Have you ever been playing the original Doom and stopped to look at one of the weird faces that dot the many walls in the game? Or maybe looked at your gun closely and thought about how it was made?
Well, it turns out that id Software used an old book by author Stephen King and photographer f-stop Fitzgerald and a bunch of toy guns to create a lot of the art found in Doom.
Doom superfan and Youtuber decino uploaded a video recently going over all of this and much more. Doom’s graphics are filled with little secrets, quirks and leftover content. Like a pile of bodies that never got used in the game.
Some of the wall textures in the game that look like human skin were actually created by using a photograph of Kevin Cloud’s arms. Kevin was one of the artists at id during the development of Doom. In fact, Kevin is still at id and still working on Doom. He helped create Snapmap in Doom (2016).
Many different textures and gun sprites in Doom were created using photos of toy guns. For example, a toy chaingun was used to create the chaingun. Less obviously, it was also used to create wall textures, lamps, and some pillars. A machine gun toy was used to create the Plasma gun and a ray gun toy was used to create the BFG. In each case, id didn’t just take a photo and slap it into the game. They instead used bits of the toys, combined them with other artwork or flipped them around.
The full video is filled with even more interesting facts about the iconic art and graphics of Doom. A lot of this information has floated around the web for years, but it is nice to have it all collected into a single video.
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