If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Doomdump: Unseen Treats From Romero's Archives

Unused and unseen Doom art

Alice O'Connor avatar
News by Alice O'Connor Associate Editor
Published on

"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.

Topics in this article

Follow topics and we'll email you when we publish something new about them.  Manage your notification settings .

Subscribe to the Rock Paper Shotgun Daily newsletter

Get each day's biggest PC gaming stories delivered direct to your inbox.

About the Author
Alice O'Connor avatar

Alice O'Connor

Associate Editor

Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.

Comments
Rock Paper Shotgun logo

We've been talking, and we think that you should wear clothes

Total coincidence, but we sell some clothes

Buy RPS stuff here
Rock Paper Shotgun Merch