Doom at 30: what it means, by the people who made it

In 1993, a team of five coders released what would become one of the most influential video games ever made. Three decades on, they explain how they did it

In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block on the Lyndon B Johnson freeway in Mesquite, Texas, to start a new job. The building had a jet black glass exterior and sat utterly incongruent amid acres of car parks, single-storey industrial units and strip malls. Game designer Sandy Petersen called it the Devil’s Rubik’s Cube. Taylor’s new workplace was on the sixth floor in office 615. The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom.

By the time Taylor joined the company that day, fresh from his electrical engineering degree, id had already hammered out a dozen small-scale games for the digital magazine publisher Softdisk and the shareware pioneer Apogee. Its most recent title, Wolfenstein 3D, was an edgy Nazi shooter with fast-paced action and rudimentary polygonal environments. But when Taylor met id’s charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project, whose name was partly inspired by a line from the movie Color of Money. (“Doom” is what pool hustler Tom Cruise called his cue.) The concept was simple: Aliens meets The Evil Dead. But into this new project, Romero, the brilliant coder John Carmack and the artist Adrian Carmack had thrown all their obsessions: heavy metal, Dungeons & Dragons, gore, cutting-edge programming.