Generative AI is a hot-button topic in the industry, and for good reason—it's been kinda destructive, whether that's jacking up hardware prices or putting people out of a job—and while there have been some fairly mundane use cases that seem helpful, it's been hard to escape the sheer sense of mania that's built around its use. Or the bad PR, juiced out of the sheer exhaustion we've all had from executives promising the matrix or something.

So, naturally, it came up in a conversation with Tim Willits, the CCO of Saber Interactive and also the co-owner id Software from 1995-2019. Speaking to PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens at Gamescom 2026, he notes that: "As most people know, we are experimenting with AI in future games. We don't have it here right now, but we announced [Rideshare Simulator] and I want to clarify things because there's some misconceptions."

If you're wondering why we're talking about a Rideshare sim, here's some context: Saber landed in hot water earlier this month over it, because it seemingly delayed its AI disclosures on Steam for a while, and was exposed as using AI by a former writer who claims they were booted off the team in favour of it.

That same writer was badmouthed by Saber's CEO Matthew Karch, who later apologised. Willits says that Rideshare's main campaign mode and all of its side missions are written by humans, and the AI components are only used for an optional game mode called Free Ride: "We're going to use AI for the passengers, so we can deliver new stories.

"So that is only possible if we use AI for that—this is an experiment. We at Saber want to figure out how we can use this technology, so we're doing it at a small scale to try to learn. We're like everyone else, we're just trying to figure this out. But there is no generative AI in our big titles. No Hellraiser, no Turok, none in Stuntman."

I feel like an asterisk has to hang over that "only possible"—while, yes, churning an infinite stream of dialogue for an optional mode is only possible with generative AI, a free ride mode with enough conversations for it to not grow stale absolutely could've been cobbled together with actual writers and voice actors. Sure, you'd run out eventually, but I don't think anyone's hungry to make Rideshare Simulator their forever game.

Still, Willits emphasises: "We want to experiment, and I do believe that there will be a company—I don't know who—but some game development company will create a game that uses AI in such an amazing way that everyone will be like, 'That's it, that's what we need to do'." He then goes on to joke that "someone needs to come up with the 'Half Life 2 of AI', something that's so amazing that it just launches some type of killer app."

I remain characteristically unconvinced, though in fairness to Willits, I do at least think that—if generative AI does find a use as the core of a videogame—it'll probably be a new genre of its own, rather than trying to create an infinite RPG with infinite NPCs. An act which would just shake out to make something unappealing and meaningless.

The thing that makes me cynical is we keep watching money being burned and datacenters being built precisely because the tech doesn't really seem all that useful for anything other than busywork. When it takes centre-stage, it produces voice acting that's bland, writing that's terrible, and art devoid of direction or memorability, even as it gets more technically proficient.

I'll eat my artificially-generated hat with a side of humble pie if Willits' "Half-Life 2 of AI" game materialises, but a lot of people have swung at that ball and missed, and each time I feel like the bat is a little smaller. Still, Willits says that id Software probably would've used generative AI if it was a thing back in the day—because the studio was always at the cutting edge.

"Yes! Oh, of course. I mean, look at what [id Software] has done. In 1999, when we released Quake 3, it required a graphics card, and we got so much hate for that. People said we were going to ruin the industry. Nobody was going to spend $100 on a video card, and it was the dumbest thing that anyone ever did … I know for sure back in the day if it was available, John Carmack would be like making Skynet or something."

Still, to be fair to Willits, he seems to share my view that the game'll have to prove that generative AI can change the industry itself, rather than via the promises of a CEO somewhere: "The games will speak for themselves, even in our experiment with Rideshare, I encourage people to check it out when it comes out, play it themselves. They may be like 'oh, this is cool! I like this'. And if they don't like it? Fine. And but the games speak for themselves."

It takes a brave soul to ask the question "What if Doom was an incredibly slow-moving tactical shooter?" In fact, it's not a question I ever thought I'd want an answer to—we aren't exactly short of grim-faced, hyper-lethal first-person shooters these days. But the most recent footage of Blackout has convinced me that tactical Doom might be a good idea, if only because its dark and dangerous demo looks so darned terrifying.

Blackout is a work-in-progress mod built for Doom source ports Zandronum and UZDoom, currently available in playable alpha. Created by modder PKmX, it's designed to provide "tactical military simulation-based gameplay that focuses on slow methodical clearing", according to a breakdown posted on the ZDoom forums, with players expected to "hide behind covers and execute proper breaching techniques to maximise chances of survival."

The mod makes several radical changes to Doom's basic playstyle. Movement is much slower, while your character is significantly more fragile. Weapons are based on real-life firearms that feature ADS and reloading, with damage and recoil that reflects their calibre, fire-rate, and so forth.

The enemies you face remain classic Doom monsters, but PKmX says their behaviours have been "tweaked to suit tactical gameplay". Attacks are deadlier but take longer to charge, and they can both suppress you and be suppressed by you. There's also a stealth and awareness system where gunfire draws monsters to your location, while remaining quiet may enable you to sneak past enemies unseen.

In motion, Blackout reminds me a lot of Stalker, with relatively slow movement but highly reactive (and vicious) gunplay. Surprisingly though, this isn't the inspiration that PKmX cites. Apparently, Blackout draws significantly from Crysis, right down to featuring an energy suit inspired by Crytek's nanosuit. Not only does this feature a damage-absorbing energy shield and an "adrenaline system" that provides a speed boost when near death, but it also includes a cloaking device which temporarily makes the player "almost undetectable" by enemies.

I think this goes a long way to explain why Blackout looks as good as it does. While Blackout is clearly a more methodical shooter than Doom, the emphasis remains on action and combat rather than the strategy and resource management layer of other tactical shooters. Indeed, a commenter on PKmX's video asks whether the game will feature magazine management, to which the modder responds "one of the goals of this mod is to avoid becoming an inventory simulator."

If you fancy giving Blackout a go yourself, you can download it via the Doomworld forums. PkmX also recommends several other mods to enhance the experience, including a palette mod to make levels darker, which certainly seems to fit with Blackout's tone.

Remember CD-ROMs? Those were the days, ey? You had to put a spinning disc in the front of your PC to install the games you physically bought and paid for. Actually, in the case of the Quake shareware CD-ROM, it was stuffed full of games you didn't buy, too.

That's according to Fabien Sanglard, who's written a blog post on the curious case of the Quake shareware CD release. The game itself took up a mere 22 MB of a CD-ROM's 640 MB capacity, leading John Carmack to joke that if there was ever a CD version of Doom, it would come with a "Making of Doom" feature film to use up the entire capacity.

However, it was decided that all that extra space could be put to better use instead—by including locked versions of id Software's entire back catalogue of games. The idea being, you could gain access to the games by calling a hotline, paying for them over the phone, and then putting in an unlock code. Just like you could when unlocking the shareware version of Quake into the full release.

In the days before proper digital game distribution (and for many, decent internet connections), this was likely seen as a stroke of genius. However, there was one fatal flaw. Yes, you guessed it. Those dastardly pirates have struck again.

Just 39 days after the CD-ROM's release, Quakecrk.zip emerged on the interwebs. Contained inside was Qcrack.exe, a tool which allowed users to merrily generate codes that would decrypt every single game.

The technical details go a little bit above my head, but I'll try to explain it the best I can. When attempting to unlock a game, the CD-ROM's GUI provided a code number, which was then supposed to be relayed to a phone agent. The agent would then provide a serial number, which the user would enter, granting access to a game.

However, the serial number obtained over the phone was merely a way to inform the unlock program that payment had been made. Said unlock program was capable of generating valid serial numbers all on its own, and merely checked to see if the locally-generated serial and the serial entered by the user matched.

Which meant a cracked program could create a valid serial using a generated code number in the same way, and voila, access to id Software's entire back catalogue (in 1996, anyway) was yours.

Sanglard has also found a quote from David Kushner's Masters of Doom regarding the whole fiasco:

"Gamers wasted no time hacking the shareware to unlock the full version of the game for free. Worse, all the mundane aspects of distribution and order fulfilment were spinning out of control. In a desperate measure, id tried to put the brakes on the retail shareware, but it was too late. They were stuck with almost 150,000 CDs sitting in a warehouse."

So, the whole thing was pretty much a disaster. While gamers could pick up the shareware release of Quake for around $10 from retail stores, those in the know could use it to gain access to not just the full version of Quake, but a whole heap of other games for no extra cost.

Worse still, the pirated experience was technically better than the legitimate one. Sanglard has dug around inside the Quake shareware CD file structure and found several glaring errors, including the fact that Final Doom could not be accessed by calling the unlock center because of a small typo in the filename:

"There is a typo in SKU.17 which makes GAME-ID 12 correspond to codename 'Final' (with a capital F). This makes the serial generation retrieve the wrong doc. The correct value was 'final'. This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers."

A scenario that may ring true for some today. Anyway, lessons were learned, and I'd imagine that many curse words were used in the id Software offices when all this was discovered. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I might go and have a blast through Quake myself. It's been a while since I've played the original, so I think I'm ready to make up for some lost time.

Quake mappers are absolutely killing it in celebration of Quake's 30^th birthday. The Quake community has been running map jams of varying themes all year. In the last few months there have been two 'Quickie' speedmapping jams, a 1024 Jam where contributors had to build maps of 1024 units cubed, and a Limits Jam, with the fun restriction that submitted maps had to use the same technical and design limitations as the original Quake campaign.

Now, the Quake community has brought another bloodstained birthday present to Quake's afterparty with Q30 Deathmatch Jam. Organised by Quake mappers Annihilazor & Infiniti, the map-pack adds 22 new arenas designed specifically to be played with regular old Quake.

The maps run the gamut of Quake's interdimensional settings, ranging from gothic castles through sci-fi kill-zones to an industrial brown sewer called The Filth Pit. Numerous notable designers from the fan community have taken part, including a collaborative map called Overflow by Mazu and Makkon. The latter was one of the organisers of the excellent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, while the former designed that Jam's showstopper map—a five hour long mini-campaign with its own internal story.

If you want to give the maps a whirl yourself, Q30 Deathmatch Jam is designed to work with numerous modern Quake sourceports, including Ironwail, Netquake or Nightdive's Kex port as seen in the Quake Remaster. In each case you can play it as a standalone mod by dropping the folder straight into your Quake directory and using the in-game console to call it up. If you want to play online via Netquake or QuakeWorld servers however, you'll need to copy the map, loc files, and skybox data into the relevant folders of your competitive multiplayer install.

None of this is to mention all the other Quake-related events that have happened this year. As mentioned, January had barely begun when the community released Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a massive mod themed around concrete megastructures which was essentially a new FPS in all but name.

Then, at QuakeCon id Software launched a brand new episode for Quake, developed in collaboration with Machine Games to celebrate the shooter's 30^th anniversary. While Microsoft's brutal layoffs cast a pall over the proceedings, Dawn of the Machine is nonetheless a fantastic collection of maps, and a worthy successor to Machine Games' Dimension of the Machine from 2021.

The recently concluded QuakeCon was a big one, marking the 30th anniversary of the game that started it all and, more notably, bringing id Software co-founders Adrian Carmack, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero together for the first time in a very long time.

I had wondered, in the lead-up to the event, if it might get a little awkward or uncomfortable: Differences between the Johns were "over-dramatized" over the years, according to Romero Games co-founder Brenda Romero, but Adrian Carmack filed a lawsuit over his removal from the studio back in 2005, and other internal conflicts over the years led to the dismissal of well-liked employees like American McGee and Paul Steed. The more recent layoffs of Xbox that left the studio in varying states of "gutted," depending on who you ask, also threatened to overshadow the whole thing.

So, you know: you wonder.

Now that everything is wrapped up, I'm happy to report that if there was any awkwardness or discomfort between the studio's famed founders, everyone kept it to themselves and they all seemed to have a really good time. "QuakeCon was fantastic this year, especially reuniting with the original founders!" John Carmack wrote on X.

Adrian Carmack, who I will note for the record (again) is no relation, shared the post and added his own enthusiasm for the moment. "This was one of the best times of my life. Truly. I haven’t seen John Carmack in 20 years. I was so damn excited and it surpassed my expectations. We haven’t all been together since 94. Damn."

Tom Hall reposted a clip of himself and the Johns looking at an archive of old Doom design notes, calling the experience "amazing."

Romero Games shared a photo on Bluesky accompanied by a lovely message: "Thank you so much for the best weekend ever."

Thank you so much for the best weekend ever. ❤️

— @romerogames.bsky.social (@romerogames.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-10T20:05:06.492Z

In a particularly nice touch, Donna Jackson—the famous "id mom"—showed up for the reunion. Jackson was hired in January 1994 to assist with office and business management, and as far as I know she's still there: She's credited as "Office manager and id mom" in the studio's most recent release, Doom: The Dark Ages.

And American McGee, who was fired in 1998 under somewhat murky circumstances, shared some warm thoughts of his own, crediting Carmack and Romero for transforming his life "beyond imagination."

It's nice, isn't it? There's a lot going on with the videogame industry right now, and the world as a whole, and sometimes it's good to be reminded that not everything inevitably has to suck. For as small and simple a thing as it is, this reunion, with all four of id Software's founders so clearly happy to see each other and hang out for a bit, is just goddamn nice, and frankly I'm happy for all of us that we got it.

One of the biggest tragedies of Xbox's wide-reaching reset is id Software, which was cut by a whopping 136 roles. And while official statements from Microsoft and the studio have tried to reassure players that it's not been gutted, whether that's just a panicking Xbox trying to calm anxieties is up for debate.

Especially given the words of Chris Hays, lead services programmer at id Software, in an interview with YouTube channel Auf ein Bier at the end of last month. To say that Hays doesn't mince his words is an understatement—and I'm finding it hard to blame him, given Microsoft announced the layoffs one day before Doom: The Dark Ages released its DLC.

"Everyone had just gotten off of a worse-than-usual crunch to get the DLC out the door, finally get a breather, and we were excited for our launch on the Tuesday … Instead of watching in anticipation for people, streamers, and seeing all the hard work they put in finally pay off? Now they don't know what they're doing."

Hays adds that "it was so inhumane, it was demoralising, and morale has never been lower," though it also doesn't help that Microsoft isn't communicating much of a plan at all to folks on the studio-level: "There's been plenty of things said internally that mimics the same things that we've all seen as public statements by the company. But how that actually results in making games? That's not clear. I don't know. I don't know where this goes.

"It is hard to make a game that is AAA, that is like we've done before, with half the people. And by hard, I mean impossible. It's hard to make a game when there are entire departments gutted that you need, entire disciplines that are gone. So if they've got some kind of new plan for how this is going to work, that hasn't been told [to us]. We don't know what that is."

As for the statements that "we're still the same id", Hays says that "First of all, we're not the same id. We're half the same id. It was the people—what made us special was the people and the relationships that we have. It's not the IP, our name doesn't matter. It was the relationships we built and the experience that we had together." From his perspective, most of Microsoft's damage control is to avoid people jumping ship.

But Hays believes that Microsoft's permanently damaged its reputation in the industry, making it harder to either get those same people back if it needs to, but also denting id Software's ability to recruit again:

"They have burned a lot of bridges—it's not just us … originally, we were told, 'we hire to retire'. We were ready to be there until we retired, and no-one believes that anymore. Even the best management at the studio level won't matter if they just decide one year they would get a 0.1% stock increase if they shut down the studio.

"I think as long as we're under Microsoft, no-one will believe anything. No-one is going to believe studio management giving assurances on things, because they know they're not making the shots. They're not gonna trust Microsoft ever, so by proxy, they can't trust studio management."

Hays also says that "a lot of the cuts are hard to understand—to be clear, you can't cut 50% of a AAA studio in ANY way, and have it make sense … I don't know how that works. There are certain pieces where it's like, 'who will do that work now?'

"Who's going to make our skyboxes when we get rid of our skybox artist? How are we going to maintain our infrastructure when we get rid of an infrastructure team? How will we maintain an engine when so much of the engine team was let go?"

Ultimately, Hays says that "these decisions were not made with foresight. They were not made with the idea of a healthy games studio continuing forward … They fundamentally don't understand art. They don't understand art, they don't understand games, they don't understand that business model."

It's hard not to feel the same way, especially given this isn't Microsoft's first head-scratcher in recent years. For example, canning Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks, or shutting down Project Blackbird despite then-Xbox president Phil Spencer having to be peeled away from it, or kneecapping Zenimax just as The Elder Scrolls Online finds its feet again, or laying off one of your most senior concept artists at Bethesda.

None of these choices speak of a desire—or even an interest—in long-term longevity, which is something that Hays reflects on: "Part of me thinks that they're looking at fiscal year 2027, and they see that we don't make money in 2027 because we released a game already.

"It's hard to know, since they don't tell us anything, but it's clear that the way they do accounting—the way they align their spreadsheets for their financial reports—is not the way we used to do it."

At this year's QuakeCon in Gaylord, Texas, a number of id Software's OGs and founders are in attendance for a retrospective talk and reunion, and it looks like legendary programmer John Carmack took some time to refamiliarize himself with the reason for the season.

"I sat down to try the Evercade Doom port, and before I knew it, I was on level four, and realizing that I had forgotten where all the keycards were," Carmack wrote on X, "The Everything App." "It wound up taking me 15 minutes each on level four and five. Still a great game after all these years!"

It certainly sounds like Carmack's a little rusty: E1M4 and M5 have par times of 1:30 and 2:45 respectively. I'm always curious to see how developers relate to their own games, especially a Criterion classic like Doom decades down the line. Carmack's fellow John, Romero, is still very much "Knee Deep in the Dead," as it were, creating the Sigil expansions and even giving the one-of-a-kind MyHouse.wad a try on stream.

I've always been slightly shaken by Larian honcho Swen Vincke's admission that he's never revisited Ultima 7⁠—one of his favorite games and primary inspirations⁠—because he knows it wouldn't stand up to his memories from the '90s. In the same conversation, Vincke told me that he spends so much time immersed in and testing Larian's games during development, he hardly touches them after launch.

Couldn't be me: I compulsively replay all my favorites to the point that it's a problem. I have to agree with Carmack: The original Doom really has held up after all these years.

Bethesda is currently running a 40th anniversary sale on Steam until August 13, just in time for this year's QuakeCon. The sale covers the studio's entire catalogue, including the offerings of subsidiaries id and Arkane.

That's where the real heat is, if you ask me: The recently-released Doom: The Dark Ages expansion, Revelations, is on sale for 50% off, 10 bucks to a typical 20. If you've missed out on the main game as well, Dark Ages itself is 67% off, or $23.

It's been a month since Revelation's July 7 release, and it's a beast of a shooter. Former PCG guides writer Rory Norris awarded it a 90% in his review, while staff writer Morgan Park, who was more cold on Dark Ages' base game, argued that Revelations redeems the whole endeavor.

Aside from Revelations, there's bound to be something in here to strike your fancy⁠—it's hard to argue against 10 buck Skyrim, if you somehow don't already have it. I'm a huge Arkane freak, personally, so the studio's whole catalogue for $54 gets a hearty recommendation from me.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is weirdly not discounted in this sale, possibly related to its publishing and copyright situation, but it's also only $10. So taking the plunge on the bundle probably comes out in the wash versus buying things piecemeal.

The sale is an undeniably great opportunity from a customer perspective, but comes at a fraught time for Bethesda. The studio and its subsidiaries were hit hard by Microsoft's "reset" at Xbox: Layoffs at Bethesda Game Studios, Zenimax Online, and id Software, while Arkane is getting spun off with an uncertain future. It also makes me nervous to see a game as good as Revelations get a 50% off discount after just one month⁠—you'd think Bethesda would have protected its value with a more token discount if it was selling really well.

A very Quake-themed QuakeCon kicked off today, with John Romero and current id studio co-director Marty Stratton speaking on a panel celebrating the shooter's 30th anniversary. A new 19-level Quake episode was announced and released during the panel, which also featured a brief livestreamed appearance from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor.

Reznor famously composed the music for Quake, which was a very big deal at the time. If ever there was a more 1996 cultural artefact than Quake I don't know what it could be (maybe Space Jam?). Reznor's industrial tumult definitely fit the grimier, darker, browner mood of Quake, compared to the MIDI thrash metal of Doom. I remember sometimes having to mute the music because it made me feel too tense.

"When I first encountered Wolfenstein it felt impossible," Reznor said. "Nothing was like that. It was a radical departure from what I'd known as videogames. I went out and bought a PC just to play it."

But it was Doom that sealed the deal. "Jump ahead a few years, Doom comes out, and it was like a bomb went off," he went on. "It was not only technologically advanced, but there wasn't anything like that. It felt like no adults were involved, nobody said no, it was free, and it was fantastic. In some ways I felt a parallel with what I was trying to do with music, by misshaping things and trying to express myself. I really felt a connection to it."

"[I] crossed paths with the id guys and hit it off, became friends, and I'm grateful to be invited to be part of the Quake team working on music and sound effects. And you know of all the things I've done in my career I'm extremely proud of that, and I think the game holds up today."

Reznor was hardly going to make an appearance at QuakeCon in order to distance himself from Quake and its soundtrack, but it's interesting to hear him draw parallels between Doom and his own music at the time. It's a reminder that the nowadays quaint-looking shooter seemed utterly terrifying in 1993. I remember the music in E1M3 sending shivers down my spine. The first pinkie demon encounter in that level prompted a quick shutting down of the game. Similarly terrifying: hearing the radio edit of Closer on the top 40 countdown.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Quake, a bunch of Nine Inch Nails Quake-themed gear has been released. You can get an ammo box (it really is just a $30 empty box), a t-shirt, a keychain, a hoodie, and the soundtrack has been reissued on vinyl. It's all extraordinarily expensive but you may find yourself buying it anyway.

Just a smidge over 30 years after its original release date, Quake just got a big update. MachineGames has added a new chapter to id Software's landmark 1996 successor to the Doom games, dubbed Dawn of the Machine.

The 19 new levels, which join two previous MachineGames expansions, see Quake's protagonist trapped in "a dimension of endless illusion." I'm most curious about some promised new weapon variants: "the Super Axe—unleashing lightning on successive strikes—and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle."

The update also adds a gallery of archival material from Quake's development, including a handful of playable levels that were created early in development and never finished.

The creative process on display is decidedly relatable, with level names like "Tim" "Tim10A," and "Tim14," and notes like, "Lots of tight hallways make navigation tough, and similarly there are many dead ends that were not completed, so it is not entirely clear what the idea was."

The update was revealed at QuakeCon today in a panel which included id Software co-founder John Romero, who noted with laughter that the announcement was occurring not on the 30th anniversary of Quake, which released in June of 1996, but on the 30th anniversary of the day he left id Software.

Quake famously marked the end of an era for id: Romero, American McGee, Michael Abrash, Sandy Petersen and others left the company after its development. Petersen said recently that "Quake ruined id Software."

But ruined or not, the studio carried on and released two of my favorite games, Quake 2 and 3, and everything else that came after, including the much lauded run of modern Doom games.

Id now faces a new kind of adversity following substantial layoffs imposed by Microsoft as part of its plan to "reset" the Xbox business.

"This is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month," id Software co-founder John Carmack said in reaction to the news.

Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall are all scheduled to appear at a founders reunion panel on Saturday for "a rare conversation about the company's earliest days, and the friendships, challenges, and innovations that have forever changed gaming."

Doom, one of the most influential videogames of all time, was famously distributed via the shareware model: The game's first chapter was completely free, and if you liked it, you sent id Software some money and they mailed you the remaining two episodes.

What would sometimes happen in those pre-online days, though, is that less-than-scrupulous resellers would offer the shareware version for sale, even though it was meant to be free. For $5 (or whatever, it's been a while), you could take home the hot new shooter from the guys who made Wolfenstein—and sure, you weren't getting the whole thing, but whatever. It's still Doom. Do you want to play it or not?

You might think that id Software would take issue with people making money on their work while they received nothing, but speaking at QuakeCon today, studio co-founder John Romero said the opposite was true: They were happy to see it happen.

"Please do it. Don't give us any money. Just get it out there," Romero said about people who made and sold the shareware version of Doom on floppies. "You would go to the store and you would see 10 different boxes that all had the same shareware Doom in it. I don't care. Give it to everybody, get it out there.

"We were totally happy with that. We were doing so much work just getting the game out. We knew in Taiwan that they were copying it: 100%, that was the market back then. So we contacted the biggest pirates there and went, 'Can you buy boxes from us? Really cheap. Really really cheap.' So they bought tons of boxes off of us, so it would be legitimate.

"Get it out there, make them feel good. We made money when people would actually order the rest of the game. We didn't try to make money off the shareware [version]."

Romero said id viewed it as simply a form of distribution—because again, this was years before the ubiquity of the internet, and most gamers didn't have easy access to this stuff, as we explored in our feature on how shareware transformed PC gaming forever.

Doom and other shareware games were available on BBSes, but that meant two things: You had to make a potentially lengthy (and expensive) long distance phone call if you didn't happen to live close enough to a distribution board, and worse, you had to be one of those computer nerd weirdos who actually owned a modem. Believe me, there were not many of us back then. So, dodgy as they might have been, those not-entirely-legit disk-in-a-box distributions were good for id Software and gamers alike.

That attitude also informed the studio's approach to copy protection, which is something it just didn't bother with.

"There's always been a war that's never been won with copy protection, and we didn't want to waste our time with that," Romero said. "If people are going to copy it, they're going to copy it. They might buy it some time later, but—we didn't have money for everything we were playing, so we're like, let's not copy protect it. If people want to play it, they can still figure out how to play it."

I liked Doom: The Dark Ages when it arrived last year, but I really ought to have loved it. The first two Dooms of id's modern trilogy are generationally great FPS campaigns with unmatched action, memorable guns, and late-game fights that will grind your teeth down to the gums. They successfully reestablished Doom around speed, hyper mobility, and improvisational gun swapping—ideas that id actively turned away from when it designed The Dark Ages around a shield.

The Slayer's shield was a neat multitool, allowing him to block any incoming damage, parry certain attacks, or throw it as a weapon to bisect fodder grunts. But those features came at the cost of mobility and complexity—this Doomguy could no longer jump high or dash around the battlefield, and the new solution to every enemy was to block attacks and blast it in the face with the shotgun.

Revelations, the new Dark Ages expansion that released just hours after id was decimated by layoffs, is a masterful comeback.

The expansion picks up soon after the base game: The Slayer ventures into Hell to take on the very worst it has to offer. He gets his ass kicked, then summarily punted into Purgatory. Beaten and bruised, he has to rip and tear his way out of Hell's wastebasket, and this time he can't hide behind a shield.

No really—a big bad guy literally rips it in half in the opening level. Yea, id is not being subtle in acknowledging the feedback to the base game. Revelations is about the Slayer reclaiming his apex status in the mortal realm, but it's also about id reclaiming the best aspects of Doom. Enter the Chain Spear, a new appendage for the Slayer that immediately upstages the shield on all fronts by reintroducing layers of mobility back into the series.

He can plunge the spear into enemies and geometry to yank himself towards them (similar to Eternal's meat hook), but crucially, his trajectory is controlled by camera movement. That means he can hook a guy from across an arena, aim up or left or right, and turn demons into his personal catapult. It's simple, fun, and immediately more expressive than anything I ever accomplished with the shield.

At the same time, id has added Eternal's air dashes back into the mix, which can now trigger a "perfect dodge" that charges a meter for special spear moves. Such are your two options for dealing with enemy fire: The spear can parry green attacks and dashes can evade everything else. There is no block.

The result is a harmonious combat loop that siphons some of Eternal's brilliance while maintaining The Dark Ages' weighty, defensive identity. You're still doing a lot of deflecting green energy blasts back to their senders, but you're also flinging yourself over hordes to reach the high ground, sniping airborne wraiths with powerful spear throws, and atomizing platoons of demons with a single ground pound. The spear delivers control and options that the shield couldn't.

It's understandable how id thought the shield would be addition through subtraction—a persistent complaint of Eternal was an overwhelming number of guns, mods, grenades, and melee attacks to juggle—but clipping the Slayers' wings was an overcorrection.

Doom is best when the Slayer holds all the cards, and in id fashion, you can eventually swap between the spear and shield at any time in Revelations. You're never required to use both in combat, but the shield is used for traversal puzzles that incorporate both weapons—these, too, are more involved and fun than the base game.

By the time I'd reclaimed the shield and filled out the spear's own ability tree, I did have those Eternal-like moments where the number of guns, moves, and similar-but-different melee attacks at my disposal would occasionally short-circuit my brain. I'd throw my spear when I meant to slash with it, deflect when I meant to stab, or forget for an entire level that I can ground pound. But it's a hill I eventually climbed, and on the other side was a mastery of Revelation's moveset. The Chain Spear became a natural extension of my reach—the hand with which I move the pieces of Hell's armada at my whim. Every piece clicked into place, and Revelations singlehandedly justified Doom: The Dark Ages as an idea.

Do not miss the 10-12 hour Revelations expansion—out now on Steam.

Human ingenuity is a powerful—sometimes terrifying—thing. Throughout history, no matter how basic the tools available to us, we have always found a way to build the weird obsessions that appear in our minds. You know, like Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, or Doom (1993).

No, really. In a recent chat with Jesse Petrilla on YouTube, id co-founder and Doom lead artist Adrian Carmack revealed that, when it came time to put together the classic FPS' animations, the incredibly complex and advanced animation tool he used to do it was… the undo key.

"As an artist, oftentimes you end up making your own tools," said Carmack. "You know, there was no animation tool, so I started using the undo key to create animation—the undo key in Deluxe Paint, so I'd go back and forth."

If you're unclear as to how that works, remember that animations in original Doom weren't really animations as we think of them today, with models seamlessly transitioning through countless subtle movements to create smooth motion. Doom sprites, from your enemies to your weapons, were all very frame-y indeed. Working with relatively few frames meant Carmack could create and capture animation loops by cycling through frames in Deluxe Paint using undo/redo.

Carmack's fellow id devs were duly astounded by his innovation. "The guys were pretty impressed that I came up with that for animation," he says. "But that's the tool I used, and [Doom programmer] John Carmack really limited me on the frames of animation, so I was always trying to be very frugal… to make this animation look as good as I can with as few frames as possible."

Carmack suggests this was not a risk-free process. Constantly undoing things means you might inadvertently delete your own work, but it sounds like Carmack quickly worked out a system that minimised that possibility. "The first time you lose some work, you're pretty cautious after that. And so, it was very unusual for me to lose anything, doing it that way."

One of the biggest questions left in the aftermath of the Xbox layoffs earlier this month is the state of legendary Doom and Quake studio id Software. Some have claimed the cuts ran so deep that the studio's ability to make new games and support its proprietary idTech engine are in question, while id Software itself published a statement, later echoed using almost identical language by TESO studio ZeniMax Online, that it's merely been reduced to a headcount comparable to what it had a decade ago, when it developed the 2016 Doom reboot—so, basically, everything's fine.

Now studio director Hugo Martin has weighed in, and unsurprisingly he's in the 'all is well' camp. Speaking in a new Slayers Club Live stream, Martin said "reports that we've been nerfed into the ground and gutted and we have 50 people [remaining]" are not true.

"We're the size we were when we made Doom 2016, and idTech is very much alive and well. You have to understand, we have idTech engineers both in Frankfurt and at MachineGames. We collaborate quite a bit. So the idTech is there, the Doom team is here, and we're excited to share with you guys more of what we're working on in the future when it is appropriate and approved."

According to an Aftermath report, id's office in Frankfurt—quite small to begin with—was also cut in half by the Xbox layoffs, being reduced from 12 employees to six.

That statement from Martin was fairly safe and anodyne, obviously intended to calm the nervous crowds without committing to anything specific, and I think the truth is that we're not going to know the true impact of the cuts until we know what id Software gets up to next.

But he had more to say, and Martin's subsequent comments struck me as considerably more tone deaf. "The fact that we made a game that people like and is critically and commercially successful ... that's good for everyone. For the people at the studio, for the people who unfortunately we had to say goodbye to, I think that helps everyone, and we really appreciate your support.

"What matters the most is that the games are good, and I'm so happy that people—it's just a good thing for everybody."

As someone who likes and appreciates it when the games are good, I have to say that I'm not sure that's really the most important thing at all, at least not compared to the long-term health of the industry that makes them—which of course means the people who make them. Technology advances at a sometimes alarming pace, it's true, but the headlong rush to embrace those advances, heedless of any consideration beyond the bottom line, is not going to lead us to a better place—or to better games. Pretending that everything is fine as long as the games are good is a quick way to end up in our list of "25 foolproof ways to get laid off in the videogame industry"—which, yes, includes making an acclaimed and commercially successful game.

Martin isn't the only one looking to reassure gamers that everything is a-okay. Earlier today Bethesda dropped a massive infodump on its plans for the future, including confirmation of a new Fallout game being made by Obsidian, remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and word that Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

One of the major victims of Xbox's "reset" is id Software, which suffered a whopping 136 layoffs—a move one artist likened to reducing it to a "support studio". This is a line that Microsoft itself has tried to counter, both via official studio channels and a statement given to Windows Central last week. More on that in a moment.

One primary concern was that the studio's engine, id Tech, would be scuppered in favour of Unreal Engine. This would be a huge loss. As my fellow PC Gamer writer Wes Fenlon described it, id Tech "runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second."

Windows Central spoke to Microsoft about that concern, and the site was told "There are dozens of people working on id Tech across multiple locations. Reports that there’s only one person left in Texas are inaccurate."

But now, a comprehensive Game Developer report, speaking to an id Software worker who was laid off, seems to contradict that statement: "They've just gotten rid of all the people who could ever fix, maintain, or change [id Tech], so it's most likely going to end up in the trash can. That's where I just come back to: It completely feels like success is detached from your ability to keep a job, and I think that's basically provable."

They continue: "There were five members of the VFX team, including the lead [that were laid off]. Our technical art and design part department now only has its lead. That's it. All other four of the members of the team were let go. The institutional knowledge [that has been lost] on the id Tech side is immense. [...] I cannot imagine a path forward where they make another game in id Tech."

At the moment, it's Microsoft's word against the laid-off staff's—and to be clear, I am neither surprised nor judgemental that there are developers at id Software who are currently toeing the company line. This is a historically terrible time in the industry to be looking for work, given the sheer volume of talent that has been sloughed out of mainstream studios over the past few years.

If (and I am speaking in hypotheticals, here) Microsoft has ordered these studios to broadcast the message that everything is pretty much fine, I don't resent those studios for doing so. It's not the fault of these studios or their developers to be put in a position where dissent might lose them their work.

But I think it's a little telling that, when a source is allowed to speak anonymously and has nothing left to lose, the picture painted is far more pessimistic. Whether id Software is able to make another game in id Tech will be proven in the years to come—but it's clear there is a stark difference in optimism between the company message and the experiences of those laid off in last week's massacre.

We often talk about Doom—the original 1993 shooter from the young upstarts at id Software—as one of the most influential videogames of all time. But the Washington Post, one of the country's most highly-regarded papers of record, has elevated it to an even higher plateau: It has selected Doom as one of the 25 most influential works of American culture, representing the absolute pinnacle of its era.

The list, assembled to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the United States of America, covers a remarkable breadth, from Thomas Paine's Common Sense to the Star Spangled Banner, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Levi's jeans, Mickey Mouse, and the recordings of legendary blues man Robert Johnson: One selection marking the highlight of each decade of America's existence, bolstered by a handful of honorable mentions.

And there, for the decade of 1986-1995, is Doom—beating out heavyweight competition including Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and the MTV reality series The Real World.

"In December 1993, Id Software gave away part of its new videogame free over the internet. College networks buckled under the traffic, and bulletin boards lit up, as the game eventually was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows 95 at the time," Washington Post videogame critic Gene Park wrote.

"Doom was foundational in digital entertainment—a 3D world viewed in first person, self-published, with no gatekeepers and no retail store, as it gave rise to user-generated content years before anyone had a name for it. Programmer John Carmack handed the audience the tools to build their own corners of hell."

Park acknowledged the negative perceptions of Doom over the years in his ode to the game's impact, saying it "was a scapegoat for the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, ground zero of America’s ongoing nightmare." But, he added, "It was people with guns, not a game, that took lives. A grieving nation feared a new form of entertainment it misunderstood. Hearings were held on games and music, a template that would replay after nearly every mass shooting since."

Ultimately, in Park's view, Doom embodies America: "The game’s spirit of sharing and community, along with its pioneering approach to guiding players through abstract environments in 3D space, is rooted in the upbringing of designer John Romero, who is Native American (Yaqui, Cherokee) and Mexican."

Quoting Romero, Park continued, "'A lot of Doom’s design, especially the level design, was really influenced by just that understanding of the environment, the world, and that comes from my dad, my grandma, everybody'— generations, he says, 'where people lived on the land' they believed to be shared."

Romero himself seemed pretty excited about it:

So was his fellow id co-founder Tom Hall:

It's a reflection of the way we perceive time and history, but more recent entries in the list definitely feel more like pop culture fluff than culturally significant works: Keeping Up with the Kardashians was selected for the 2006-2015 decade, for instance. But the Post says it's not meant to be a "best of" list, but rather a series of historical signposts, each defining its time.

"No decade can be summed up any more than a country can be summed up, but if we wrote an autobiography not of words but of works—books, music and art, ideas, dress and culture—these 25 would be among the most momentous," the Post's culture critic Philip Kennicott wrote. "These are not necessarily our proudest moments, but they are defining acts of culture. It is an imperfect list, and incomplete, but then that is America, imperfect and unfinished."

This is the second time Doom has been recognized as a culturally important American work in recent months. In May the Doom soundtrack was added to the country's "national playlist" in the US Library of Congress.

Caught up in the wave of Xbox 'reset' layoffs that occurred last week, id Software has been hit particularly hard. And while official statements given by the studio maintain that it's still of a decent enough size to make the kinds of games it used to, that sentiment's at odds with many of the developers who were laid off.

It's even at odds with some of the devs still working there. id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was a large part of the studio's efforts to unionise back in 2025, has made a series of posts on LinkedIn which are still (understandably) furious, despite the studio's official stance that things aren't all ruined.

"I think the only way to fix the video game industry at this point is for developer owned studios to start rising from these studio closures and layoffs," writes Willis, "We've got to learn from the past, be fiscally responsible, and create an environment of sustainable growth (though growth should be a byproduct of success, not a goal in and of itself)."

A "return to growth" was, after all, mentioned in Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's announcement. "we will return to growth in 2027", Sharma said. Mind, that was also in the same post that announced there'd be another 1,600 layoffs happening by 2027, but hey. It's a pretty standard tag-line for most big businesses—something to keep the shareholders happy.

Either way, Willis remains unimpressed: "It's the only path forward I can see, and these large publishers and monopolies have proven themselves terrible stewards and somehow even worse financial managers. If the people who create the value own that value, good things will follow."

In a follow-up post, Willis adds: "The games industry must change if it is going to create art and franchises that have long term sustainable value—right now it feels like the monopolies that control it are simply trying to extract as much goodwill and value (that took decades to build) as they can with little concern for the diminishing returns it's leading to.

"This is what happens when the people who control it (most ivy league MBAs) do not play games, have never shipped a game, and fundamentally do not understand the industry they manage. You'll never get another WoW or Morrowind in the current climate."

While I'm not wholly convinced that you need to play videogames to be in charge of a company that makes them, I do think you need to be humble enough to delegate or listen to the people who do—and humility is clearly rare within the executive suite.

I also agree with Willis' assessment that you probably wouldn't get another World of Warcraft in this climate—it's something I've spoken to on our MMO column before. But, and this might be proving his point, I think we're getting plenty of games that are at least on-par with the classics from smaller independent studios.

That doesn't mean it's easy, though. Studios like Larian, which is shareholder-free (okay, Tencent has a non-controlling stake, but it's Tencent. Those guys are everywhere), are a bit of an anomaly—Larian itself surviving brushes with bankruptcy in the past. Point being, sticking it to the man is hard bloody work—worth doing, mind, but not a guarantee of safety for anybody.

As reported by Massively OP, senior developers at ZeniMax Online Studios said that the company has returned to its circa 2015-2018 headcount, before it staffed up for the development of canceled MMO Blackbird. The estimate is similar to one recently proffered by id Software in a statement on X, "The Everything App."

Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) Discord moderator Baratron relayed the statement from the Elder Scrolls Online Tavern event in Hesse, Germany, where a number of devs are interacting with fans.

"According to both Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) and Jessica Folsom (Associate Director of Community Management), ZeniMax Online Studios is now at the same size as it was when they made both Wrothgar and Summerset,” Baratron told the UESP Discord. "Which, as we know, are both highly acclaimed DLCs.

"So while the layoffs are extremely upsetting for everyone involved (of course including players), this is not necessarily the end of new content or the game going into maintenance mode."

For context, ESO's Orsinium (containing the region of Wrothgar) and Summerset DLCs were released in 2015 and 2018 respectively. In id Software's statement last week, it wrote that "The team today is about the size we were when making Doom (2016)." According to WARN Act filings, ZeniMax Online and id Software laid off 213 and 136 employees respectively. ZeniMax also laid off 62 people in 2025 immediately following the cancellation of Blackbird.

I have some sympathy to members of these studios wanting to counter narratives of their decline⁠—see also Outer Worlds 2 director Brandon Adler's harsh words for outsiders who flippantly claim the studio no longer has the same developers who made classics like KotOR 2 or New Vegas. It is also not inherently sinister for two studios with the same parent company to adopt a similar PR line.

At the same time, it doesn't sit right with me. It is an admission of undoing a decade of growth and development at these studios. Even if the headcount is the same on paper, a studio on the upswing is a vastly different environment from one that's just been gutted. The 136 people fired from id and 213 from ZeniMax were brought in for a reason. Game development has changed in the span of 10 years.

Bungie and BioWare probably hit similar headcounts as in their golden ages amid wave after wave of layoffs in the 2020s, and it did not improve their output or efficiency. It did not bring back Halo: Reach or Mass Effect 2.

If this is a PR justification Microsoft would like to exploit in the coming days, I have no interest in indulging it. It carries the tacit implication that those who were laid off did not matter, and beckons to that nasty "lazy devs" rhetoric.

It's a line of thinking that, at its heart, allows for this wanton misery and mismanagement to have been a necessary course correction by the adults in the room. I have no patience for it.

Microsoft's cuts across Xbox studios, totaling 3,200 by later this year, included a massive reduction at id Software. The team lost 136 people (over half of the studio) just a day before its Doom: The Dark Ages expansion released, a bloodletting that had remaining and newly laid-off employees seriously concerned about the studio's capacity to make games and update its proprietary engine, id Tech, going forward.

"Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements," one impacted worker said.

Today, the official id Software X account made a statement aimed at assuaging these worries.

"While our studio was impacted, those changes were spread across teams. We still have the crew we need to build the games and tech we're known for. The team today is about the same size we were when making DOOM (2016). We have always had a flat studio where everyone is a maker, and we will remain true to that philosophy moving forward," the post reads.

That bit about the current size of the team matches a Windows Central report that also claims the studio is not being forced to move to Unreal Engine in the immediate future, as employees have openly speculated about. The studio's statement also suggests that it will continue work on id Tech.

"We are focused on supporting each other and the team members impacted. We're going to keep building the great games and tech that have defined us for the past 35 years, and we're looking forward to seeing you at QuakeCon this August."

While it's encouraging to learn that id Software won't immediately join a Fallout assembly line, as is Obsidian's new charge, the statement is unlikely to change a growing impression that Microsoft is an unfit steward of the studio synonymous with PC gaming. Personally, knowing that id Software is the same size it was 10 years ago isn't an encouraging sign for its future—it takes more people and more time to make games of Doom's scale and fidelity than it did in the 2010s, hence why the team had grown to 200-plus for The Dark Ages.

Whatever id makes next, it will now do so with an axe hovering over its neck.

In 1984, an upstart retail company called Costco had just opened its first handful of voluminous warehouse stores on the west coast of the United States when it decided to try an experiment. It installed a hot dog cart in front of its San Diego store and started selling Hebrew Nationals with a drink for $1.50. People, it turned out, liked the hot dogs. The cart became Cafe 150, named for the combo price.

The company sold 245 million of them last year. When the CEO of the company in the 2010s complained to founder Jim Sinegal "we can't sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends," Sinegal, likely then in his 70s, famously shot back: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out." A Costco hot dog and a 20 oz soda still costs $1.50.

In 1992, just a year-and-a-half after releasing a cutesy 2D platformer called Commander Keen, a tiny squad of game developers barely out of their teens started a studio called id Software and pioneered the first-person shooter. Then they followed it with Doom, maybe the most important computer game of all time. It was installed on more PCs than Windows. That tiny squad hired more people and then made Quake, maybe the most important 3D computer game of all time.

Decades later, a new generation of people at id dedicated to that legacy defied expectations to make another shooter so good it could proudly stand beside the ones that defined videogames. Then they made an even better one.

On Monday, Microsoft, which owns Xbox, which owns Bethesda, which owns id, laid off 136 developers from the Texas studio, which 12-year art veteran Derek Best described as "nuking a team into the dirt." Neither id Software or Doom were mentioned in CEO Asha Sharma's "Resetting Xbox" announcement. But the studio's new game, released one day after much of the talent behind it were laid off, currently occupies the top banner on Xbox.com.

What does it say about a company when it doesn't understand—or at any real level seem to care about—something it has become the steward of?

Doom, as a series of videogames, has generated hundreds of millions of dollars. But Doom is not just the money it's generated. It's the literally countless mods, maps, and entire games built on its bones; incredible ones are still coming out right now. Doom is the countless people making games today who cut their teeth mapping or had their neural pathways permanently altered the first time they picked up the Super Shotgun. The original game's labyrinthine levels and pulsing music and gory kills were revelatory enough, yet it's literally impossible to overstate its impact on the history of videogames from that moment forward. John Carmack programmed in the network code that enabled multiplayer in one month, in November 1993, and the game came out 10 days later. John Romero called the multiplayer deathmatch, and we're still calling it that today.

id Tech, the studio's ever-evolving engine, is not just a modern marvel that runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second. It is the origin of yet more careers, thanks to its history of open source releases; one of the best indie games of 2025 uses it. It is a creation that any executive with any amount of vision would see as both a point of pride and an invaluable asset. You bought your way to the inner chamber, the very beating heart, of videogame software. Is that not a thing to revere?

Ahhh, but how much money does id Tech make? How much is it really worth? Xbox, its leadership says, is "not healthy," and as a result hard choices have to be made. That's just sensible business, not a short-sighted attempt to maximize shareholder value this quarter by kneecapping an incredible asset.

How else could this have gone? Last year Costco took home $275 billion in revenue (just $6 billion shy of Microsoft), and its former CEO—the one whose life was threatened over the sanctity of the hot dog—bluntly said "we have never been a company that puts the shareholders on top." A few months ago his successor housed a hot dog in a viral Instagram video before declaring: "The hot dog price will not change as long as I'm around."

He also said, through a mouthful of meat, that it's a good hot dog. And it is a good hot dog! But that's not why people love it.

People love the Costco hot dog because it's a symbol for the whole operation: that you're paying the membership dues because the deals are worth it. That they're going to give you a good value for every goddamn cent you give them. It stopped mattering years ago if the hot dogs themselves made money or not.

Costco's founder Jim Sinegal, who declared the buck fifty frank more valuable than a human life? The hot dog cart wasn't even his thing back in 1984. The idea started at a competing warehouse chain, Price Club, which merged with Costco in the '90s. But Sinegal knew what he had and expanded Cafe 150 into the food court, now one of Costco's biggest draws. That's how you treat a legacy.

The people at id Software—or the people who were at id Software as of four days ago—knew how to treat a legacy. They got it so deeply that it was evident from the very first moments of Doom 2016, as PC Gamer's James Davenport wrote in the very first paragraph of his review 10 years ago:

This thing here? It's important.

How does the company that's for decades been synonymous with the PC—much as we now wish it weren't—end up with its hands on the game studio that's synonymous with the PC, and not see it as a priceless asset?

"Xbox has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote on Monday. id wasn't mentioned. What does it say about the people in charge that they paid to get their hands on that kind of legacy, and then gave it less respect than a $1.50 hot dog?

John Carmack has reacted to a major round of layoffs at id Software, the studio that he co-founded in 1991. Microsoft is cutting 136 roles (reports indicate over half of its headcount) at the Doom studio, which just released an expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages this week.

"My 'Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand' statement isn't aging well," Carmack wrote on X, "and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month."

Despite what comes across as disapproval of the layoffs, Carmack stops short of criticizing Microsoft's decision.

"I'm saddened, but I can't muster anger or outrage over it. I don't have access to the books, but I suspect that id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft's perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios."

Carmack is referring to a recent Bloomberg report that claims profits from Minecraft had been redirected toward less financially successful Xbox studios for the past several years.

"To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved. Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal. You can't rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn't be your default belief. I don't think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games."

He then went on to offer some hypothetical strategies that could have prevented where we're at now, which is the decimation of the team behind the most critically-acclaimed shooters of the generation.

"Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games?

"Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper?

"I really don’t know."

In his own response earlier this week, id Software co-founder John Romero expressed grief for those suddenly out of a job—an ordeal that he can relate to, considering that Xbox cut funding for his studio's next game this time in 2025.

"I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It's a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history… Romero Games was there a year ago. I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you."

The full scale of Xbox's rash of layoffs is still to be properly tallied up—partially because CEO Asha Sharma is yet to announce a further 1,600 axed roles. One particularly harsh casualty is id Software, which has taken around 136 job losses on the chin. A move that one employee described this week as reducing it to the size of a "support studio".

We're just now learning about the projects that the developer, which had just released a large DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages, was cooking—courtesy of Gamesbeat. The report states that id Software was looking to pitch a Perfect Dark reboot:

"The team was also considering doing a game based on Perfect Dark, the franchise that hasn’t had a new addition since Perfect Dark Zero in 2005 on the Xbox 360 game console … Concept art was in the works."

And, listen—it's not confirmed this pitch hasn't been picked up, or even that it's been impacted the layoffs. But I think we can all take a deeply educated guess that it's unlikely id Software is going to have the resources to make it. It's a studio whose majority of staff has been shown the door, forced off its homegrown game engine and forced to work in Unreal. Chances of it happening are microscopically slim.

Which wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has killed a Perfect Dark reboot in the past five years. Back in 2025, a staggering 9,000 layoffs saw developer The Initiative closed, and their version of the game—which had an impressive gameplay demo in 2024—tossed into Microsoft's growing landfill of shuttered projects.

Another project from the hollowed-out studio that likely won't see the light of day is a John Wick-inspired game dubbed "Fury", says the Gamesbeat report:

"It had elements of sci-fi, noir, and Louisiana and Chicago gangsters. It had a modern, cyberpunk-like feel. It had a concept called Gun Fu, which combined gunplay with martial arts. The game was supposed to feel a lot like a John Wick movie, but it was not formally greenlit for production."

Sounds awesome, and I figure if anyone could've pulled it off, it would've been id Software, progenitors of Doom—shooter experts in their own right. Will it ever see the light of day? Well, Microsoft would have to restore an estimated 3/4ths of its staff, first. I legitimately can't think of a game that a studio who has lost that much talent could even make. When your co-founder's mourning their own former studio, you're probably in trouble.

The scale of Microsoft's brutal Xbox layoffs become clearer by the day. Among the studios that Xbox hasn't decided to dump from its portfolio entirely, we now know one of the outfits hit hardest by CEO Asha Sharma's "Xbox reset" was id Software.

The Doom studio, which just released a massive expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages this week, will lose 136 roles, according to WARN notices. It's a substantial downsizing that, according to laid-off VFX artist Derek Best (as spotted by VGC), has diminished the PC gaming institution to a "support studio size" overnight.

"I'm still in shock at how brutal the layoff cuts were," Best wrote on LinkedIn. "Collectively decades of knowledge was wiped out of the studio. The VFX team was eliminated down to one single artist with no lead or producer. The engine programmer responsible for the massive gains in VFX pipeline improvements (like all the particle editor work) was let go as well.

"Great job Microsoft. Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements."

It's a particularly painful pill to swallow around these parts, not just because the modern Doom series is the greatest singleplayer FPS effort happening at a large scale, but because the story of id Software is integral to PC gaming itself.

In a follow-up comment, Best says the "engine team was decimated," which could indicate Microsoft will no longer invest in idTech, the studio's in-house engine with roots in just about every FPS worth talking about.

"Writing on the wall is getting relegated to support studio size and moving to Unreal, based on internal email and the roles you can see clearly got impacted," Best wrote.

Todd Boyce, a lead VFX artist at id, also chimed in on the same thread.

"This is what insanity and despicable corporate greed looks like. What a complete disregard for people who spent months working unpaid overtime to make the DLC, and for an engine that has consistently been the industry standard for performance. It is pretty insulting how it was done, when it was done, and what it will do to the id brand and those who are still employed (for now.)"

PC Gamer has reached out to Bethesda for comment on id's future and will update if a reply comes in.

New CEO Asha Sharma hit the reset button on Xbox yesterday, taking out 1,600 jobs at once with another 1,600 cuts still to come before the end of the year. Very few studios escaped the scythe: even id Software's legendary name did not save it, and it quickly became clear the studio had been swept up in the bloodletting.

Now, anonymous sources tell Game Developer that the losses at id amount to around half the studio, and that the QA department in particular has been heavily affected. Meanwhile, id co-founder John Romero has taken to social media to express his grief at the cuts.

"I'm so sorry for everyone at id Software affected by these layoffs," wrote Romero. "I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It's a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history." Romero, famously, was forced to resign from id in the mid-'90s after clashing with fellow co-founder John Carmack (they're on better terms now).

Romero, for his part, is pretty chuffed with how id's current devs have continued the studio's legacy. "Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein are not easy names to carry on, especially in today's industry," he wrote. "The last few games showed real care, skill and respect for what those worlds mean to people."

Touching on an issue with particular salience in the wake of Sony's announcement that it will be ditching physical PlayStation discs in 2028, Romero professed hope that someone is doing the work to preserve "the company's ongoing legacy (the work, code, assets, stories and the people behind them).

"id's history is critically important to the history of games. I've preserved id's complete early history from our start at Softdisk through to August 6, 1996, including materials and assets that, as far as I know, id itself no longer has." In a follow-up post, Romero added that "For those asking, it's in my will to donate everything to the Strong Museum of Play, including all digital assets."

Regardless, Romero's heart goes out to the studio's current and (now) former devs: "I'm thinking of everyone at id today, and everyone else affected by yesterday's layoffs. Romero Games was there a year ago. I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you."

Today's Xbox layoffs may have hit Bethesda and ZeniMax particularly hard, as reports of "significant" cuts have begun to surface and the Bethesda Game Workers Union says that "many" employees at Bethesda Game Studios have been let go.

Today's announcement of major layoffs at Xbox and the spinoff of four studios—Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs—also included word from CEO Asha Sharma that company is "making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios."

Details on studio-specific cuts haven't been announced, but Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said on Bluesky that ZeniMax Media, the parent of id Software, Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Online Studios, and others, "will be impacted significantly by the reorganization," although he added that Bethesda will not be pared down to just Fallout and The Elder Scrolls teams, as some reports have claimed: "The publisher will also still work on Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake."

But some of the studios responsible for those games are also reportedly being hit hard: "Studios in the Bethesda organization like id Software (Doom) and ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online) are not shutting down but are cutting a significant number of staff this morning, per sources," Schreier added in a subsequent post.

A separate statement from the Bethesda Game Workers Union, the "wall to wall" union that formed in 2024, also indicated that the cuts run deep.

In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios. With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T16:29:42.450Z

"In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios," the union wrote on Bluesky. "With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.

"Today we say goodbye to many of our friends and colleagues and to hundreds more across Xbox, including folks that have worked at Bethesda Games Studios for decades. When will this cycle of cuts in pursuit of ever-greater profits end?"

I've reached out to Bethesda and the Bethesda Game Workers Union for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

The 30^th anniversary of Quake recently passed by—June 22, 2026 was the day—and of course there were acknowledgements, salutes, and celebrations a-plenty, as you'd expect for such a groundbreaking, influential, and enduring game. But it also got a couple of the driving forces behind it reflecting on those days rather more deeply, and as sometimes happens when youthful memories come to the surface, they got pretty deep into their feelings.

Quake co-designer Sandy Petersen, who joined id Software in 1993, got the ball rolling, writing bluntly on X that "Quake ruined id Software." He said Quake "is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design," and credited everyone on the development team for doing "a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right." But, he added, the workload was intense, "and I think it broke us spiritually."

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Petersen then ran through a list of everyone who left id "within a couple years of finishing Quake," including John Romero, Shawn Green, Dave Taylor, Mike Abrash, American McGee, and of course Petersen himself. All of them went on to have long and fruitful careers in game development, "so plainly we didn't depart because of some kind of talent issue," Petersen wrote. "We were all highly competent, just a little burnt out after the labor of Quake."

"Id Software was never the same after," Petersen wrote. "In my opinion (only an opinion), the only other truly great game that id produced was Quake 3, and it was not at the level of the pre-Quake games."

Despite clearly being a bit melancholy about the whole thing, Petersen said Quake was "absolutely" worth the cost it extracted from id: "Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world." But, he added, "man alive it seems like the company could have had its act together better and kept that dream team."

Sandy Petersen is pretty famous for having his recollections repeatedly (but respectfully) knifed by John Romero, but in this instance his reminiscences were met with agreement, mostly, from the other John of the original id Software squad: Carmack.

In response to Petersen's missive, Carmack said Quake was "overly ambitious technically," and that the studio "could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times."

"I pushed everyone too hard," Carmack wrote. "I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

"On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better."

Carmack said he doesn't think having elevated expectations for Quake level designers was a mistake (and credited Romero with setting that bar high right from the studio's early days), but acknowledged that "we should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier." But, he continued, "there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t."

And then, simply and directly, he apologized: "Sorry, Sandy."

The dissolution of id Software under somewhat acrimonious circumstances has been well documented over the subsequent years: American McGee, for instance, was reportedly fired by Carmack for sub-par performance on Quake, although Petersen later suggested that McGee was actually done dirty by another employee. Petersen also pointed a finger at Carmack's "intensity" in particular in a separate post, writing that Carmack "decided we all needed to be in the same big room together. He’d read about this way of “focusing” the team and it did. But we also had nowhere we could decompress or hide out."

It didn't take long for the other other John—Romero—to enter the convo with his own thoughts on the matter, which aren't too far removed from Carmack's: He echoed the in-hindsight belief that they should have stuck with a Doom++ game while ironing out the fully-3D Quake engine, and that everyone at id was "pushing ourselves past what was reasonable because that was how id had always worked." He also gave particular credit to McGee for being "really good" at building Quake levels, a notably pointed comment given how McGee's time at id ended.

"There are a hundred things we could have done differently, but we did the best we could do at the time with what we knew. Having a media circus around us certainly didn’t help," Romero wrote. "id still goes on, and so does Wolf, Doom, and Quake. Maybe that was what we came together to do. That is more than enough for any game dev, any team, any lifetime really."

Taken altogether, it's a really interesting conversation about one of the most storied game studios in history. But I love a happy ending, and so what really lands for me is how it all wraps up: With an understanding that everyone was younger then, the world was a different place, and as Romero put it, we did the best we could. Following Carmack's apology, Petersen said he didn't blame him for how it all worked out and told Romero he "did an incredible job" on Quake, and Romero thanked Petersen for getting them talking: "It really was a hell of a game."

I had forgotten about Quake Champions, the free-to-play take on Quake 3 Arena that first arrived on Steam in 2017. But it's still around, it's still got, well, a handful of players, and today it got a surprisingly beefy update to mark the 30th anniversary of Quake, including a free battle pass for everyone.

The battle pass is the most obvious hook here: Befitting the big birthday of id Software's OG 3D shooter, the season 30 battle pass includes a number of cosmetic rewards from 1996 and QuakeCons gone by, plus previously exclusive skins and the new Disintegrator rocket launcher and Goroth's Earth Magic podium.

Functionally, though, I think the update is the bigger deal. Despite its age and relatively small player numbers—it typically peaks at a few hundred concurrent players on Steam these days—the patch makes some significant changes, including an overhaul to the network code aimed at reducing packet loss and lag compensation, and improving projectile predictions. The amount of lag compensation will now vary based on your ping, problems with hit validation for high-ping players have been fixed, and the 160 ms ping limit required to connect to games has been removed completely.

A range of other fixes, optimizations, and tweaks have been made across the board, and a new "Random Champion Select" option has been added that lets players play as locked champions—when randomly selected—in practice, quick play, and ranked modes.

Universal weapon shaders have been added, characters and maps have been tweaked up in a range of ways, Quake 30th anniversary banners have been added everywhere—this is a sizable update by any measure, and particularly so for a shooter we included in our list of "eight 'dead games' that are still very much alive" two years ago.

That hasn't gone unnoticed by players on Reddit. "I don't know how [Quake Champions developer] syncerror convinced them to let him keep updating this game for so long but I'm grateful for his efforts," redditor Fob0bqAd34 wrote. "When we got that battlepass some months back (or maybe it was last summer?) with a ton of the old weapon skins in one pass I thought that was going to be it. Hopefully he gets to keep quietly ticking away in the Sharma era as well."

The patch notes for the Quake Champions 30th anniversary update are below.

• Game Client Updates
  • Fixed the collision bug that pushed players out of the map, through the map geometry collision layer
  • Fixed being able to damage a respawning player by attacking their death location with a gauntlet
  • Raw Mouse Input fixes & optimizations • NVIDIA Reflex fixes & latency markers added
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the damage summation markers code
  • Code optimizations and cleanup for the special movement input code
  • Fixed Heavy Machinegun shader not applying when attempting to customize its shader prior to selecting any other weapons in Customization
  • Fixed the wrong champion medals being awarded after meeting the qualifications for a medal and then changing champions
  • Fixed an issue where you could see a static player doll in the map when a spectator enters Freefly cam mode
  • Fixed spectators not being able to exit Freefly cam mode after entering it
  • Fixed a crash in the camera manager when switching to a player that is currently dead
  • Added caching optimizations to improve performance when referencing user setting values
  • Reduced RAM size requirements for Texture Quality levels
  • Quality Settings will no longer be lowered for hardware that is too new to appear in our internal CPU & GPU databases
  • Removed the fullscreen UI popup that would occur after a match when reaching Level 2, announcing that a new mode (Slipgate) has been unlocked
  • Fixed several cases of game crashes
• Threaded Input
• This option is enabled by default as it has tested to improve performance under most conditions – however, this option is not recommended for Linux users and may not be ideal for mice using polling rates of 4Khz or greater.
  • Added Threaded Input setting - Enables moving the input to a dedicated thread that runs at above normal priority. This has some benefit regardless of input mode but greatly reduces Raw Mouse Input latency
• Sound UpdatesBroken Persistent Sounds
  • Fixed sounds that would remain persistent in the world after they should have ended
• Pain Sounds
  • Fixed missing pain sounds
  • Fixed the incorrect pain sound playing when exactly 25 or 50 hp
  • Restored pain sounds between 75 and 100 hp
  • Added Acid & Fire panic sounds when a damage-over-time effect has been applied
• Death Sounds
  • Death Sound radius extended to 35m to match other character sounds
• Weapon Sounds
  • The volume of the RUTHLESS water railgun shot sound was reduced
• Item Updates
  • Power-ups dropped from dead players will now have a minimum duration of 3 seconds remaining • Dropped Power-ups no longer pop up vertically before dropping
  • Dropped items now fall at the normal rate of gravity
  • Fixed in-game Lore drops, in addition to being able to unlock a readable lore item, it grants an in-game bonus to those who discover them
  • Fixed dropped items (weapons, powerups, flags, etc.) from being able to land on a player’s head and remain floating in the air
• Bot AI Updates
  • Fixed Doom Slayer Bots so that they can now use their Berserk ability
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer run backwards during Bull Rush
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bots so they can no longer accidentally cancel their abilities early
  • Fixed Strogg Bots so that they can now use their Drone Strike ability
• Armor Feedback
• To provide players better feedback regarding how their combat encounter is going, we have integrated the armor hit beep system from Quake 4 and expanded upon it further. This new feedback will provide unique hit beeps when dealing damage to an opponent with armor, as well as provide visual feedback when that armor has depleted.
• Armor Hit Beeps
  • You will now hear a unique hit beep when you hit an opponent who has armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BEEP STYLE - includes OFF, Q4 and QC options Armor Break FX
  • You will now see special fx when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • HUD Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK FX Armor Break Sound
  • You will now hear a special sound effect when the damage you deal depletes your opponent’s armor
  • AUDIO Settings: Added ARMOR BREAK SOUND - includes OFF, POWER DOWN, ENERGY RELEASE, SHIELD PUNCH, and METAL TINK options
• Additional Hit Beep Options
  • Added HITBEEP styles – includes:
    • Mid-Tone (popularized in Quake 3)
    • High-Tone (from Quake 4)
    • Damage-Based (from Quake Live)
    • Additive Damage (introduced in QC)
• Teamplay FeaturesTeammate Death POIs
• Teammate Death POIs have been added to assist in teamplay. These not just help you know when a teammate has fallen but can act as a sign of danger. Whether you choose to rush into that combat zone for revenge or heed its warning to find a new path is up to you.
  • Show a Point of Interest markers at the position a teammate dies
  • HUD Settings: Added TEAMMATE DEATH POI
• Drop Commands
  • Now available in team modes are the Drop Weapon and Drop Power-Up commands. Each command will drop the item if available and trigger a message in team chat
  • Drop Weapon will drop the weapon with the current ammo count if you own below the weapon’s starting ammo amount
• Say Commands
  • Added 6 Say Commands: Yes, No, Hi, Bye, Thanks, Sorry.
  • Available in all game modes, issuing these commands will print a chat message and generate a local in-world VO message that everyone can hear
• Show Vanity Customizations Toggle
  • Enabled by default, this new setting allows you to toggle off the in-game armor shaders, vanity items, vanity weapons (including their custom fx and sounds), and weapon shaders. This can be toggled on the fly in a match. You will still see all vanity in the Match Lobby and the Pre and Post Match Podium scenes to show off your style, but during gameplay all vanity will be removed
• Weapon Zoom Toggle
  • Activating the toggle will keep the weapon zoomed in until you either untoggle or change weapons
  • CONTROLS Settings: Added ZOOM TOGGLE
• Hidden Weapon Position
  • New Hidden option sets the weapon and hands to be invisible and centered
  • Added a Gauntlet icon to the ammo HUD, so that the gauntlet weapon selection is always visible
• Weapon, Ammo, & Knockback Updates
  • Starting Weapons now upgrade instantly without weapon switch downtime
  • Weapon Pickups will now always add the starting ammo count to your current ammo count
  • Knockback is now applied immediately instead of queuing and applied in delayed batches
  • Knockback cap adjusted from 120 to 132, resolving the rocket jump penalty accrued in the prior update
• Champion Specific Weapon Loadouts
  • Weapons are now equipped per Champion in Customization
  • Added an optional Equip on All Champions button
• Random Champion Select
• The Random Champion, selected in the Champion Roster, will make a random selection from all champions. This option allows players to play locked champions (albeit random) on Practice, Quick Play, and Ranked
  • In Duel, it selects one champion at random that will be used for the entirety of the match
  • In Sac Tourney, CTF Tourney, and TDM Tourney, selects a champion during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the team
  • In Duel Rounds, makes a random selection during the pick phase, ensuring that it is a unique selection within the squad
  • In all other modes, it picks a Mystery Champion that cycles at random with each respawn, with ability cooldown retained
• Universal Weapon Shaders
• All weapons that currently have shader support now support 23 universal shaders, which have been made available for free to all players, instead of needing to own different sets of basic weapon shaders for every individual vanity weapon
• Basic weapon shaders
  • Red, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Teal, Blue, Purple, White, Grey, Charcoal, and Black Basic Shaders Camo weapon shaders
  • Grasslands, Forest, and Snow Camo Shaders Patterned weapon shaders
  • Blue and Brown Patterned Shaders Mastery weapon shaders
  • Ithagnal, Cthalha, Goroth, Volkerh, and Master Shaders
• UI Player HUD Updates
  • Buff & Debuff player info HUD (such as Quad, Protection) shows a remaining duration number when duration is 5 seconds & below (and shows decimal durations when duration is 3 seconds & below)
• Pre & Post Game
  • Fixed the Drag/Move Player hit detection of the bottom right pillar in the Custom Game 4v4 Lobby
  • Fixed a the Add-Bot [+] UI elements appearing on top of the Settings UI when passing Party-Leadership to a player actively in the Settings menu
  • Added new tips to the map loading screens
  • Fixed the persistent menu blur bug when leaving the Battle Report after a match
• Champion Updates All Champions
  • Changing champion mid-game no longer resets the ability cooldown
• Anarki
  • Disabled weapon switch during ability usage, while still allowing you to queue the switch, which will execute after the Injection completes
  • Fixed the Anarki hoverboard sounds' Teammate Volume support
• Athena
  • Grappling Hook: Fixes & updates to pull speed acceleration
• BJ Blazkowicz
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Increased Walk Speed from 160 to 280 ups (for silent walking)
  • Fixed BJ Blazkowicz’s SUMMERTIME outfit attachments when combined with the GOLDEN CROWN
• Clutch
  • Starting armor reduced from 100 to 75
• Barrier
  • Barrier: Breakable shield, increased duration that degrades as it receives damage, with a maximum of 200 dmg received before breaking
  • Barrier: Both duration and damage soak share the same energy pool. For example, while the shield can withstand a maximum of 200 dmg before breaking, if half of its duration expires before taking damage only 100 dmg is needed to burn through the shield’s remaining energy
  • Barrier: Shield sound now alters pitch as duration depletes
  • Barrier: Fixed incorrect movement settings during ability usage, including move speed 300 instead of 320 and max speed of 750 instead of 600
  • Mining Laser: Duration is now 3 seconds, instead of the remaining time from Shield duration
• Dodge
  • No Dodge Passive while the Shield is active • Spawns with 1 of 3 dashes available
  • Reduced stamina regen from 0.33 to 0.3
  • Improved the responsiveness & accuracy of the Dodge Stamina UI
  • Added a 10ms delay between executing dodges to address small issues when rapidly executing dodges
  • Updated the Air-Dodge passive title & description to Dodge Jump, to fully encompass both Air-Dodge and Ground-Dodge mechanics
• Death Knight
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Fixed the "bayonet" bug that would leave the sword extended outward while holding a weapon
  • Fixed Death Knight’s Humiliation vanity not staying equipped
• Flame Strike
  • Fixed the splash damage from the fireball projectiles, they will now always add the flame dot
• Charring Passive
  • Fire Dot - Increased from 6 dmg x 5 sec (30 dmg max) to 9 dmg x 5 sec (45 dmg max)
• Doom Slayer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
• Berserk
  • Improved enemy visibility in Berserk, making them appear solid white (with an enemy outline colored arrow)
  • Duration reduced from 5 to 3 sec (to reduce the distance he can run away when using berserk passively)
  • Duration restored in full when he lands a punch, resetting the remaining berserk time to 3 seconds (to encourage offensive usage)
  • Added a sound effect when a punch lands, to help it feel more visceral and for punches to feel like they are making contact
  • Added magnetism, trails, and new pickup sounds for blood punch bubbles
  • Fixed a bug with the weapon drop and hand raise that resulted in being stuck without fists or a weapon during or after ability usage
  • Blood Punch sound added when earning a kill with Berserk
• Eisen
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 700 ups
  • Max Extra AP reduced from 175 to 150 ap
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved Eisen armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 sec
• Sentry Turret
  • Added Damage Summation audio support for hitbeeps from turrets
  • Added Overhead Health Bars for both friendly and enemy turrets; health bars on enemy turrets are visible when the turret is either below full health or when it has obtained any armor upgrades
  • Decreased the turret’s max health from 120 to 100 hp
  • Increased the turret’s starting health from 120 to 125 hp
  • Starting Armor 0 ap, Max Armor 50 ap, Max Extra Armor 75 ap. Armor is granted via the updated Repair passive
  • Improved Turret armor decay rate from 1pt every second to every 2 secs
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 100 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Reduced activation delay from 2.0 to 1.5 sec
  • Added an a health and armor info status indicator above the ability info to show when you have an active turret deployed and how healthy it is • Fixed turrets from eternally bouncing on jumppads
  • Throwing a turret into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the turret and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the turret was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
• Repair Passive
  • Removed the armor regen passive, in favor of a new Turret Repair passive
  • Eisen can now deny Light Armor pickups when at max armor by standing near the pickup for 2.5 sec. Any armor Eisen picks up will also be applied towards the deployed turret to "upgrade" the turret's stack
• Salvage Passive
  • Shards will now grant 5%, Light Armors 10%, and Heavy Armors 10% cooldown reduction
• Galena
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Improved the fitting of the QPL SEASON 3 BELT with Galena’s ACOLYTE Outfit
• Unholy Totem
  • Hitbeeps will now play when damaging enemy totems
  • Damage Numbers will now appear when damaging enemy totems
  • Added Overhead Health Bars, Enemy Arrows, and Owner Names for friendly totems
  • Added Overhead Enemy Arrows for enemy totems, when targeted Owner Names, and when damaged Hit Beeps and Health Bars
  • Totems now receive Quad Damage, Protection, and Spawn Protection FX to show when they will deal or can receive more damage
  • Added fire SFX to totems when 3 totems are deployed
  • Totems you own will now appear solid through walls, to differentiate them from totems belonging to a teammate Galena
  • Friendly totems will now appear yellow through walls when 3 overcharged totems are deployed
  • Enemy totems will now have a visible SFX ring around them that is visible in any lighting quality setting
  • Starting Health increased from 60 to 75, Max health increased from 60 to 75
  • Damaged health now regens back up to 75 hp, healing 5 pts every 1 sec when it does not receive any further damage for 5 seconds
  • Throwing a totem into a kill zone will now grant 80% of your cooldown back, as it isn't exactly fair that we destroy the totem and you lose your cooldown just because we decided the totem was placed in an unallowed location. We grant 80% instead of 100% to discourage spam and exploitation
  • Fixed applying the Super Shotgun's close range bonus damage towards totems; damage was capped at 80 dmg with the Super Shotgun but you can now deal 120 dmg
  • Slightly increased the totem's weapon collision mesh, so that close range shotgun pellets don't miss when expected to hit
• Keel
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Grenade Swarm
  • Fixed grenades sometimes explode 3 times instead of once
• Reinforced Passive
  • Improved self-damage reduction from 60 to 67%
  • Improved splash damage reduction from 20 to 33%
• Stockpile Passive
  • Improved ammo box cooldown reduction from 10 to 20%
• Nyx
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 750 to 1000 ups
• Ranger
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 650 to 900 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Ranger Gladiator outfit renamed to BRAWLER to avoid having two armor sets with the same name (Strogg's GLADIATOR, which is based off of the Q2/Q4 Strogg Gladiator enemy). BP art for new reward added
• Dire Orb
  • Velocity reduced from 1000 ups to 900 ups
  • Shoot Delay after throwing increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • Shoot Delay after teleporting increased from 0.4 to 0.5 sec
  • The orb now has 75 pts of health and can be destroyed when shot, triggering the orb to explode. The explosion can be triggered by anyone: Ranger, teammates, or enemies
  • The orb’s damage output is now based on it’s time in flight, gaining damage over time & distance
• Scalebearer
  • Increased the maximum speed cap from 600 to 800 ups
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
  • Fixed an IK animation crash in the Scalebearer’s animation set when trying to reach a target position during weapon-aiming that was unreachable
• Bull Rush
  • Fixed the Scalebearer sensitivity bug, where sometimes the default rotation limits are not restored
  • Fixed Scalebearer Bull Rush sometimes passing through the enemy target with a collision (especially at high ping)
• Slash
  • No changes.
• Sorlag
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 75 to 50 ap
• Strogg
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap
  • Will no longer drop Stroyent when he commits suicide
  • Fixed Golden Crown power-up shaders • Fixed Golden Crown crash behaviors that would occur when cloaking & decloaking
• Drone Strike
  • Drone: Fixed Peeker’s camera view angles from updating if its Strogg owner's body enters a teleporter domain
  • Fixed Peeker’s drone flight sounds persisting after death
• Visor
  • Starting Armor in Duel reduced from 50 to 25 ap Piercing Sight
  • Piercing Sight now exposes the enemy’s health and armor information
  • Increased the volume of Visor’s third-person ability VO and reduced how much the occlusion muffles its volume
• Game Mode UpdatesLobbies/Queues
  • In a ranked match, when a player disconnects from the lobby/match, the leaver still gets the existing forfeit loss, but now loses SR. The remaining opponent now also gets a forfeit win persisted to their profile
  • Added Unholy Trinity TDM to the Bot Practice queue
  • Added support for disabling the Score Limit, by setting Score Limit 0 in Custom Game
• Matches
  • Fixed the max warmup time bug, which would allow warmup to go on forever, instead of being capped to 120 sec
  • Fixed the Auto-Abort system, to properly end matches when no enemies remain in game
  • Anti-Griefing system will now exit the current match and send you back to the main menu, instead of closing the game application
• Duel
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized
• 2v2 TDM
  • Dead player bodies will now hide at the minimum respawn time (3 seconds) -- so that it doesn't convey when an opponent chooses to respawn. This also allows you to use the Hide Dead Bodies option without being penalized. Instagib • IG Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Sacrifice
  • Active Abilities are now canceled on Soul Pickup, just like we do in CTF during flag pickups • Added an Announcer VO countdown from 10 to 1 as the point reaches 90-99% captured
• Clan Arena
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Slipgate
  • Added First-Person Spectating while dead to replace the third-person spectating
• Unholy Trinity
  • UHT Matches in Quick Play now last for 10 minutes with no score limit
• Spectating
  • Fixed spectators having a delay changing the spectator player, when the followed player dies and has entered the death HUD UI
• Map UpdatesAll Maps
  • Quake 30th Anniversary Banners added
• Blood Covenant
  • Removed an unused out-of-bounds jumppad
• Blood Run
  • Added a teleporter from the Tri-bolt mid-level to the Super Nailgun / Power-Up room
  • Fixed a hole in the wall mesh near a statue
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bounds breakable urn, placing it back into the map
• Church of Azathoth
  • Fixed missing game mode flags for items in the disabled obelisk area
  • Fixed the position of an out-of-bound breakable urn
  • Removed the out of bounds jumppad
• Citadel
  • Removed out of bounds fireplace reference inside the central jumppad Deep Embrace
  • Recreated ocean mesh from scratch for performance optimizations
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Insomnia
  • Fixed holes in the window frame mesh near HMG
• Ruins of Sarnath
  • Swapped the SG spawn and SG player-spawn locations (so that you don't have to turn around to pick up the Super Shotgun)
  • Fixed three small holes in the map mesh
• Tower of Koth
  • The smaller version of Tower of Koth will now be used in DM, TDM, IG, i9, and UHT
  • The larger version of Tower of Koth has now added the support beam above the central mid-level teleporter that was introduced in the smaller version of Tower of Koth

If there's one thing I respect in this fallen world anymore, it's commitment to a bit. Jim's Music Dungeon on YouTube is Knee Deep in the Bit, having taken hundreds of classic metal songs and made them sound like Doom level music⁠—and he isn't slowing down.

His Doom midi cover of Schism by Tool definitely has my favorite image gag of the lot, with a godmode Doomguy superimposed over Lateralus' signature psychedelic cover art of a skinless muscle dude just chilling out. Also, the long runtime and repeated prog riffs make this one feel particularly well-suited for in-game use.

The tasty irony of it all is that Doom's own iconic soundtrack was, itself, basically just classic metal music remixed in the Doom soundfont. Some of them sample from a number of sources, but others are basically just 1:1 midi recreations. Take the track "Sign of Evil," for example, which is pretty much "Starless" by King Crimson. No shade to Doom composer Robert Prince, it was sick as hell. The '90s could be so beautiful.

Back to Jim "Aku" Brimstone and his Music Dungeon: his first Doom soundfont experiment appears to have been a cover of Nirvana's "Something in the Way" in 2023. It was cleverly titled "Doomguy in the Way," though Jim appears to have abandoned such puns in the titles for discovery's sake, leaving that work to frequent cover artist collaborator Reddo.

Jim's made so many of these, it's hard to pick favorites. I love his recent Master of Puppets treatment, which sounds extremely similar to At Doom's Gate⁠—the song is listed as a likely sample source used by Robert Prince on the Doom Wiki. As a big fan of Iron Maiden, I gotta shout out Jim's covers of the band, including the self-titled "Iron Maiden."

If you dig what Jim's got going on, you can subscribe to keep up on YouTube and also check out his other music on Bandcamp or Patreon.

We all know Doom was so popular, so monumental, that it changed videogames forever. As a society, we're still obsessed with installing Doom on increasingly improbable devices, from pregnancy tests to vapes. But sometimes I run into an old factoid about Doom, some detail from its heyday that I'd forgotten, that still puts it in perspective.

Like this one: back in 1995, Doom was installed on more PCs than Windows.

I was reminded of this bit of trivia by re-reading an old PC Gamer magazine interview with John Carmack, published in November 2008, where the id Software programmer was reflecting on the benefits of open source and shareware. "We look back at the early days when the original Doom was shareware, and Microsoft did a study at the time that said there were more copies of Doom installed on computers than there were Windows 3.1. It's hard to characterise what exact value that is, to have people aware of your game but not paying you, but I certainly don't think it's been bad. Maybe we could have monetised it better than we would have thought of as a young company."

More users than Windows sounds like it should be a gargantuan number, but you have to remember this anecdote predated the launch of Windows 95, in August 95, which is when the operating system truly took off. Personal computers weren't rare in the early '90s, but according to articles about the history of Windows, Microsoft sold only about 10 million copies of Windows 3.0 between 1990 and 1992, and an additional three million of Windows 3.1 within its first three months.

In a 1996 interview, id Software president Jay Wilbur said that the shareware version of Doom had been downloaded 20 million times. That seems like an easy slam dunk comparison—Doom, which ran on DOS, was way bigger than Windows!

In the early '90s, being installed on more computers than the most popular operating system of the day was unheard of. As Carmack alluded to, those installs didn't all mean sales, though—Doom's first episode was free, thanks to the very successful shareware model id used. But clearly it was a detail that stuck with people in the tech industry at the time.

People like Valve founder Gabe Newell, who offered more details on the Doom/Windows ratio in a 2013 interview than Carmack did in 2008. Newell said that in the early 1990s, Microsoft (where he worked at the time) had very little insight into how many people were actually using Windows or its other software or what they thought of it, so it commissioned "a really large study" rather than relying on retail reseller data to guess.

"They'd actually go out into the real world and see what people were actually doing. This was the first time Microsoft had done it, to look at 10,000 people's machines and figure out what they were actually using PCs for. Well, it turns out they were actually using them for porn and videogames, and that part of the study was immediately ignored. But the good news was that if you extrapolated those numbers, Windows was actually being used in 30 million people's PCs in the United States.

"But the thing that was really striking to me, at the time, was that Windows was the number two product. Most of you probably know what the number one product was. Yeah, it was Doom."

The rest of Newell's talk is interesting if you're into the sales machinations of the early software industry, and how that ultimately informed the "direct to consumer" model of Steam that we now take for granted. But the bit that sticks out to me is that, at least according to his memory of the study, Doom was installed on more than 30 million PCs. He doesn't cite the year, but he references the "early 1990s," which suggests to me the study was conducted before the release of Windows 95.

30 million is a significantly bigger number than the 20 million number Wilbur cited in 1996. And that's from after the launch of Windows 95! It seems there's no doubt that Doom exceeded Windows' popularity. But by how much?

Could boxed retail sales and people passing around copies of the game on floppy disks or across office and college LANs have made up for another 10 million that id Software couldn't account for? How many times was Doom pirated?

Newell also specifically referenced 30 million Windows users in the United States, while another popularly quoted figure about Doom's success, this one from a September 1995 interview with Wilbur, highlighted the game being on "at least 15 million computers worldwide."

Those numbers from Wilbur are the ones you'll see on Wikipedia, which suggests to me we really don't know how many people installed, much less played, the shareware version of Doom. The anecdote that it was more popular than Windows 3.1 has been passed around in articles for years, but seemingly without anyone focusing on the significance of Newell's reference to 30 million Windows users. Was his memory of the study way off, or were we undercounting Doom's popularity all these years?

I've reached out to Newell and id co-founder John Romero to see if either of them remember the survey's findings in more detail, because it sure seems like we've got an unaccounted-for 10 million players or so.

No wonder Bill Gates was so excited about the Windows 95 port of Doom he cut a promo with a trench coat and shotgun.

The United States Library of Congress got a little cooler today by inducting the soundtrack of the original Doom into its National Recording Registry. The Doom soundtrack, by composer Bobby Prince, is one of 25 recordings now designated as "audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage."

"Music and recorded sound are essential, wonderful parts of our daily lives and our national heritage. The National Recording Registry works to preserve our national playlist for generations to come," acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen said. "The Library of Congress is proud to select these audio treasures and will work to preserve them with our partners in the recording industry."

Other recordings in the 2026 crop of inductees include the Taylor Swift album 1989, Mambo No. 5 by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra (that's the original, not the Lou Bega version), Feliz Navidid by José Feliciano, Weezer's Blue Album, The Devil Went Down to Georgia (Charlie Daniels Band) and Midnight Train to Georgia (Gladys Knight and the Pips), and The Fight of the Century: Ali vs. Frazier, a broadcast recording of the famous boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, which saw Ali take his first professional loss.

It's the proverbial mixed bag, in other words, although frankly that's just the Weezer talking—otherwise it's a solid list all around. (I'm not a huge fan of I Feel For You either, but it's fine to the extent that I get why other people would like it.) What we're really here for, though, is the rip-and-tear aural experience of Doom, and the Library has some very nice things to say about it:

Originally released in 1993, the videogame Doom brought a heavy metal energy to MS-DOS systems across the globe, while at the same time pioneering the ever-popular first-person shooter genre. Key to Doom’s popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by freelance video game music composer Bobby Prince. Prince, a lifelong musician and practicing lawyer, was fascinated by the MIDI technology that rose in prominence in the mid-1980s as a means for instrument control and composition, an interest that led to his earliest work composing videogames.

For Doom, Prince took inspiration from a pile of CDs loaned by the game's chief designer, John Romero, including seminal works by Alice in Chains, Pantera and Metallica. Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers, Prince composed the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game’s demon-slaying journey to hell and back. Taking advantage of his knowledge of MIDI, Prince even worked to ensure that the sound effects he created could cut through the music by assigning them to different MIDI frequencies. The Doom soundtrack would go on to inspire countless remixes and lay the foundation for future generations of game composers.

Prince is sometimes criticized for cleaving a little too closely to his inspirations. This, for instance, is Them Bones from the great Alice in Chains album Dirt:

And this is Bye Bye American Pie, heard in Barrels o' Fun—a Doom 2 map, to be precise, but the point remains.

Still, there's no denying that the Doom OST slaps, and that Prince's work helped make Doom one of the most intense and foundational videogames of all time. It is not, however, the first videogame to have its music committed to the Library of Congress for eternal posterity: That honor goes to the Super Mario Bros. theme, which got the nod in 2023. The Minecraft soundtrack is in there too.

Today is the 10^th anniversary of Doom—not the 1993 classic that changed the world, but the 2016 reboot that proved to be far better than I'd dared to hope. We celebrated the big birthday by confirming with Doom co-creator John Romero that Doom Guy was not intentionally rocking a sexy tummy window, but had in fact had his shirt torn open by the legions of Hell. Why did we do this? Because we're PC Gamer and we do whatever the hell we want, that's why.

Others have apparently chosen to mark the memorable moment in more conventional ways—such as Doom overlord Bethesda Softworks, which has marked that great shooter down to just $2/£1.59/€2 on Steam, 90% off the regular price. Doom is, to be clear, well worth that regular price—as a stand-up, balls-out, rip-and-tear killfest, there are very few better—so for $2, it's an absolute steal.

"The most striking thing about the new Doom, to me, is how refreshing it is to play a game so rooted in the design sensibilities of 1994. These ideas don't feel old," PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon wrote in 2016, when we awarded Doom our Best Comeback GOTY award.

"From the moment your character throws an exposition-delivering monitor into the wall, Doom signals that this is a game of pure adrenaline, and that the new ways aren't necessarily the best ways. And it's absolutely right. Nobody makes games like the original Doom anymore, but after Doom 2016 it's hard to remember why."

It really is that good, and you're probably not going to find a better $2 shooter today than this one. But what if you already own it? I have good news for you there, too: It's all on sale.

• Doom + Doom 2 - $4/£3.19/€4 (60% off)
• Doom 3 - $4/£3.19/€4 (60% off)
• Doom 64 - $2/£1.59/€2 (60% off)
• Doom Eternal - $10/£8.74/€10 (75% off)
• Doom: The Dark Ages - $23.09/£23.09/€26.39 (67% off)

Those are pretty good deals across the board, but the simple fact is that there's one can't-miss deal among them, and that's the 2016 reboot—which is also, you may have noticed, the cheapest of the bunch. Trust me, if you don't have it, you want to get it. You also don't want to horse around about it too much, because the sale (on all of them) ends in just a couple days, on May 15.

Where your average modder looks at a videogame and asks themselves "what could I add to this experience," Isowulf creator LoGeKyl approached the classic Wolfenstein 3D with a slightly different perspective: "What if this was an entirely different, and worse, game entirely?"

I say "worse" not to diminish the quality of LoGeKyl's work in the slightest, but because the pitch—"A faithful re-creation of the original Wolfenstein 3D… but viewed from an isometric perspective" makes me imagine an alternate version of the '90s where id Software followed up the 2D Commander Keen platformers with some sort of top-down puzzle-action game that was a lot closer to the original 1980s Castle Wolfenstein. Without putting the "3D" in Wolf3D, would id have ever made Doom, giving us the gift of the first-person shooter? Surely not!

With that pessimistic prognosticating out of the way, I have to say LoGeKyl's mod is still quite cool, especially as it was directly inspired by his love for the early days of id Software. "What made Wolfenstein 3D special to me was that it was one of the first times I realized that people made games," he writes on Isowulf's ModDB page. "The credits were right there: John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall. (Wait—aren’t these the same names I saw on Commander Keen!?) From that moment on, making games was all I ever wanted to do."

LoGeKyl writes that he listens to audiobook versions of Masters of Doom or Romero's autobiography Doom Guy whenever he's getting ready to start a new project, and for this one he wanted to explore how well Wolfenstein 3D's design would work in another form, with the camera pulled out and tilted to make a sort of shooter-Diablo.

"As it turns out, John Romero and Tom Hall’s original design still holds up, even from a completely different perspective. I figured I’d have to tweak movement speeds, enemy AI, maybe switch from hit-scan to projectiles—but nope. It all just works."

His only addition, graphics-wise, was a sprite of B.J. Blazkowicz, since the first-person game naturally didn't include one beyond his character portrait. While the mod debuted about six months ago, it's been updated to include all of the original game's episodes, saving and loading, and rebindable keys.

If we hurled Isowulf backwards in time and it swapped places with the original Wolfenstein 3D, I do wonder if the FPS—like life—would, uh, still find a way. Perhaps it would've taken a little longer. But if Isowulf had basically done Diablo before Diablo… maybe Blizzard North would've gone and invented the first real-time first-person shooter instead? Frag a while, and listen.

I believe that Doomguy, the protagonist of seminal FPS series Doom, may have a more whimsical reputation than he deserves. The culprit? His belly, which is readily visible in Don Punchatz's cover art for the 1993 classic. Doomguy did not go into battle wearing a jaunty little cutoff tee, nor did he have a uniform purpose-stitched to display his impeccable abs, but I believe he may have left this impression on untold thousands (millions?) of gamers.

Whatever the in-universe explanation for the tummy window on Doomguy's outfit, it has become a persistent feature of his design in both fan and official works. When his OG outfit is replicated in the HD era, you always see the abs: Doomguy's classic skin in Quake Live has it, as does the equivalent skin in Doom Eternal

This arresting fan art by user Dalia and Sam on Artstation takes it as inspiration for a full-on, early 2000s, low-rise midriff take on the reboot Doom Slayer armor. Even the brown paneling over the belly on the Doom Eternal Slayer armor is clearly evoking the tummy window

Dozens of us

Take a gander at this 2021 Doomworld forum thread on the subject. "His undershirt is ripped (presumably) exposing his six pack, right? Yeah, we all definitely realized that," user Terraformer9x wrote in the introductory post.

"Wearing a belly shirt leaves Doomguy open for tickles," quipped out_of_service further down the thread. Many commenters wondered how the exposed skin plays with the Martian atmosphere and sub-zero temperatures.

LastSpaceMarine took a moral stand against the tummy window being anything but a deliberate aspect of Doomguy's outfit, in-universe. "I refuse to accept that the shirt is ripped," they wrote in 2021. "As far as I'm concerned, it's an intentional ab window. Doomguy just wanted to look hot while he kills demons."

I got on this beat via the 2007 mod, Classic Doom 3, a recreation of Doom 1 Episode 1, Knee Deep in the Dead, in Doom 3. YouTuber DarthVR recently uploaded a longplay of the project, to give you an idea of what it looks like. The mod begins with a heinously, deliciously amateur voice-acted cutscene setting the stage⁠—let me tell you, never in my life have I been more amenable to Doom programmer John Carmack's famous assertion that story in a game is equivalent to story in a porno.

Anyway, you can see Doomguy suit up in an id Tech 4 recreation of his classic outfit, and his tummy is out, matching Don Punchatz's iconic artwork. I immediately assumed the author shared the same misapprehension I did for many years: That the Doomguy's shirt was always like that, like a saucy little cutoff tee is the official uniform of the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC)'s paramilitary wing.

"Casualties have been up since they instituted the hunky cheesecake uniform," these far future jarheads might grumble to each other. Clearly, I am not a smart man.

The thought has since occurred to me that this was just a tongue-in-cheek visual allusion rather than a painstaking 3D recreation of Doomguy, but we press on. Before any action, before any demon might have had the chance to expose Doomguy's belly to the world, this fanmade Doomguy was both sun's out, guns out and hellspawn free, tummy for thee.

When I told my colleagues the horrible truth—that I'd long known there was solid evidence that Doomguy's shirt had actually been torn in battle— I found out I was most definitely not alone in thinking he was just feelin' himself for all those years.

"This is news to me, also," wrote PCG senior editor Robin Valentine. "Could it be… Doomguy was never as slutty as I hoped?" News writer Lincoln Carpenter chimed in with: "Dude didn't just want to show off his ab work?" It's an astute observation: Doomguy has an incredible, some might say anabolic physique.

Whether Doomguy is natty or not is a question for another day (I think he's juicing): I'm here to talk about his shirt (or lack thereof). To prove I'm not insane, I've embedded a close-up of my McFarlane Toys Doom Slayer (Classic Doomguy Skin) action figure above. You can clearly see frayed edges where the shirt was ripped, yet viewed from far away, it almost looks like a window to the abs—so perfectly does it frame them, it must have been tailored.

Window to the soul

To confirm this unsexy revelation, I got in touch with the man who would know best: John Romero, id Software co-founder, programmer, and designer. In his memoir, Doom Guy, Romero described the day a model was brought in to pose as reference for Punchatz⁠—there was no mention of the shirt situation, though. I had to ask: Was the torn shirt a visual design priority for id, or an artistic flourish from Punchatz?

"As you can see from the Doom box cover," Romero wrote, "Doomguy's shirt was torn by demons. His armor is still there, but the shirt below is shredded. This was all Don's idea. In the game you are fully clothed."

That last part was a bit of a bombshell for me, and something that was brought up as a point of discussion in that old Doomworld thread. I'm sure I'd seen, but never really noticed, that the in-game Doomguy sprite had a fully intact shirt.

Another bit of evidence on Romero's side is the 1996 Doom comic, in which Doomguy's midriff remains chastely covered while he yells. "I'VE GOT A HANDFUL OF VERTEBRAE AND A HANDFUL OF MAD!"

Subsequent generations of game and fan artists turned not to Doomguy's in-game model, but Don Punchatz' art as a primary inspiration to bring Doomguy to life in different art styles or with modern graphics.

I can't blame them⁠—Punchatz' art is iconic for a reason⁠—but Doom's cover shows a single moment in the Doomguy's crusade, one where his shirt happened to get torn in a particularly playful and sexy way. Now that moment is part of his identity in perpetuity.

But let it be known: Doomguy did not show up to the Martian hellbreach dressed like he was going to utterly dominate a beach volleyball tournament, he showed up ready for business. I'm sorry if this news is a disappointment.

Ever since Godzilla first battled Mechagodzilla all the way back in 1974, it's been clear to everyone that nothing exists which cannot be made cooler by the inclusion of giant robots. This axiom is self-evident, so there's no need to ask a question like, "Would Doom be cooler if you could pilot a mech in it?" Thankfully, someone did anyway.

The proof is in the pudding, the pudding in this case being Redxone's MechDoomer: Rebooted—a souped-up take on a mod which gleefully jams Doom and MechWarrior together. It adjusts the UI, adds "mech-assault styled movement," and gives you a full suite of customizable weapon slots so you can stomp a round in the legendary FPS Battletech style.

The new 1.0 release features a whopping 28 mechs you can pilot, all of which are split among light, medium, heavy, and assault classes. The iconic Atlas is included alongside stuff like the Crab and Kit Fox, and it's impressive just how different the game looks through the lens of a swaying cockpit.

Some third-person gameplay is shown in the release trailer, and while the low-poly mechs are a little uncanny in Doom's sprite-filled labyrinths, seeing a Tarantula squash a horde of demons by goomba-stomping them into a torrent of gore is a joyous sight indeed. The description states the scale of these bots is "fully customizable," making the mod "compatible with all sorts of different level geometry."

Since you can, as Redxone clarified on the Doomworld forums, exit your mech "whenever you please," it seems like it should play nice with a variety of other mods. A post on X from the team behind the Halo Doom mod reveals the two are compatible, along with "almost any weapon and monster mod you like to normally run." As always, it's never too late to warp Doom beyond recognition before your next playthrough.

Here at PCG towers, we've recently been sorting through some of our old treasure hoard of magazine issues, including interviews with many of the industry's leading figures. One that recently jumped out to me was a 2008 interview with John Carmack, at which time he was still at id Software, around the launch of Quake Live: a browser-based remake of Quake III: Arena. And as Carmack makes clear, despite id's lineage of genre-defining games, including the likes of Doom and Wolfenstein, Quake Arena was his baby.

"It was never really a secret that Quake Arena was my favourite id Software game," says Carmack. "Of all the games that we’ve made, Quake Arena was always the one that I looked at as a pure game.

"While it had its noteworthy graphical advancements for the day, it really was about the gameplay. It was at a turning point in maturing for the gaming industry, where you had to start throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, and Quake Arena wasn’t our most successful title. But I do look back at it and think Quake Arena as a game stands the test of time."

Carmack says the idea for Quake Live came from "looking at how the PC market has changed," and again I'll emphasise this interview is from 2008, adding "there are still things that the PC does better than consoles." There is "the whole idea of PCs being everywhere, and having a game that you can play just about anywhere."

Elsewhere in the interview Carmack mentions that most of the games he plays himself are not technical showcases and makes the point that, even though id's work is known for technical wizardry, what does it for him personally is putting square pegs in square holes.

"That’s one of the aspects of engineering that’s always appealed to me," says Carmack. "Trying to do the right thing in the right place. You don’t try and push something where it no longer belongs. You look for opportunities in all the things that you have available."

Quake Live was a pretty pioneering idea for the time, launching as essentially a free-to-play browser plugin that offered everything the original game had, plus more. But id struggled to make the game profitable and eventually launched subscriptions to support it before, much further down the line, making it a paid title on Steam and leaving the browser version behind.

Carmack has previously said that Quake Arena was probably his own swansong as a designer, adding that his skills "probably tapped out a decade ago. I don’t have anything to say about design beyond the Quake III level." Which is a little bit like Michelangelo finishing up David, putting down his chisel, and saying I got nothing to tell you about sculpture. Even these days you can pick up Quake Arena, get the headphones on and, as Carmack says: "It’s pure play on it."

Doom the movie has a rating of 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, which puts it on the same tier as Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and the Assassin's Creed movie. Which is unfair. Assassin's Creed was terrible because it thought it was clever, drily dumping conspiracy theory-history with a straight face, while Doom was gleefully dumb, the kind of action-horror movie where people say "motherfucker" then do something cool—one of those ideal four-beer shout-at-the-screen experiences.

The way the doomed marines are introduced is a classic of the form. You're used to this kind of scene from Aliens (Bishop playing stabscotch) and Predator (Blaine insisting that chewing tobacco will make you "a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus"), though I have a soft spot for the one in Top Secret! where the French Resistance are introduced holding increasingly ridiculous weapons, including a straight-up cannon.

Doom's not as over-the-top as that, but it's close. Sarge (Dwayne Johnson when he was still being credited as The Rock) is introduced shirtless, because why waste time getting to what we want to see? The group sleazebag Portman is so greasy his hair looks like it repels water, the religious Goat reads a Bible and catches fruit without looking—someone has to catch something without looking up in these scenes so you know they're cool—and Duke plays a Futuretronics Galaxian 2 to remind you videogames exist.

This scene tells you exactly the kind of movie you're about to watch—one that's so indebted to Aliens it's still paying off the loan, but willing to have more fun with the form than any of the Alien movies since.

While Mac and Destroyer play baseball with fruit, the Kid cleans up and watches wide-eyed so you know he's at the bottom of the heap. The Kid could not be more doomed if he was only one tour away from retirement and also about to get married. Finally there's Reaper (Karl Urban unaware he's auditioning for Dredd), who cleans his weapons conscientiously because he's thoughtful and has hidden depths.

This crew gets sent to Mars to investigate an archaeological dig base where bad stuff has happened. Doom the movie explains the monstrous demons with some hasty ancient-alien-experiment pseudoscience rather than having them be just plain demons, which helps differentiate it from Event Horizon, but did anger the kind of fans who care about the Doom lore that apparently exists. I guess if you grew up in America during the Satanic Panic the rebel yell of Doom's pentagrams must be meaningful in the same way anything that made your parents mad is. I didn't and so the fact Doom the movie, like Doom the books, uses Christian ideas as a metaphor but is actually about aliens is fine by me. Your mileage may vary.

On Mars the marines meet "Pinky" Pinzerowski, a technician whose lower body is mechanical because of a teleporter accident (Dexter Fletcher with a better American accent than the one he had in Press Gang) and they also meet Doctor Samantha Grimm, in the role of the beautiful scientist this era of movies loved (Rosamund Pike from Gone Girl and Pride & Prejudice, being more convincing than Denise Richards was as Dr Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough).

For a second we're supposed to think Doctor Grimm is Reaper's ex-wife—his real name is John Grimm, that's why they call him Reaper, lol—but actually she's his estranged twin sister. Their parents were among the first scientists on Mars, and when they died she wanted to follow in their footsteps while he wanted to get as far away as possible. That's the kind of traumatic backstory that marks him out as Real Protagonist Material.

What follows is a pacey, blessedly sun-two-hours spent running around in corridors that is interspersed with an oddly romantic autopsy, a Big Fucking Gun, a monster being attacked with a computer monitor that looks real VGA-ass for what's supposed to be year 2046, a sewer level, scientists named after id's founders being murdered—it manages some genuinely shocking deaths, there's a real "no one is safe" feel toward the end—and finally, an extended first-person sequence that's astonishing just for existing.

For a little over four minutes you the viewer are Doomguy as he rips and tears through a bunch of baddies. It's like a haunted house train-ride complete with zombies who pop up just to cackle—only you've got a machine gun, ho ho ho. The movie honestly could have ended here, but instead it throws in a bareknuckle boss fight and a real "movie's over, fuck off" finale so you know it's never going to get a sequel.

The 2019 reboot, Doom: Annihilation, ends on a cliffhanger because for some reason they thought they'd get a sequel, and again I'm thankful the 2005 version was more self-aware than the average videogame movie. Doom: Annihilation also tried to have it both ways with demons who were simultaneously ancient aliens and also from a Hell dimension, but the imps look so lame throwing fireballs it's obvious why the previous version ditched that idea.

Sure, 2005's Doom was as dumb as rocks who flunked out of rock school, but that's what I want from a Doom movie. That and some kickass music, which Clint Mansell's score totally delivered.

I've had one eye on ambitious Doom 2 mod Trench Foot for a while, though it was, admittedly, my weaker eye that requires me to wear corrective lenses. I had assumed Trench Foot was a total conversion set in the First World War, but it turns out it's much weirder than that. It basically combines World War One chic with medieval religious zealotry and a gothic ostentation that wouldn't look out of place in Warhammer 40,000.

Notionally, Trench Foot has you play as a master Templar of the one true faith known as the Canonicate, on a mission to wage "apocalyptic holy war" on the heretics who cower in the sprawling trenchworks of the wartorn nation of Cretu. With 14 unique weapons to wield and 15 enemy types to blast into ludicrous gibs, Trench Foot sounds utterly preposterous in the best way.

Unfortunately, the mod has hit numerous stumbling blocks over the course of its development. Some of these were design hurdles typical to mod making, but others were external factors such as the Doom modding's sudden sourceport shift from GZDoom to UZDoom. Developer TrenchWork has addressed these issues on several occasions. But the project has finally borne some fruit, albeit not what fans were likely expecting.

Out of the blue, TrenchWork has released a three-episode mini-campaign called Butcher's Summit, which acts as a prequel to the events that will ultimately be portrayed in the mod. Playing as a knight in the Templar order, you're tasked with eliminating a heretic surface-to-air battery dug deep into the peaks of a vast mountain range. With three maps spanning an estimated two-hour run time, the prequel features multiple weapons and "over 40 new monsters", which sounds like a lot more than was initially planned for the full mod.

In an article revealing the mini-episode, Trench Foot lead L0kken explained what's gone on. "It's no secret that the development of [Trench Foot] Chapter 1 has had its ups and downs," he writes. "During one of those slower phases of development, I decided to use the free time to begin work on a new project. I wanted to make something with a smaller scope that wouldn't require the efforts of the whole team to complete."

I took a very quick Tour of Trench Foot's opening level, and my initial impressions are that it's pretty tasty. The mod throws into the action almost immediately, with you pushing through a quasi-World War One frontline as you fight through axe-wielding cultists and deadly suicide bombers with revolvers, rifles, and your own mighty fist. The levels are large and open for a Doom-based game, with moody battlefields wreathed with fog and dusted by snow.

It seems impressive even at a fleeting glance, but L0kken is nonetheless keen to stress that Butcher's Summit "does not represent" how Chapter 1 will play. "I made a few decisions to keep the project as simple and expedient as possible," L0kken points out, adding that they opted for "A single difficulty option and kept cinematic moments to a minimum, prioritising gameplay and exploration."

Regardless, I reckon Trench Foot's prequel episode is well worth trying. You can download Butcher's Summit over on ModDB. While the mod is based upon Doom 2, it's also wholly standalone, enabling you to launch it straight from the file with no additional tinkering required.

Humble is back with yet another bundle, and this one's a doozy, the kind that makes me wish I could erase my memory so I could experience the joy of playing these games for the first time again. Sci-fi Shooters 2.0 loads a second clip of FPS action into its discount rifle, featuring some of the best games in the genre from the last decade.

Sci-fi Shooters 2.0 is a two-tiered bundle, and there's good reasons to shoot for either of them. Paying the minimum price of $14 (£12.51) will net you four games, namely Doom Eternal. Prey: Digital Deluxe Edition, Black Mesa, and FPS roguelite Battle Shapers.

I'm not hugely familiar with Battle Shapers, but the other three games are, in my opinion, must-play experiences. Doom Eternal is still the best single-player FPS you can play today, a spellbinding iteration of id Software's 2016 Doom reboot that rewards mastery of its rich combat system in a manner unlike anything I've played before or since. Even last year's Doom: The Dark Ages, which I enjoyed very much, cannot compete with the ferocious pace and intensity of Eternal's combat.

Then there's Prey, which isn't really a shooter even if it technically qualifies as one. It is, however, an incredible game, a spiritual successor to System Shock with some of the richest creative problem solving you'll encounter this side of Deus Ex. While its initial reviews weren't as effusive as those for Arkane's more fantastical Dishonored 2, its reputation has grown substantially over time, and I believe it to be one of the best games ever made.

Finally in this tier is Black Mesa, Crowbar Collective's brilliant remake of Half-Life. While it is superb throughout, it is particularly worth playing for its expansive reimagining of Xen. Arguably too expansive in some areas, but it's still an incredible creation from what was initially a group of enthusiast modders.

$14 is a downright steal for these three games. But if you up your payment to $20 (£17.89) you'll also get Nightdive's remasters of System Shock 2 and Star Wars: Dark Forces, alongside the cooperative multiplayer FPS Starship Troopers: Extermination.

While Dark Forces and System Shock 2 are a little harder to go back to today, they are still hugely important games in the PC's history, and much more accessible thanks to Nightdive's work. Extermination, meanwhile, may have had its thunder stolen by Helldivers 2, but its larger scale teamwork has its own appeal, and the game has come on leaps and bounds since it launched in 2024.

You can, of course, pay even more for the Bundle if you want, but that's the maximum number of games you'll get. Part of your payment goes to support two environmental charities—One Tree Planted and Cool Effect. The former is dedicated to global reforestation, while the latter aims to reduce the carbon pollution at the root of climate change. The bundle has another 18 days to run, so there's plenty of time to expand your sci-fi shooting horizons yet.

While id Software's rebooted Doom got me reaching for my Super Shotgun with suitably psychotic glee, I never warmed to Doom: Eternal. I know that for many gamers, it delivered the hyperfast bullet ballet they'd always wanted, but for me, it simply felt that far too much of Doom's DNA had been sacrificed in order to deliver it.

Rather than always ripping and tearing with wild abandon, you were always dodging and pirouetting with forced necessity. What happened to being knee deep in the dead? In Eternal, you were always soaring over them.

Therefore, when id Software recalibrated the rebooted series with Doom: The Dark Ages, moving back towards gameplay that prioritised getting stuck into the demonic hordes rather than constantly running away from them, I was overjoyed. A more grounded (literally) take on the classic FPS formula that, to me at least, felt far more like a spiritual successor to the legendary 1993 original.

And now, thanks to id Software's 35th anniversary celebrations, Doom: The Dark Ages is over two-thirds off. I definitely rate this FPS, to the point that I'd personally recommend picking it up over Eternal, so I thought I would bring the discount to the wider PC gaming community's attention. The details can be found below, as well as information on additional discounts to both other games in the rebooted Doom series.

It's not only Doom: The Dark Ages that has been discounted in the id Software 35th anniversary celebrations, either. Both the rebooted Doom and Doom: Eternal are heavily price-slashed too, making it easier than ever to jump into the Doom Slayer's beastly shoes.

Prefer OG Doom? Then check out Sigil and Sigil II

Like the idea of some new Doom but would prefer new content for the original FPS experience? Then be sure to check out John Romero's recently released Sigil and Sigil II expansions. These new episodes deliver tons of deliciously devious Doom levels to fight through, and they come from the Doom design master himself. You can get both for free, but I'd recommend paying for the versions that come with the suitably excellent soundtracks by Buckethead and Thorr. Rip and tear my friends, rip and tear.

Founded on February 1, 1991, id Software is responsible for the creation of Doom, Quake, and it picked up the mantle of the Wolfenstein series with Wolfenstein 3D. To celebrate the company's 35-year anniversary, and a day late, John Carmack has posted a video to X reflecting on how things have changed.

"Every day that I sit down to my AI research work, doing petaflops of tensor calculations, I've got above me a reminder of the old days at the dawn of id software."

Behind him sits a sequence of three posters from Nick Derington's 'Ode to id'. This series of pictures recaps moments from Doom and Wolfenstein 3D and is placed in glass frames, above the three monitors Carmack presumably uses every day.

"We had 16 megahertz CPUs, 640k of RAM, floppy disks, 320 by 200 graphics. It was an age of constraints. And code, art, and design had to work closely together to find the very best corner of this tight little box that we were working within. I think we did a pretty good job back then, and I'm grateful that the legacy lives on to this day. Thank you all for playing"

What Carmack is referring to with these PCs are the standard MS-DOS rigs they were using during the development of Wolfenstein 3D. Carmack and the team moved over to higher-specced NeXT workstations—from the company founded by Steve Jobs—for the development of Doom, and he said in 2016, "using the NeXT was an eye-opener, and it was quickly clear to me that it had a lot of tangible advantages for us."

Doom itself has become a standard for testing hardware, with it running with a motherboard BIOS, a pregnancy test, and within Doom itself. This isn't purely because it's easy to run, but also because it's iconic in playstyle and look: that merging of code, art, and design Carmack was talking about.

Nowadays, John Carmack runs AI research company Keen, which led a $20 million investment round in 2022. In that same year, Carmack said the goal of Keen was "AGI or bust, by way of Mad Science!" At the time, Carmack was also a consultant on VR over at Meta, but since appears to have stepped down and away from games on a professional level.

In celebration of the 35th anniversary of Doom developer id Software's founding, co-founder John Romero has released a video retrospective on one of id's most unsung games: Catacomb 3-D.

The video featured Romero's own recollections, as well as those of id vets Tom Hall, John Carmack, and Adrian Carmack⁠—no relation on those last two, by the way. I only found that out embarrassingly recently.

id began work on Catacomb 3-D in October 1991, after completing Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter⁠. This was during the studio's brief stint in Madison, Wisconsin after leaving Shreveport, Louisiana, but before settling in Texas for good.

Catacomb 3-D was part of a deal id had with its founders' former employer, Softdisk. Some of id's first games⁠—made in blisteringly fast two-month development cycles until Wolfenstein 3-D⁠—were distributed in Gamer's Edge, a monthly, subscription-based demo disk of games put out by the software company. Similar to shareware, it's a distribution model that sounds like it came from another universe looking back from 2026.

Catacomb 3-D wasn't id's first FPS, but it included major advances over Hovertank One. While the crew continued to hone its art and design, John Carmack was experimenting with texture mapping, an aspect of 3D graphics we take for granted today, but which could only run on expensive Silicon Graphics workstations before games like Catacomb and Ultima Underworld made it work on far less powerful consumer hardware.

Speaking of things we take for granted, "FPS" wasn't even a proper genre at this point: id's early FPSes were often compared to top-down, arcade-style shooters. John Carmack called it "basically a quarter-eater still, put onto the PC" in the video, but also characterized Catacomb as id planting its game design flag.

"It didn't have the overarching story and depth that people felt the PC was better suited for," said Carmack. "And we were still kinda striking out and saying: 'No. Action, fast twitch, that still is a great, viable gaming thing to do.'

"We just had this one, new, super novel new perspective⁠, literally⁠⁠, by putting it in 3D."

Tom Hall noted that id opted for first-person in its early 3D games partly due to technical limitations. "It was very costly to draw large things on-screen⁠—don't want to slow down the game," said Hall. But like other design coups in gaming, this technical constraint resulted in something special.

"We could have done it over the player's shoulder and stuff," said Hall. "But it made it really easy to aim if something's just in the center, and it's very simple, and it's fast to draw. It also increases the player immersion, like 'this is me.'"

Romero revealed that id only made $5,000 on Catacomb 3-D through its Gamer's Edge deal⁠—approaching $12,000 in today's money, but that's still not a great paycheck for two months of work by six people. Commander Keen was more profitable and popular, so id launched into development of Commander Keen 7 at the beginning of 1992, shortly after Catacomb 3-D was completed.

But the team was beginning to realize that they had stumbled on something transformative, that immersion Tom Hall mentioned. Johns Carmack and Romero both point to an incident with Artist Adrian Carmack as a bit of a eureka moment.

"One of my more cherished memories of making Catacomb was Adrian almost falling out of the seat when he turned around right in the face of a troll. This is where we could tell we're starting to get it," said Carmack. "This is the future of gaming, rather than looking at the little sprites moving around on the screen and maybe getting tense. But it was the sense of shock. That was the first moment that locked into my mind that we were really onto something in this new genre and style of play."

"It just automatically sucked you in visually. You couldn't help it," Adrian Carmack recalled. "That's just what your eyes and your mind did.

"That was just one of the craziest things in a videogame I'd ever seen. We definitely knew that we'd found a new game style, a new game type."

id abandoned development on Commander Keen 7 after just two weeks, never to return to the series. "One night, we talked about how Catacomb 3D was just the beginning of a new way to play games, and that the future was 3D," said Romero. "Within an hour, we had decided what our next game would be: Wolfenstein 3-D, the grandfather of first person shooters."

By Romero's reckoning, Catacomb was a critical step on the path to Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake⁠—the FPS genre, as well as 3D graphics and design writ large, as we know them. "This all began with Catacomb 3-D," Romero concluded.

Romero Games is offering a classic-style, PC big box reissue of Catacomb 3-D on its website alongside other goodies like the big box release of Sigil or Romero's game dev memoir, Doom Guy. And after a Microsoft-induced scare, John and Brenda Romero's studio sounds like it's back on track to release its long-awaited next gen FPS.

I know what you're thinking. "How banal, yet another programmer has got Doom running where it doesn't belong." And I get it: you've seen id's formative FPS running on a Lego brick, a PDF, bacteria, 100 pounds of potatoes, a pregnancy test, and even a piano. I don't think I could make up something more ridiculous than what's already been done. And yet, I am still impressed by Doombuds.

Thanks to Sydney-based web developer Arin Sarkisian, Doom now runs on a pair of earbuds. More specifically, it runs on the PineBuds Pro, which Sarkisian explains on his site are "the only earbuds with open source firmware." The buds have a CPU strong enough to run Doom with some minor tweaks—the site notes Sarkisian "cranked [the CPU] up to 300mhz and disabled low power mode," providing "more than enough" juice to run the game, albeit at around 18 fps.

Doom itself also required some tweaking so that the buds' meager RAM could handle the game, but the site explains "there are plenty of optimisations" that can cut down on Doom's required 4 MB of RAM. And while the earbuds can only hold 4 MB of data (Doom is just a bit larger than that), the 1.7 MB Squashware WAD is small enough to fit. The power of id Tech 1, in the palm of my… ear.

If you're itching to try this version of the game, you can play it without any PineBuds of your own. The Doombuds website has an embedded Twitch stream and a virtual queue where anyone can line up to connect to Sarkisian's earbuds remotely and play Doom on them from their browser. Because earbuds don't have a screen, this stream acts as the game's display.

How that exactly works is laid out on the "more info" section on the website, but suffice it to say it's a pretty novel way to experience Doom, even with the low frame rate. If you'd like to run Doom on your own PineBuds, Sarkisian has shared the means to do so on GitHub.

At some point, fan retoolings of classic games are just whole new games in their own right. In 1996, Quake released with 32 levels and 6 deathmatch maps. Today, Quake Brutalist Jam 3 released with a ludicrous 77 maps tributing both id's classic shooter and brutalism, an architectural style defined by moody harshness and concrete.

You can find the project on the Slipseer website alongside an explanatory blog post. "The goal for QBJ3 was to make something uniquely ambitious for the community to build with us. Beginning production in the winter of 2024, the team slow-cooked a total conversion mod in (semi) secret," the announcement reads.

"The community came out in force, producing an unprecedented 77 maps, pushing the limits of the Quake engine to bring the oppressive, gritty, and beautiful aesthetic of brutalism to life."

The first and second Brutalist Jams were already impressive, but this new one is on another level. It comes bearing all sorts of new weapons, enemies, power ups, 3D art assets, which the release announcement posits is a "a complete visual overhaul of Quake's existing roster." It shows off the goods in a trailer that released yesterday and it's barely recognizable as a game from the '90s.

You can find a more detailed look at all the new guns and mechanics in an introduction teaser released in Oct. 2025. If you've ever wanted to dual wield wrenches, now's your chance.

It's a testament to both the resilience and passion of Quake's mapmaking community, and specifically to the growing influence of the Quake Brutalist Jam as its most prominent event. Playing it for yourself will take some tinkering, but don't let that turn you off if you have no experience modding games; detailed instructions are attached in the announcement blog post.

For the last four years, the hottest mapping event in the retro FPS scene has been the Quake Brutalist Jam. Here, mapmakers enthralled by id Software's 1996 shooter have gathered to honour architecture's moodiest style, constructing levels designed to evoke its austere, concrete minimalism.

The first Brutalist Jam occurred in 2022, spawning 35 maps that were bundled together and released as a single mod. A second Brutalist Jam took place the following year, producing 30 more delightfully grey, angular constructions to blast your way through.

Both Jams seemed like impressive achievements at the time. But this year's Brutalist Jam blows both previous events out of the water. After kicking off in October, the Quake Brutalist Jam 3 has received a whopping 75 entries created by the Quake community. For context, the original version of Quake contains 37 maps.

Why has this Jam proved so much more popular than the previous ones? Well, it might be partly down to word of mouth spreading, and the Jam didn't run last year, which likely encouraged people who feared they missed out to take part this year. But on top of that, Quake Brutalist Jam 3 doesn't just use vanilla Quake as its foundation. Instead, it revolves around a set of bespoke features unique to the Jam.

This includes a whole new armour system inspired by Quake Champions, where armour is fully stackable at all times, as well as a redesigned arsenal that includes a pipe-wrench, twin nailguns, and a shotgun with Flak Cannon-style bouncing projectiles. You'll also use these to fight a "new" enemy roster that's exclusive to the Jam. This roster includes some snazzy reskins of vanilla Quake monsters, but there are also completely new enemies for mappers to experiment with.

Arcane DimensionsThe Jam's organiser, who goes by Makkon, provided the final count earlier this week. The 75 maps include 43 "main" maps, 18 new faces maps, and 14 miscellaneous maps. However, it might be a while before we get to play the results, as it's now upon Makkon to join all these maps together in a playable hub.

This is a tradition that harks back to the original Quake, featuring in many other multi-map mod projects like Arcane Dimensions. But creating such a hub for 75 maps is a huge lift. Some members of the community have suggested splitting the Jam into multiple releases. But Makkon is committed to releasing it as a single package, noting, "This is going to be an insane challenge."

If you want to get a sense of what Brutalist Jam 3 might include, you can download the introductory map created by Makkon, designed to showcase the features of the Jam. While made for instructional purposes, it's still a decently sized map, letting you try out the new weapons in a bespoke shooting gallery before battling the new enemies across a more traditional FPS level.

In 2021 PCG reported on a singular scientific experiment: rats named Carmack and Romero had been taught how to 'play' Doom. I use the inverted commas because, cute and cool as it was, the question of whether the rats were really playing Doom in any meaningful way, or just running on a ball for some delicious sugar water, was not conclusively answered.

The project leader Viktor Tóth said at the time he wasn't happy with how they'd implemented the shooting response, and four years later the team is back with a new setup that significantly expands what the rats can do (first spotted by Tom's Hardware). And this time, the rodents are rocking a trigger mechanism.

The first version had the rats suspended in a harness over a ball that rotated when they moved, with that movement mapped to a simplified version of a Doom corridor with an imp at the end. When the rat did the right things, it would get a reward in the form of sweetened water.

The limitations meant that it was a bit of a stretch to say the rats were playing Doom, but as Tóth said you could make a decent argument they were "kinda" playing Doom.

The new setup still maps the rat's real-world movement into a Doom environment, but now allows for more nuanced navigation alongside new inputs and feedback. The rats are now treated to a wraparound AMOLED display that covers more of their field of view (which "maximizes immersion without obstructing whisker space"), and any wall collisions are communicated via gentle puffs of air to the animal's snout.

Most notable of all is a new trigger mechanism that lets the rat fire a gun in Doom, meaning they now not only move around in the game environment but can shoot things.

"The shooting input is a custom-built hand-operated lever," writes Tóth. "Rats pull it with their paws to fire. The lever is held in place by small springs, encased in a 3D-printed housing. It includes a rotary encoder to detect motion and a stepper motor to actuate it."

Everything about the setup is external: sensors, motion tracking, visual feedback, and of course the good old rewards reinforcing correct behaviours. The initial experiment was a Tóth solo project, while this v2 was built in collaboration with electrical engineer Sándor Makra. Akos Blaschek also assisted in documenting the project for open-sourcing and, should you wish to build your own rat VR hardware, here is how to do it.

The results? "The rats successfully learned to navigate the virtual environment and trigger the shooting mechanism," writes Tóth. "Habituation took approximately two weeks per rat. While advanced training wasn't completed due to time constraints, initial data showed promising engagement with the system. Full behavioral validation requires longer training periods."

So perhaps we can forget about the inverted commas, and simply say that rats can now play Doom. The rodent versions of Carmack and Romero have long since gone to the great sugar water dispenser in the sky, but the legacy is clear: they walked, so later rats could run 'n gun.

I didn't think it was possible for Doom to become more accessible than it already is. Id Software's omnipresent FPS is playable on every device imaginable, from pianos to printers to even gut bacteria, while Nightdive released a delicious double-barrelled overhaul of Doom + Doom 2 last year, which exists on top of the fact that you can play vanilla Doom in your browser.

But it turns out I was wrong, terribly wrong, as an entire subculture of Doom modding has just been excavated in a way that might spell actual doom for my career. DoomScroll is a new website that lets users scroll through and play thousands (and I mean thousands) of user-made Doom WADs right in your browser.

DoomScroll is the creation of software engineer James Baicoianu and Internet archivist Jason Scott, who have developed it over several years and released it to celebrate Doom's 32^nd birthday: "Our goal was to make decades of work from one of the most creative communities in gaming history more accessible and visible to everyone," Baicoianu explained in a Bluesky thread. "The community has built so much over the years, and there's no question that Doom has had a lasting influence on the game industry as we know it today."

Baicoianu points out that the DoomScroll archive includes everything from "simplistic maps made by kids just learning how game development works" to "full total conversions with all-new music, textures, and sprites". Presented against a vast wall of Doom sprites and bloody industrial textures, each level is summarised in a small grey box featuring its name, author, description, and a spinning wireframe view of the map.

Clicking on the box brings up a more detailed overview of the WAD displayed on a virtual laptop, with the wireframe overviews now spinning near the bottom of the page. Clicking on these will bring up an interactive automap, with a menu running across the top of the laptop from which you can select to play the WAD. After a few moments, the site launches you into your chosen Doom map from pistol start.

Every year another Doom birthday rolls by and reminds me of the same thing:I never actually launched the project I started five years ago with @textfiles.com Today, I finally fix that.

— @bai.dev (@bai.dev.bsky.social) 2025-12-11T14:33:54.985Z

I tested several maps, all of which worked out of the gate with now-standard Doom KB+M controls. I then very quickly had to stop playing because, good grief, I can see myself losing entire workdays to this. Turns out that Christmas coming early causes you all sorts of organisational problems.

While DoomScroll is brilliant, it isn't perfect. Responding to Jason Scott's own post revealing the project, Doom modder and YouTuber Major Arlene states, "some maps won't work" through DoomScroll due to the "limitations" of the emulator. I tested the WAD Major Arlene mentions (named Army of Darkness), and for me, it wouldn't load at all, simply presenting me with a black screen.

Major Arlene also points out that "not everyone gives permission for their projects to be redistributed outside of where they're originally uploaded". The Doom mapping community has apparently encountered "a lot of problems" with incomplete and improper sourcing of WADS, and DoomScroll currently offers no way for users to check this.

Even so, Major Arlene is enthusiastic about DoomScroll, stating that it is "a fantastic idea". Indeed, even with the teething problems Major Arlene highlights, it's a fantastic way to explore Doom's long history of community creations.

Short of any other wildly ambitious, last-minute surprises, DoomScroll wraps up what has been a fascinating year for the shooter series. This year, of course, brought us Doom: The Dark Ages, another fascinating take on Doom by id Software, which recently received a rework to its wave-based Ripatorium. The Doom modding community also proclaimed the death of popular sourceport GZDoom, as its contributors departed en masse after tensions with its creator came to a head.

Elsewhere, Doom co-creator John Romero is still working on a new FPS, despite his studio having its main project cancelled by Microsoft earlier this year. Fortunately, Romero Games survived the cancellation and salvaged much of that work, transposing it into a new, smaller indie FPS that Romero says "will be new to people the way that going through Elden Ring was a really new experience".

If you haven't heard, Steam is having a Black Friday sale for the first time ever. Yep, despite hosting nonstop sale events all year along, this is the first one formally branded around post-Thanksgiving consumerism.

It's not one of Steam's "big" sales of the year—the kind that takes over the entire store page and gives away stickers—but it does have one standout deal that you should really consider for the FPS enjoyer in your life. Doom: The Dark Ages is on sale at 50% off, marked down to $34.99.

That's a tremendous deal on one of the best (and only) big budget singleplayer shooters in recent years, especially considering it's barely six months old. Is it the best Doom of the modern trilogy? No, but id gave itself a tough act to follow, and The Dark Ages is still gigantic and impressive in different ways than Doom '16 and its 2020 followup, Eternal.

As I wrote in my 80% Doom: The Dark Ages review back in May:

"This is Doom at its most indulgent and deliciously violent, but it's also dumbed down and undeniably the easiest of the trilogy. Maps are uncharacteristically barren, secrets abnormally obvious, and puzzles so simple that they hardly fit the description. Viewed through the lens of loud feedback that insisted Doom Eternal was too complicated, The Dark Ages is an overcorrection."

If you were a big fan of the swings id took with Eternal, you might not glom onto The Dark Ages' deliberately slower combat. Months later, I do understand it better now that I've played through the original Doom for the first time on Steam Deck—The Dark Ages' flat maps and weapon simplicity could be viewed as a throwback, though even so, the aggressiveness of OG Doom's tight quarters and demon density provide the deeper thrills.

This is all to say that The Dark Ages is a much easier recommendation to FPS fans of all tastes at $35. It's a meaty, 22-level campaign stuffed with memorable guns and more cutscenes than you'd probably expect from id. And if you're one of many who lost access to The Dark Ages when Game Pass skyrocketed in price and drove a bunch of people to cancel, here's your shot at an also-inherently-fleeting digital copy.

Doom: The Dark Ages received a whole new mode back in August—the wave-based "Ripatorium" that allows players to build their own demonic encounters. But it seems id Software has had a rethink about the Ripatorium, as The Dark Ages' latest update substantially overhauls how it works.

While update 2.3 is mainly Ripatorium focussed, it's worth briefly going over the adjustments it makes to the campaign and general play. Regarding the former, the update introduces another round of combat encounter tweaks, adding an enemy here, removing another there. On the latter front, it adds an option to adjust TDA's "Brink of Death" feature, which determines how likely you are to survive a near-death situation. Basically, you can now reduce the system's impact on combat, making you more likely to die at low-health.

Onto the main event, update 2.3 introduces "Ripatorium 2.0", which chiefly converts The Dark Ages' arena mode from a purely wave-based affair to a more structured round-based format. Previously, players only had broad control over an encounter, able to select enemies they wanted to fight, dictate number of times enemies would respawn and choose whether or not to set a time limit or to simply toggle endless mode.

With Ripatorium 2.0, players instead face up to five rounds of enemies, with custom settings available for each round. You can still adjust the type of demons you face and number of respawns within each round, with rounds supporting up to 10 waves apiece. But the round structure means you don't just face the same arrangement of enemies over and over, and instead can build a greater sense of progression into a fight.

In addition, the update adds five new music tracks to listen to when eviscerating hellspawn, and adds new encounter presets for players who aren't interested in a custom experience and just want to dive right in. Most interesting to me, though, is passcode sharing. This lets players save encounters they've created with a unique passcode, then share them with friends and other players.

In isolation, passcode sharing is not all that exciting. But id Software is looking to add the best custom encounters as "community-made" presets, encouraging players to share the codes on social media (tagged with @doom). While I'm not all that interested in designing my own Doom encounters, I am interested in playing the best encounters that other people have designed.

In fact, I'd love to see a system that lets players share and rate encounters within the game, kinda like the underrated Snapmap system from Doom 2016. I appreciate this is probably much harder to implement, as The Dark Ages doesn't have much of an online component in the way 2016 did. But it would give the Ripatorium, and TDA more generally, a bit more prominence in the game's post-launch life.

Not that there's anything wrong with releasing a purely singleplayer FPS—in fact, I'd like to see many more of them. But I'm also aware that the modern industry makes that a difficult sell, so I'm in favour of whatever helps justify making singleplayer shooters. Strong player-creation support is one such example, so anything that makes it easier to build a community around the Ripatorium seems like a good idea.

FPS legend John Romero is on record as regretting, and apologizing for, the famous Daikatana magazine ad that stated he was about to make you his bitch. But in recent years, a Photoshop of the ad has taken on a second life as the perfect memey encapsulation of Romero's social media interactions with former id designer Sandy Petersen.

For more than four years, Romero has been politely but pointedly correcting every inaccurate memory and anecdote Petersen's shared on Twitter (now X) from his time working at id Software. Nearly each tweet begins with some variation of "Hi Sandy, hope you're doing well" before nuking the original statement from orbit.

Petersen joined id during the development of Doom in 1993, working on several of the game's levels and designing more for Doom 2. He also worked on Quake before leaving the studio in mid-1997, about a year after Romero's exit. That makes for a good bit of overlap, though of course Romero was with id from the beginning, having co-founded the studio in 1991.

Romero, notably, has talked about having hyperthymesia, which he credits for giving him a vivid memory. I don't know if his recall is perfect, but each time Petersen trots out an id anecdote, Romero seems to have a confident correction locked and loaded in the chamber. It turns out that "John Romero's about to hope you're doing well" is more intimidating than Daikatana ever could be.

Only once in the four-and-a-half year history of these exchanges have I seen Petersen fight back to insist he had part of his memory right. And, y'know, I think with that sort of hit rate I would personally just stop posting forever—though given some of Petersen's other takes, maybe being wrong about the minutia of Doom is a better use of his time.

And now, a short but satisfying history of John Romero Hoping Sandy Petersen Is Doing Well.

2021

Given what a phenomenon Doom was, selling 100,000 copies sure sounded low.

The specificity of distinguishing "skies" from "a skybox" particularly tickles me in this one.

Give Tom Hall credit for the rocket jump!

"I appreciate your interest in Doom" may low key the most savage burn of them all.

(Petersen responded to his original tweet guessing that it was Grenadier models, and that the cacodemon wasn't made. Both seemingly incorrect.)

2022

Damn Sandy, I didn't work at id and even I know that Commander Keen had two different trilogies clearly built on different engines because I played 'em.

The rare follow-up correction.

2024

It is really hard to believe that Sandy Petersen would've had to convince the rest of id Software to keep the shotgun.

2025

Tom gets his flowers again.

"Hello again" is when I'd start frantically trying to turn off my phone.

Petersen fired back on this one, insisting Steed "did the animations for Quake, including the fish." He's not credited in the original CD manual for Quake, which only lists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud as artists. However, he does show up in the credits in later manuals like this one, so perhaps Paul contributed to some of Quake's post-release updates, like its mission packs. Steed unfortunately passed away in 2012.

2026

Here we are again. After a cordial exchange between Carmack, Petersen, and Romero about Quake's 30th anniversary, Petersen goes off on videogame piracy, claiming "70-90% of Doom's players pirated it" and blaming that figure for id Software being "gutted" during Quake's development.

Romero's not having it.

Doom: The Dark Ages is officially Steam Deck verified, which is surprising only in how long it took considering id Software's history delivering shooters that are not just visually impressive, but exceedingly well optimised. The studio has worked minor miracles with handheld ports too, most notably the Nintendo Switch version of 2020's Doom Eternal.

That said, The Dark Ages was the first Doom game to be fully and constantly ray-traced, making it a less obvious candidate for handheld gaming when it launched. While it ran well enough on most PC hardware and could even deliver reasonable framerates on a cheap gaming laptop, as Andy Edser noted in his PC performance analysis, the Steam Deck nonetheless struggled to meet its minimum requirements, and as such performance was underwhelming.

But that's all changed, apparently. Update 2.2 introduces several handheld-centric optimisations and quality-of-life features. This includes general performance improvements and advanced optimisation settings for handheld devices, as well as more performant SFX and VFX when gaming on the go.

The update also adds handheld-specific autodetection, and device specifications for numerous devices including Steam Deck and the newly released Xbox Rog Ally X. I suspect the latter's launch is partly behind Doom: The Dark Ages' extra performance push, given that both id Software and its publisher Bethesda are owned by Microsoft.

Aptly named YouTuber Deck Wizard recently took Doom: TDA for a handheld spin, and id's optimisations certainly seem to deliver a consistently smooth experience—though it is unsurprisingly a lot less shiny than when played on a proper PC.

While update 2.2 is geared mainly toward smoother handheld play, it also folds in a bunch of bugfixes for both the campaign and the wave-based Ripatorium added in August. Primarily, it makes several tweaks to weapon balance, ensuring that damage stats are now registered properly when an enemy receives multiple damage instances in the same frame as its death (The Doom Slayer certainly dishes out the pain in The Dark Ages), while also tweaking the Slayer's shield so that it properly accounts for melee stagger.

Elsewhere, the update adjusts numerous combat encounters across the campaign, and fixes an issue with "Sentinel civilians‘ heads being out of place in Hebeth, Siege – Part 1, and Sentinel Command Station." Given just how many heads end up out of place in Doom: The Dark Ages, id Software should be credited for spotting these ones being incorrectly displaced.

While I'd probably still recommend you play The Dark Ages on a traditional desktop if you can, it's well worth picking up if you're partial to a bit of first-person blasting. While not as strong as 2020's Doom Eternal, it does successfully remix the shooter's fundamentals once again, as Morgan Park noted in his Doom: The Dark Ages review, where he called it"the trilogy's sharpest zag yet—recasting the Slayer from a meaty fighter jet, ducking and dashing past the hordes of Hell, to a stalwart tank, smashing shield-first into the action".