Doom Turns 21, John Romero Celebrates by Showing How It Was Made

One of the ancestors of the first-person shooter genre, Doom, is turning 21 today, and its creator John Romero is sharing a ton of unseen artwork from its heyday.

After essentially creating the first-person shooter with Wolfenstein 3D, telling the story of a grizzled US marine intent on taking down the Fuhrer and his Nazi war machine during the time of World War 2, developer id Software moved on to another, even more ambitious project.

Doom was for many a cornerstone experience, blending fast-paced action and tense, suspenseful moments with an unbridled creativity and powerful imagery.

People who are old enough to have experienced it can surely attest to the haunting quality of the stomping noises made by the Cyberdemon, relentlessly sending explosive rockets your way.

For its time, Doom was state of the art, and had many great ideas that became staples today, as well as some very hard to forget cheat codes, such as the case of idspispopd, which enabled no clipping mode.

The game also made a return on iOS back in 2011, and many gamers made first contact with it back then, getting the chance to experience Doom firsthand.

The title used secret passages and primitive lighting techniques to great effect, managing to offer a genuinely scary experience.

The overall aesthetic also helped to achieve that, as the game featured a ton of industrial areas, and weird, creepy biomechanical textures and monsters.

Spider Megamind and Mancubus

21 years' worth of good memories

John Romero, one of the minds behind Doom, has been celebrating the shooter's 21st anniversary by sharing a bunch of never-before-seen artwork from the days of yore on Twitter.

Romero has provided an instant trip to the past for many, while revealing some interesting aspects of the process of game design from back in 1993, when pencil sketches were scanned in order to be turned into in-game textures, and when clay models of the various demons were scanned and then made into actual characters.

Back then, the BFG 9000, the ultimate in-game weapon, fired so many colored plasma balls that it actually slowed down the computer, according to Romero.

One of the creepier beasts was by far the Pinky Demon, a melee adversary that usually happened to get right behind you from a secret compartment in a nearby wall, all angry and full of sharp teeth and horns, not to mention completely naked. Creepy.

Romero has revealed that Pinky was actually drawn over a video scan of a dinosaur toy, in order to get the movement and posture right.

Hopefully, the Doom reboot that id Software is working on right now will use more advanced technology. You can watch its QuakeCon 2014 trailer below.