John Romero on Doom: The Dark Ages and how they rejected the Aliens IP for the original Doom

The creation of the original Doom in 1993 is of course a crucial chapter in the history of video games and was recently recollected in the book Doom Guy: Life in First Person by John Romero, as the biographical volume was released to celebrate its 30-year anniversary. The other day we caught up with the autor and Doom co-creator in Cascais within the framework of DevGAMM, and there we looked at both the game's origins and how it has been transformed through the years.

One thing about the original Doom some know, some others don't, is how it was offered to become an officially-licensed Alien game, but among other things, the team behind the soon-to-become a classic found the idea a tad too generic.

"Before Doom, we did go through a Nazi castle and blow up Nazis", Romero starts retelling in the Gamereactor video interview below. "No other game, other than Castle Wolfenstein, no other game did that. So in 3D for a new generation, it was a great idea. And then with Doom, it was like, well, when you go into space, it's always finding aliens. What if you found hell instead? So it's like the science versus religion bit in there. So it was interesting. We're going so far into experimentation with portals and teleporting that we find hell. Like, oh my God, it really exists! (Laughs) So that was a really unique idea".

"And then when we get the offer to take the experience of what Doom was and turn it into an Alien franchise type game", he continues. "So when we were looking at the idea of using Alien as the franchise idea around the experience of what Doom is, the biggest problem was dealing with a movie company and the creative control that would be taken away from us. And we never did that before. And then it was like, why would we make Alien's IP more valuable and not make our own IP, [our own] intellectual property? That didn't make any sense. We're creating our own world and our franchise. Why would we just give it all to them? So forget it. And so it was only 30 minutes of discussion".

After talking about space and hell we asked Romero to share his thoughts about the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages game and the medieval fantasy setting.

"We made Heretic and Hexen, which are the medieval shooters back then", he reminds us proudly. "And it was because I wanted to see... We love Dungeons & Dragons. And it's like, what would high speed D&D look like? Because we've never seen that before. Everything in the past was like, you know, the SSI gold box games. Everything is like step based. Everything is slow turn-based stuff. It's like high speed medieval, I want to see that. And that's why Heretic was created, you know, with Raven. And Hexen was the sequel to that, even harder game to play. But it was great. It was the beginning of being able to play something that was in the medieval time period, the Dark Ages, at a high speed. And now we have, of course, Doom: The Dark Ages. That's going to be coming out soon. So you get to see, to me, I think it's the Army of Darkness version of Doom. Like modern character coming back to the past and mowing them all down (Laughs)."

Romero is now preparing a brand-new FPS (more details here) and, in the full interview, he also shares how shocked he was when he saw the original Doom running on a pregnancy stick.

Are you looking forward to playing Doom: The Dark Ages? And what do you think would have happened if the original game had actually become Doom: Aliens?