'I like making Doom games': Doom: The Dark Ages won't be the end, says director Hugo Martin

Doomslayer pointing a large gun at a larger demon — (Image credit: id Software)

Doom has been with us for a long time. The original arrived in 1993—32 years ago, if you can believe it—and after a pair of sequels and a long stretch of silence, it returned in 2016 with a powerful reboot that cemented its claim as gaming's greatest FPS. Now the sixth game in the series, Doom: The Dark Ages, is almost upon us, and with trilogies being a popular thing in popular media, you might reasonably wonder if it represents a conclusion of any sort. The answer, according to id Software creative director Hugo Martin, is a simple no.

"It isn't designed to be the end of something," Martin said during a recent preview event.

Which isn't to suggest developers are looking ahead to the next step in the Doom narrative—"genuinely, sincerely, we're really just focused on this right now," he continued—but Doom: The Dark Ages isn't "a period on the end of a sentence."

That's good news for Doom fans, but shouldn't come as a great shock, and not just because the big-budget videogame business lives and dies on sequels. Doom is not what you'd call a narrative heavyweight: 'There's demons and you gotta shoot 'em' is pretty much the sum total of the story, and while id has loaded up the more recent games with lore, it's not particularly vital to the experience. I mean, this is the entirety of the game description currently on Steam:

That's it, that's the whole thing—but it's also all you really need to know, right? This is Doom. You know what you're here for, and you know it's never going to really be over. The irony is that its absentminded handwaving at a plot makes the Doom games very similar in at least one way to another shooter that does lean heavily into narrative: There are always demons, there's always a man, there's always guns.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.