mars resulted in portals to Hell itself, cue The Marine. Also,
 * Plagiarism: The Cacodemon is the head of the Astral Dreadnought monster taken from the cover of the Dungeons and Dragons manual, Manual of the Planes.
 * Quad Damage: The Berserk Pack multiplies fist damage by ten times. For the rest of the level. You can gib weak mooks by punching them.
 * There's a (hopefully) intentionally crappy mod out there called All Hell is Breaking Loose! Among such things as flying demons that shout "Fuck you!" and flip you off when they die, the zombie soldier gib animation is replaced with them burning to death. This means that you can set someone on fire with a punch.
 * Also the second power of the Artifact from ROE is a berserk charge that lets you one-shot any enemy in the game (except bosses) with your fists. Considering the FIRST power is Bullet Time and the THIRD power is invincibility it's obvious why the Artifact is a major league Game Breaker.
 * Rated "M" for Manly: Admit it, you've always wanted to kill demons with your bare hands. The sequel takes it Up to Eleven when
 * Reassigned to Antarctica: The Doom Guy in the original two games assaulted a superior officer who ordered him to fire on civilians. Rather than a court martial that would make them look like monsters if the reason for it got out, they decided to assign him to Mars -- a barren rock whose only notable features were scientific outposts on its moons, and which was never expected to see any sort of action.
 * Reassignment Backfire: We all know how well that turned out.
 * Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Spider Mastermind (AKA Spiderdemon).
 * Regenerating Health: Inverted in Doom 3's Nightmare difficulty, where your health constantly decreases by five points until it hits 25.
 * Ridiculous Future Sequelisation: A PDA message in Doom 3 says "The new Quake-43 game blows my mind."
 * Right-Handed Left-Handed Guns: Completely averted in the original Doom games, where the Doomguy is very notably shown to be left handed; both in the way he holds his guns, and when he's using his fists.
 * Rocket Jump: Ur Example in first-person shooters. There's no vertical lift, but it does toss you around. One secret was specifically designed to require a rocketjump... though it can be reached just by straferunning.
 * The Scapegoat: For Columbine and other school shootings.
 * Sequence Breaking: Straferunning and Arch-Vile jumps are just a few examples of sequence-breaking tricks.
 * Memorizing some of the security codes in Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil can do anything from unlocking powerful weapons early to circumventing an entire PDA hunt.
 * Serial Escalation How many devices can this game be ported to?
 * If that's not enough, a fan-made GZDoom mod ports the console-specific graphics, music, sounds and other features of Play Station doom to the PC. There is also Doom 64: Absolution, a fan-made port of Doom 64 that's about 98% accurate, using the Doomsday engine. This has essentially allowed people to make custom levels for Doom 64 as well as play it without access to an N64.
 * Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: A vital survival technique, especially in levels with more monsters than you can shake a boomstick at.
 * The first area of E3M1 didn't have enough ammunition to kill all the Beef Gates. It was punch them to death, or get them fighting each other. Since Imps and Cacodemons both had ranged attacks, getting them to hit each other was relatively easy. Then the retaliation started...
 * E2M9, the secret level in the second episode, had two rooms. One with Barons of Hell, the other with Cacodemons. Again, the trick was to get them fighting each other, then maneuver for survival. (Lampshaded in the novels.)
 * Map 8 of Doom 2 has a room with a Cyberdemon and several Barons of Hell facing away from you. The trick? Cause infighting to dispose of one group, then take down what's left. No wonder it's called Tricks And Traps.
 * Map 20 of Doom 2 contained a large antechamber with a Cyberdemon and a Spider Mastermind on two opposite platforms. No prizes for guessing the easiest way to waste them both. The level is appropriately named 'Gotcha!'
 * This sequence exists mostly to try and answer the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny-style question of who would win. (It's usually the Cyberdemon, but the Spider Mastermind's odds improve in inverse proportion to the distance between them. Gotcha! is just on the Cyberdemon's side, although Spidey does sometimes win.)
 * Shareware: One of the most well known examples.
 * Doom is probably the one title above all others which destroyed forever the "shareware is shareware because it's nowhere near good enough to sell at retail" myth. It was the first shareware product ever to be reviewed in the main pages of British PC Format magazine, instead of being relegated to the shareware section.
 * Shoot the Medic First: The Archvile in Doom II can revive fallen foes, so killing this guy first is essential. However, he can also deal out a ton of damage with his line-of-sight attack. In ZDoom, it is possible to create enemies that can resurrect fallen foes via Decorate. Again, death for these guys should be top priority.
 * Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The original screws you over twice:
 * First, after defeating the Barons of Hell in the final level of the first episode, the only way out is through the teleporter... . Specifically,, but since Deimos was mysteriously teleported The debriefing text really drives it home: "Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base, you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you? Where's your fat reward and ticket home? What the Hell is this? It's not supposed to end this way!"
 * And of course, the end of episode three. The Space Marine escapes from Hell and returns to Earth... only to find that the demons he had been fighting have already invaded. Cue the sequel.
 * Short-Range Shotgun: While the original pump-action shotgun was an aversion of this, the double-barreled shotgun from Doom II was probably the Trope Maker and it was played completely straight in Doom 3.
 * Shout-Out: The Wolfenstein 3D levels in Doom II. One of them even have dead Commander Keens hanging in the ceiling.
 * On the source port side, ZDoom has the developer's console cheat "anubis". Typing it in and pressing enter results in every monster in the game fleeing at the sight of you. Why? Because the message displayed when you hit enter is QUAKE WITH FEAR. Typing "anubis" again and hitting enter deactivates the fear effect with the message "No more Ogre Armor".
 * Also, the ancient Martian panel showing off  is actually a recreation of the manual above. Parts of the mural are broke off (notably heads), though.
 * In the film, Dwayne Johnson actually had to fight to keep the "BFG" reference. There's also Pinky (who gets chainsawed), a Hellknight, and Reaper saying "Hell on Earth".
 * Doom 3 had Nabcom retro arcade consoles scattered about the early levels. This included one console you could actually play, Turbo Turkey Puncher, a Game Within a Game based on graphics from the original Doom games.
 * Doom II has this:


 * Episode 4 of Ultimate Doom and all the levels within, excluding the secret one, have names based on biblical verses.
 * Doom II was released the same year Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun. MAP21: Nirvana has a shotgun in the very first sector.
 * Sighted Guns Are Low Tech: How exactly would one aim any of the guns in the third game in Real Life?
 * None of the weapons in classic DOOM except the pistol and the shotguns have sights, either.
 * Slave Mooks: The zombies in all of the games.
 * Smoldering Shoes: The Cyberdemon's death animation in the original series.
 * A Space Marine Is You: Possibly the Ur Example, although most of the cliches are only found in the backstory from the game manual.
 * Speed Run: These games developed one of the earliest online speedrunning fanbases.
 * Splash Damage: The always venerable rocket launcher, along with the classic Exploding Barrels. BFG, the biggest gun in the game, does not deal blast damage in the traditional sense though, instead firing a cone of invisible beams when the main projectile hits anything.
 * Spider Tank: The Spider Mastermind(s) and the Arachnotrons.
 * Standard FPS Guns: Fists, Chainsaw, Pistol, Shotgun, Chaingun, Rocket Launcher, Plasma Rifle, BFG. Doom was very important in creating/popularizing this one.
 * Stock Sound Effects: Pretty much everything, from the monster roars to the launch sound of the monster spawn cubes in MAP30 (all three of the officially-published Maps 30), thanks to iD licensing sound FX from the Sound Ideas library. This is why all, or nearly all, of the FX used in Doom sound familiar to movie buffs; they've been used in many movies and TV shows, both before Doom and since. In fact, one of the stock sounds is known today as Doom Doors.
 * The Stoic: The marine from Doom 3. Never shows any form of emotion on his face, even fear, just frowns when new sorts of monsters appear. The only time he shows fear is when he meets the Cyberdemon.
 * He probably just realized it must have huge guts.
 * Strange Secret Entrance: Some of hidden levels in the series are like this. For example, getting to one secret level required you to blow yourself off a ledge by firing your rocket launcher into a wall at point blank range.
 * Summon Bigger Fish: See Set a Mook to Kill a Mook above. If you can get powerful monsters to fight each other or mow down cannon fodder, you can save yourself a lot of trouble.
 * Surprisingly-Sudden Death: The first time you see a Lost Soul in Doom 3, it rips itself away from within a female scientist's head.
 * Switching POV: The first novel is told entirely from Fly's point of view. From the second novel onwards, the POV switches between Fly, Arlene, and occasionally the supporting characters.
 * Tele Frag: Just like "frag", it was also first coined in Doom multi-player matches. Some Doom levels allow you to telefrag monsters (e.g., E4M2 in Ultimate Doom). Doom II's final boss can also telefrag you if its monster-spawning projectile makes its impact right where you're standing.
 * If you're playing Doom 3's co-op mod, telefrags are possible (yes, STILL) at the beginning of the level if your teammate spawns on top of you. Seen here, as Grah kersplats Draikk simply by materializing.
 * Telefrags also ignore whether the telefragged is invulnerable or not and just outright splats them. To be exact, "invulnerable" (whether by Power-Up or by God Mode cheat) means "immune to attacks scoring 1000 Hit Points or less of damage", but a telefrag does 10,000 HP damage.
 * Teleporter Accident: A teleporter breaches hell in the backstory.
 * And they just plain fail in Doom 3.
 * "He went to one dimension, his ass went to another."
 * Teleporting Keycard Squad: More often than not, you can expect to find a horde of demons swarming upon you when you pick up a keycard.
 * Trope Codifier: For the FPS genre. For years, all FPS games were known as "Doom clones".
 * The rude, manly space marine has become ubiquitous since then.
 * To Hell and Back: Once per game.
 * Unwinnable By Mistake:
 * E2M4: If you go for the yellow key, retreat, and return, the crushing ceiling is permanently lowered; you can no longer reach said key. Later versions remember the original height of crushing ceilings (and you can still activate said crusher if you rub against the local area.)
 * "Dead Simple" from Doom II: The central stair raises once you kill all Arachnotrons. If played on Nightmare, Arachnotrons can respawn and be killed off again, allowing you to raise the central stairs out of reach.
 * "Pharaoh", the first secret level from TNT: Evilution, is Unwinnable in single-player mode, but not co-op mode. This is due to the yellow key being marked as "Multiplayer-Only". (But you can still complete it using straferuning, an engine bug.)
 * You can patch your TNT-iWad with Doom Patcher. It will create an iWad without said bug.
 * "Even Simpler" from Doom 64 is basically a remake of "Dead Simple," only with Pain Elementals thrown in. You have to kill every enemy, including the Lost Souls they shoot out, to advance. If they're killed next to some walls, however, the Souls they are supposed to shoot out get sucked into the walls, making it impossible to kill them.
 * Unwitting Pawn:
 * The Walls Have Eyes: Some wall sprites have moving walls of faces staring at you, and in later episodes/levels of Doom the switches are now stone heads whose eyes glow when you hit them on. Other switches are are just eyes protruding out of fleshy patches, closing when activated.
 * Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Archvile is an evil healer. His death sound is a girl saying "why?" (much distorted); he wonders why on earth anyone would want to kill him, since from his point of view he's only doing good (by resurrecting dead monsters).
 * He's also trying to burn you to death in the meantime, which he apparently can't imagine you'd be upset about.
 * He heals DEMONS. Their healing animation uses similar fire to the one he uses to damage you. He's trying to heal you, too.
 * Who Forgot the Lights?: Doom 3 is widely thought of as suffering from this; in particular, the "duct tape mod" that allows weapon-mounted flashlights remains the most popular download for the game.
 * THERE'S NO DUCT TAPE ON MARS.
 * You Have Failed Me: Surprisingly averted for once. While it seems that suffer this fate by the end of Doom 3, the Expansion Pack Resurrection of Evil revealed that not only did the demons gave him a safe sanctuary in Hell so that he wouldn't suffer from human retaliations, despite his plans failing, but they also gave him a new, stronger and aerial-able demonic body and supernaturnal powers as well a commanding rank in the demonic hierarchy.
 * You Keep Using That Word: Doom started the trend of misusing the word "chaingun" to refer to rotary guns; a chaingun is actually a single-barrel weapon which operates its bolt with an electrically-driven chain.