Doomdump: Unseen Treats From Romero's Archives
Unused and unseen Doom art
"HAPPY 21ST BIRTHDAY, DOOM!" John Romero tweeted yesterday. "In honor of this legal drinking age birthday, I'm about to release some never-before-seen DOOM game art!"
I know what you're thinking - "21 years old! The US drinking age is barbaric." Then you pause and realise "Wait, never-before-seen Doom art? Ooh!" And yes, it is splendid. Since then, the id co-founder has shared treasures including scans of the clay models id turned into monster sprites, and all sorts of abilities, textures, and gore that never made it into Doom. It's a joyous Doomdump.
Now, I might simply point you to Romero's timeline, but Twitter's ephemeral nature means all these things will soon scroll down out of sight. So let's embed them and have a nice big colourful post. You can download high-res versions of many from his Dropbox too. I think I might've seen a few of these before, or maybe similar pieces, but it's still a tweet-o-treat-a-rama. Tweets, go!
Let's start out with the scans. Lots of Doom's sprites were based on scanned objects, some items they found and some clay models sculpted by Adrian Carmack (no relation to John).
Gregor Punchatz was behind other models, including Doom II's new enemies.
Well, most of Doom II's new enemies.
Several weapons were based on scans.
Some objects were scanned to use in level textures too.
And some artwork started out as sketches on paper.
Now onto unused stuff, much of which the Doom community is already busy converting to finally bring to Doom. Getting new id stuff for Doom after all these years is pretty weird and cool.
He's shared early and test versions of things too.
And back to those fine models.
Bless 'em.