As befitting a game with episode titles such as “Knee-Deep in The Dead,” “The Shores of Hell,” and “Inferno,” the lore of the landmark first-person shooter, Doom, was embattled from its inception. Co-founders of Id Software, Tom Hall and John Carmack not only had different visions for what their follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D would be about, but strongly disagreed about the very role and significance stories played in videogames. Hall built a massive narrative design document for Doom, dubbed “The Doom Bible,” while Carmack believed that story was ultimately unimportant window dressing that was secondary to action.
Thus began the long road to last year’s Doom Eternal—a title whose lore is so convoluted even fan-created wikis cannot come to a hard consensus on what is and is not canon. Though the Id team drew influence from Dungeons & Dragons, Evil Dead, Aliens, and Metallica, Carmack’s initial idea was simply using sci-fi technology to fight demons. Hall’s bible told an elaborate story somewhere between the original Half-Life and the sci-fi horror film Event Horizon, where science-gone-wrong creates a portal to hell. The bones of this premise survived, but Hall’s bible and its intricate character-driven story did not, ultimately leading to his departure from Id.
Despite Id’s founding team following Carmack’s action-first direction with the first title in the franchise, Doom Eternal has dizzyingly complex lore with ligatures to most of the preceding games, including Doom 3 and Doom (2016) which respectively retconned and soft-rebooted the series. Despite the Doom franchise’s occasionally incoherent logic and extremely limited characterization, the worldbuilding in play is richly developed and a lot of fun. And parsing how each installment of the franchise fits together is something of a game in and of itself.
Doom is at the top of the list of games that deserve a silent protagonist. In the first title, Doomguy was merely a last man standing—A mortal marine stranded on an experimental research facility on Mars, who must fight his way through legions of demons and undead humans warped by hell’s influence. The only other story in Doom 1993, relayed through the instruction manual and snippets of text between levels, is that Doomguy earned his Martian post as a punishment for assaulting a superior officer. That, and the Martian facility is run by the Union Aerospace Corporation—one of the series’ most reliable constants—whose scientists were experimenting with teleportation when they accidentally opened a rift to hell.
This story remains consistent and fairly simplistic in the first sequel, Doom II: Hell on Earth, mirroring the structure of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, with the first episode focused on escaping Mars, and the second episode focused on saving Earth. The rest of the game’s plot boils down to escaping from one area to another, obtaining key cards, and killing a whole lot of demons. And while there isn’t a lot of depth there, the luminary tech developer Carmack, was right: Doom’s gameplay was so revolutionary that a rich story likely would have served as a distraction.
Doom 3, which was released in 2004, is where things get interesting. The game was initially intended to serve as a reboot of the franchise that ignores the events of the first two games, though in the mobile game, Doom RPG (which itself may or may not be canon, depending on one’s viewpoints), it is retroactively referred to as a prequel to the first two Doom games. Things get wilder with the launch of Doom (2016), which serves as another apparent reboot of the franchise with the same “portal to hell on Mars” premise, with one subtle but important distinction. In Doom (2016), Doomguy, now sometimes referred to as the “Doom Marine” or “the Doom Slayer,” is discovered in a sarcophagus through the portal to hell, and excavated like an artifact.
The implications of this change are not fully appreciated, however, until Doom Eternal, when it is strongly hinted that the events of Doom 3, Doom, and Doom 2, and the seeming spin-off, Doom 64, all preceded the events of Doom (2016). At some point after Doom 64 (which may take place in a parallel dimension), Doomguy is injured during his eternal battle in hell, nursed back to health by the Night Sentinels. The Night Sentinels, also known as Argenta, are a human-like warrior race from a planet called Argent D’Nur. It is at this point, that Doomguy becomes the Doom Slayer, a messianic figure with supernatural abilities aside from his gifts for firearms, though he is also influenced by the extra-dimensional Maykr race that features in Doom Eternal.
At some point after his time with the Night Sentinels, Doomguy is imprisoned in hell before being excavated by UAC’s leader, Samuel Hayden, kicking off the continuity that culminates in Doom Eternal. The precise order of the earlier Doom titles is subject to debate in the game’s fan community and paradoxical gaps in continuity are suspected to exist due to the possible existence of multiple different earths. So while Doomguy is confirmed to be fundamentally human—and, according to certain Easter eggs, the possible the ancestor of Wolfenstein protagonist, BJ Blazkowicz—it is unclear which version of Earth he is from.
This is only a partial summary of the current state of Doom‘s canon, and it ignores several other takes on the game’s narrative, including the critically-savaged 2008 Dwayne Johnson Doom movie, the first game’s initial, four-book novelization, and the RPG spin-offs, which, despite playing an important role in clarifying Doom’s chronology, are not necessarily canon themselves.
While its narrative elements never intrude upon Doom Eternal‘s action-packed gameplay, as per Carmack’s advice, the game’s lore features intricate worldbuilding on a massive scale, spanning different planar dimensions, lost Martian societies that long-predate the UAC’s colonies, and more. With its lack of emotional stakes and character growth, and elements of absurdism (according to Easter eggs, Doomguy’s feud with hell allegedly started when demons killed his pet rabbit, Daisy—seriously) Doom cannot be considered a brilliant work of video game storytelling. Rather, it is like a work of bombastic heavy metal album art come to life.
It is also undeniably fun, and proof that there is something to be said for refusing to grow up. And that may explain why Doom (1993) holds up as well as it does.
Doom Eternal is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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