How Much Money Did the Original "Doom" 1993 Cost Id to Produce?

[Dubbag]

This is a question that I have always wondered the answer to but was never able to find after decades of searching the internet. No one asks it and no one has ever answered it. My question is, does anyone know how much "Doom" in 1993 cost Id to produce/develop? I never asked on here because I always figured since no one asked, no was supposed to or that maybe it was information that Id never disclosed or wanted to have disclosed. I originally posed this question to @Doomkid in a PM and he told me that it would actually be a great idea to make a thread for it so here we are. Does anyone know? I keep digging and digging all over the internet and all I ever find is the cost of production for "Doom 2016" which BTW I recently found out was 90 Million Dollars!

Edited June 3, 2021 by Dubbag

[Reelvonic]

tree fiddy

 

but im pretty sure in the share ware version it says how much you can by the other episodes for

 

edit:

 

Edited June 3, 2021 by Reelvonic

[Dubbag]

1 minute ago, Reelvonic said:

tree fiddy

 

but im pretty sure in the share ware version it says how much you can by the other episodes for

true but what I'm asking is how much did it cost the company to produce?

Edited June 3, 2021 by Dubbag

[Reelvonic]

1 minute ago, Dubbag said:

im asking how much did it cost the company to produce?

Oh, damn, I really read the question wrong

 

damn rereading it I feel like a moron lmao 

but I think I vaguely remember hearing how much somewhere

Edited June 3, 2021 by Reelvonic

[Dubbag]

1 minute ago, Reelvonic said:

oh damn i really read the question wrong

lol all good.

[Kurogachii]

I estimate they spent triple the budget of Wolfenstein 3D, keep in mind that they used tracks from Pantera and Alice in Chains, and of course the new technologies and "3D" modelling.

[Dubbag]

6 minutes ago, Kurogachii said:

they used tracks from Pantera and Alice in Chains

I don't think they ever paid for those.

Edited June 3, 2021 by Dubbag

[Kurogachii]

4 minutes ago, Dubbag said:

I don't think they ever paid for those.

My bad, they were "inspired", still, the technology alone was way more revolutionary.

[Dubbag]

I wish you could tag John Romero in posts otherwise I'd ask him on here directly.

Edited June 3, 2021 by Dubbag

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

Unless Romero or Carmack themselves are willing to come here and answer it, all we can do is speculate.

Consider that id had a very modest office, production took less than a year, probably reusing all the computers they used to make Wolfenstein, team of a dozen people (which probably none of them had wages above 100k a year, you probably shouldn't count the bosses own salaries), and they improvised weapons with toys and a borrowed chainsaw (they definitely didn't had the time or money to make more professional assets for these stuff), it's hard to believe it being anywhere above a couple of hundreds of thousands of dollars, most definitely bellow the half-million dollar mark.

It's not just Doom, budgets of that era of gaming was extremely dark, the only game we can get a direct comparison is Super Mario 3, which did cost 800 grand , but you have to consider it was developed in a country with a much higher cost of life and the rent and maintenance of their massive luxorious office complex alone was probably 95% of the budget.

Edited June 4, 2021 by Sergeant_Mark_IV

[Doom_Dude]

It cost them at least $666 dollars with all the pizzas Romero ate.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

Consider that id had a very modest office, production took less than a year, probably reusing all the computers they used to make Wolfenstein, team of a dozen people (which probably none of them had wages above 100k a year, you probably shouldn't count the bosses own salaries), and they improvised weapons with toys and a borrowed chainsaw (they definitely didn't had the time or money to make more professional assets for these stuff), it's hard to believe it being anywhere above a couple of hundreds of thousands of dollars, most definitely bellow the half-million dollar mark.

They switched to the NeXT cubes for Doom. Wolf wasn't made on those (but the hintbook was).

 

Given how small id was and how much of an indie deal they are, Doom was probably partly funded on Wolf sales, partly on publishing deals for their other stuff.

 

My guess: $300,000-500,000. The NeXT Colorstations were not cheap, after all ($7995 each apparently), and of course they still needed to care for themselves.

Edited June 4, 2021 by Dark Pulse

[Diabolución]

3 hours ago, Dubbag said:

tag John Romero in posts

 

John Romero, the fucking killing machine amongst the fucking killing machines.

[Mayomancer]

One million dollars

[BeefGee]

apparently nextstep workstations cost approx 7k USD in the early 90s. If they bought about 5-6 of them that would easily be the biggest single cost during Doom's development. office space being a likely second biggest cost.

 

I think most other people's estimates are on the money. Around 200k? Remembering that this was 30 years ago and 200k then is roughly the equivalent of half a million now.

 

Although, Romero often says in his talks that they basically lived at the office for long periods of time, so they may not have been paying themselves massive salaries? it's hard to say.

 

Wolfenstein and Keen were both very successful games during the time of Doom's development so they could've splashed cash if they wanted to.

 

Send Jay Wilbur an email. He should know ;)

[Scuba Steve]

2 minutes ago, BeefGee said:

If they bought about 5-6 of them that would easily be the biggest single cost during Doom's development. office space being a likely second biggest cost.

 

I actually wouldn't be surprised if one of the most expensive aspects of producing Doom was contracting Gregor Punchatz. Ivan's boxart probably wasn't cheap, either.

[BeefGee]

12 minutes ago, Scuba Steve said:

 

I actually wouldn't be surprised if one of the most expensive aspects of producing Doom was contracting Gregor Punchatz. Ivan's boxart probably wasn't cheap, either.

 

Good points. Also they contracted out the network code (which they never received), some of the sound code, and some of the art besides the models (like the famous DooM logo itself). Plus hiring Sandy might not've been cheap. He was already a legend in the game design world.

[Murdoch]

Romero's hair care products ate up most of the budget.

[Doomkid]

I'm placing all my bets on $500,000, give or take. Like all Doom mysteries, this will eventually be solved, and when it does I want to be able to track how close my guess was!

[Gez]

There were a dozen employees at the time. Development of Doom debuted in earnest in September 1992, after the release of Spear of Destiny, for a release in December 1993. So that's around 16 months of wages for twelve people, or 192 months of wages. Let's say about 200. That's a ballpark, of course: Sandy Petersen was only hired ten weeks before release, but on the other hand some other people such as Carmack had been working on the Doom engine for longer than that since there was no real programming work to do between Wolf 3D (May 92) and SOD (Sep 92).

 

Then there's Bobby Prince who was contracted for the music; Paul Radek who was contracted for the sound system; Don Ivan Punchatz for branding art (box cover, logo); TXFX (Gregor Punchat"s company) for spiderdemon, arch-vile, mancubus, and revenant models (yeah, three of them ended up being only in Doom II, but all four were planned for Doom originally, so all four must have been in the contract)... And the physical products, too. While we can probably neglect the cost for the toys and artbook that served as sources for the weapons and many textures, the NeXT computers were a significant investment.

 

Finally, there's the print run for the floppies and boxes that were actually sold, and a marketing campaign with ads in gaming press.

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

4 hours ago, Gez said:

Finally, there's the print run for the floppies and boxes that were actually sold, and a marketing campaign with ads in gaming press.

If we get these information, these are things that needs to be classified as distribution costs and marketing costs respectively and separately from the core development cost.
As the Super Mario 3's example, developing the actual game cost 800k, and a 25 million marketing campaign. Dumping these numbers together blurs and changes the perspective of things.

[Gez]

Sure, but it's part of "how much did they need to spend on this game before it started to bring in money".

[Koko Ricky]

14 hours ago, Kurogachii said:

I estimate they spent triple the budget of Wolfenstein 3D, keep in mind that they used tracks from Pantera and Alice in Chains, and of course the new technologies and "3D" modelling.

Bobby Prince changed just enough notes to skirt the law. There's no actual covers in the soundtrack despite the undeniable similarity to some songs. I think this was accomplished not only by changing a few notes here and there (possibly the key itself), but also because he reinterpreted singular riffs from songs as 1-4-5 12 bar blues progressions. Which is a little weird for metal. He even said in an interview that metal songs are easy because they adhere to the 1-4-5 structure. This is sometimes true of older hard rock, but even Black Sabbath frequently used other progressions. I wonder where he got it in his head that metal is generally bluesy, compositionally.

Edited June 4, 2021 by GoatLord

[snapshot]

gotta be at least 5 bucks

Edited June 4, 2021 by sluggard

[Rytrik]

On 6/3/2021 at 11:15 PM, Murdoch said:

Romero's hair care products ate up most of the budget.

 

Worth it.

[Dubbag]

so i guess the estimate is close to but under 500 grand