Is the Doom franchise "cursed"?

[Man of Doom]

Yes, this is a serious question.

And no, this isn't some attempt to make a "Doom iceberg" meme or anything along those lines.


So what do I mean by "cursed"? Well, here's a link for a full definition:
The full definition of a "cursed production"

But for the TL;DR, what this means is that a work of any fiction which ends up beset by an inexplicable number of behind-the-scenes problems right from the word "go". In the most extreme instances of a curse, disasters and tragedies start to affect everyone involved in the production of the work (ranging from cast and crew, to production companies and even sponsors), up to and including serious physical injury, mental/psychological distress, and even outright death. Even in less extreme examples, there have been instances of works ultimately never seeing the light of day or some misfortune falling upon any random number of people involved with the project in question all thanks to a "curse".
And while it can be speculated that a "cursed" production has some supernatural elements to it, it's hard not to argue that it really is just a randomly clustered series of coincidental events.


I partially admit that my broaching this topic is more because of two things:
 

• The Doom manga I've been working on is currently in development hell as of this writing. The two artists currently associated with it have currently been unable to work on it due to several other commitments involved (I've even been talking with @Saki about who is going to be taking her place going forward, as she will be stepping down as an artist). Even I've been having trouble writing the manga, since not only has there been writer's block in certain places, I've also had to deal with a ton of other things (including my own mom suddenly joining the choir invisible).
  I admit I'm not that much of a spiritual person, but I'm now beginning to suspect that there's some divine power who doesn't want me to see this project through to the end.
  As a result, I've seriously considered having the "master document" of this project shared with people I know, and to have them share said document with the general public in the event that production irreversibly collapsed (to the point where even I'm completely unable to continue work on the manga in any shape or form). At the very least there, I can have something to show for anyone who might be interested in taking up that particular sword.
  
  But in the meantime, I'm just going to have to grit my teeth and hope it's all worth it.
   
• In light of more recent developments in the Mick Gordon Incident (discussed below), I was chatting with some friends on how things might be going with id Software. Someone brought up that it always seems like as far back as the 90s, id has always been in a constant state of flux and internal strife. It hasn't helped that history seems to have repeated itself first with Doom 1993 and then Doom 2016 (a Doom title ends up taking the gaming industry by storm and while the follow-up is just as successful if not even more so, cracks start to show and problems start to emerge; Quake in the 90s and Doom Eternal in the new 10s/20s, respectively).
  Apparently, things during id's conception were fine, but problems started to emerge after the completion of Wolfenstein 3D/Spear of Destiny.
  
  I even joked that there should be a Masters of Doom II.

 

Another part of me wanted to ask this question in jest, more so with what happened with Doom in the 90s and early 2000s, though it started to form into a more legitimate question (namely because Doom Eternal in particular always seemed like it was always covered in a cloud of what seemed to be constant bad news).

So, at the expense of possibly looking like Charlie Kelly in search of Pepe Silvia, here's a comprehensive list of... well, misfortunes at best, outright tragedies at worst. Just keep in mind, I've done my best not to speculate on the internal goings-on at any past or present version of id Software, and I admit that some of the documentation of various events might be more conjecture than anything.

Classic Doom (Doom 1993/Doom II/Final Doom?)

• Spoiler

   

  • The original pitch for Doom: Evil Unleashed was quite ambitious and would have included a more detailed story as well as fully fleshed-out characters. This isn't to say that Doom should've continued with this original plan; if anything, Doom probably wouldn't be as immortal as it now is, had that path been continued. The end result was Tom Hall being let go and a ton of his ideas were either relegated to later games in the Doom franchise or different games entirely.
    id may have truly captured lightning in a bottle with its "shoot first ask questions later" attitude, but that came with sacrifices.
  • Let's just say that Masters of Doom did such an amazing job chronicling what happened after the release of OG Doom (case in point, what happened when John Romero tried to make all gamers his bitch with Daikatana).
  • The massive backlash which ensued over TNT: Evilution becoming "official"; it didn't help that right up until the last minute, the expectation was set there that TNT was set for a free release.

   

   

Doom 64

• Spoiler

   

  • Originally, Midway planned on being much more ambitious with Doom 64 (back then, simply known as "The Absolution") by depicting various visions of Hell as it would appear in several different cultural interpretations of Hell (so far, Egyptian, Mayan, and Aztec depictions were confirmed). id ended up rejecting this pitch, instead opting for Midway to focus on more traditional depictions of Hell.
  • A sequel to Doom 64 was in development and would've had more of a focus on multiplayer, but was ultimately scrapped because other N64 titles like GoldenEye and Turok basically showed up to steal the first game's lunch money. (What really stings about this is that Doom 64 really did have enough potential to at least warrant a sequel, but back then, polygons were seen as "the future" whereas sprites were seen as "the past"; no wonder Doom 64 ended up aging much better than so many N64 titles.)

   

   

Doom 3

• Spoiler

   

  • From the beginning, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud were both adamantly against the idea of id making a third Doom game, as they mentioned that id would be making the same game over and over again. They ultimately came to an agreement, but not without the firing of Paul Steed.
  • Trent Reznor was initially brought on to be the composer and sound designer for Doom 3. But contrary to popular belief, there was no internal falling out that suddenly caused him to leave the project; what had actually happened was a mixture of scheduling conflicts and game development taking too long which resulted in Trent's contract with id expiring (and naturally, Chris Vrenna took his place).
  • While we technically get a sneak peek at what Doom 3 could have been, the leaking of the Doom 3 alpha pretty much made sure that "could have been" stayed that way. That being said, there's really no way to confirm whether Doom 3 was going to be different had the alpha not leaked.

   

   

Doom 2016

• Spoiler

  • (Technically more Doom 4 1.0) After the release of Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil, the franchise was largely dormant and it was at this point that the franchise was starting to be seen among the general public as a gaming relic; Doom was not only seen as a dead franchise but also one that was being seen as having more in common with Pac-Man than Super Mario Bros. Then come 2007, there had been rumblings of a Doom 4 in development.
    All of this wouldn't have been so bad, if it weren't for the current wave of "spunkgargleweewee" (AKA modern military-type shooters) and the fact that for several years, id had nothing to show for it. Then in 2013, an article was published showing that Doom 4 was not only scrapped outright and started over from scratch, even the development of what would become Doom 2016 was in serious trouble. It hadn't helped that several high-profile developers at id had departed around this time, including John Carmack.
    That, and the in-progress product prior to the decision to reboot didn't exactly inspire confidence as it looked like Yet Another Military Shooter.
    It had actually gotten to the point where a decision was made to show off what would become Doom 2016 much earlier than expected (at a private screening at QuakeCon 2014 rather than a planned reveal in 2015). According to Bethesda's PR VP Pete Hines, that entire private reveal was done so that people could retain confidence not only in id but also in Doom 2016 (as well as counter claims of the game being vaporware).

   

Doom Eternal

• Spoiler

   

  • The Mick Gordon Incident. Ye gods.
  • Around the game's release, there was a massive backlash over Denuvo Anticheat (which was primarily intended for Battlemode); Denuvo was eventually removed.
  • The fan backlash over The Ancient Gods (especially Part 2). Various issues were debated over things like gameplay and where the mainline franchise's story was going, but it got bad enough that quite a few fans wrote off the continuation of the mainline franchise as a lost cause (barring a hard reboot/retcon/decanonization). Hell, this even happened to a lesser extent with just the base game alone.
    It hasn't helped that behind-the-scenes development (or rather, what we've seen of it) has showed elements like the Armored Baron originally showing up in TAG1 as well as the "mysterious voice" in Urdak having been the Dark Lord at one point, and I suspect there's so many plot and gameplay elements which were ultimately left on the cutting room floor. That, and id only really had a year to make both parts of The Ancient Gods (plus the delay which pushed its release to 2020).
  • A less very minor example all things considered, but aside from a few smaller publications, Eternal received next to no recognition in the awards category (the most egregious one being The Game Awards). I know that awards shows usually tend to be glorified popularity contests, but that night still stung all the same anyway.
  • From firsthand accounts of both current and former id employees, many of them have gone on record saying that they enjoyed working on 2016 more than Eternal; this isn't to necessarily confirm or deny how things were at id during the development of Eternal, it's more that they believe they were really making something special with 2016 and Eternal is just kind of the Part 2 of that. I do suspect that it's also that everyone expected Eternal to be a blockbuster-tier success but very few people had any idea just how successful 2016 would be. All things considered, this is not actually a negative thing at all.

   

   

Extended Universe

• Spoiler

   

  • While this hasn't been like confirmed for real, apparently the reason why the 2005 Doom movie ended up excising all references to Hell and demons was because the producers were supposedly religious evangelist types who did not want any Satanic elements in a Doom movie whatsoever (and I think this might be false).
    However, I do suspect it might've been more so due to budgetary reasons (especially since not only does the final product have references to Hell and demons even though the monsters fought are clearly mutants, there's a leaked script online which shows that there would've been "mutant" depictions of not just humanoid creatures but also monsters like the Arch-Vile and a "Spider Skullington" which might've been a riff on either the mecha-spiders of the classic games or the spider-like demons of Doom 3).
  • Contrary to popular belief, Doom Annihilation was not intended to be an ashcan copy outright, as director Tony Giglio mentioned that he had worked on the script as far back as 2014/2015 (long before The Legend of the Doom Slayer came along). However, his script was ultimately relegated to the "direct-to-video" pile, and the budget was much smaller than it should've been. The end result is a Doom movie that's actually not that bad in the writing department but likely would've been given more of a chance if it had a much larger budget (apparently, demons like Pinkies were also supposed to show up and the original antagonist would've been the Bruiser Brothers).
    A silver lining here is that apparently a sequel is on its way to being greenlit and Gregor Punchatz has expressed interest in joining that.

   

   

Ports

• Spoiler

   

  • The entire story of the 3DO port of Doom 1993 could be considered one big string of fuckups. Seriously, major props to Rebecca Heineman for somehow being able to create an entire port just like that given how little she had to work with.
  • The Sega Saturn port also had quite a few woes which led to it essentially being an inferior version of the PlayStation port; for one, Rage Software (the developers of that port) had actually created a custom engine which took advantage of the Saturn's capabilities only for John Carmack to later shoot this down. Carmack later confirmed that forcing them to do this was a mistake in hindsight.
  • Surprisingly, the GBA port of the first Doom was subject to a similar fate as the Sega Saturn port. The developers (David A. Palmer Productions) originally made the game for the Game Boy Color before moving it to the Advance, and ended up creating a custom engine that was almost finished. Carmack then found the source code for the Atari Jaguar port and had the team used that instead. In the end, it wasn't exactly a small surprise that Torus Games were allowed to use a modified Southpaw Engine to handle the Doom II GBA port.

   

   

Fan Works/Miscellaneous

• Spoiler

   

  • With possibly the exception of Doom Delta (which is strictly a gameplay mod), every attempt at creating the full six-episode pitch of Doom: Evil Unleashed has been left either unfinished or outright cancelled.
  • A certain... Brutal mod, as well as a surprising number of derivatives. That is all.
  • Due to how the franchise was almost going to play out (Doom 4 1.0) versus out it actually played out (Doom 2016/Eternal, plus expansions), there's now debates over whether it should embrace the media that inspired it like how 2016/Eternal (heavy metal D&D session meets Evil Dead and Aliens) or whether it should've gone in a much grittier and darker direction; it's basically the Star Wars debate of Andor vs. The Mandalorian.
  • The Top 10 Infamous WADs have ended up either attaining some sort of notoriety or even a degree of intense tragedy; while the reputation of WADs like The Sky May Be, Imp Encounter, and N.U.T.S. may be more comical (and possibly even wow.wad to a lesser extent), there were legitimate issues over the likes of SLIGE and Mordeth (the latter being particularly infamous because it seems like that same divine entity doesn't want Episode 2 finished), the prospect of a Mockery megaWAD may have been a pipe dream to begin with (though at least there's Mock 2), both Evilution and Gothic99 faced full-blown backlash, and... well, the less said about UAC Labs, the better.
  • A large amount of Tormentor667's body of work facing either infamy or outright backlash (ranging from the meme status of KDiZD to the really fucked-up antics involving WolfenDoom: Blade of Agony). Also, special mention goes to The Shores of ZDoom for not really seeing the light of day even though there were updates on it as far back as 2017/2018 so that may be more of a Mordeth E2 thing.

   

   

Even after this entire deluge of information, this isn't even the full chronicle of what exactly happened as there were incidents that may not have even involved Doom at all (more the direct departure of John Romero, why American McGee left id, etc.). Plus, there may have been things I left out more because I'd like to steer clear from speculation as much as I can, plus there may have been things that not even I may have been aware of at the time.

Not only that, I'm very much aware that much worse things have happened at different studios (*coughs in ActiBlizz*) and yet I'm not asking if like Call of Duty or Diablo is "cursed" or anything like that.

But the thing here is the shocking amount of consistency in which weird events keep popping up around the time a Doom game is worked on or even long after release. And how it's ranged from development woes or quirks, to some sort of misfortune hitting someone who worked on a Doom game long after the fact (or even during the fact).

 

 

So with all of that out of the way, do I personally think the Doom franchise is "cursed"?
I can't really say; if anything, I'd probably argue that the Quake franchise in the 90s might have a stronger case of being "cursed", and that around the turn of the new 10s, it seems to have transferred itself into the Doom franchise.

As for my answer: maybe, maybe not. Again, I can't really say.

 

But enough about me. What say you?

[TheEyeOfStone]

A flux of the people involved and various levels of internal strife have jointly been responsible for some of our favorite films, games and franchises.

Of course, the team has to stay together long enough to get the final product made, so if drama kills the project, then it's not a good thing.

 

I am sure that sometimes the people involved and the finished product would have been better without internal strife.

Indeed many times it did prove to be a disaster when someone left a project or a company.

But honestly, how many of our treasured franchises were born and forged in crucibles of internal strife and witnessed a flux of the people involved?

The answer is; A great many of them.

 

They had to figure out exactly how to make TRON as they were doing it. The production of A L I E N was riddled with technical issues and interpersonal tensions. Yes, John Carmack and John Romero ended up parting ways during the production of Quake, was it worth it? Opinions on this will vary. I say it was. As for olde skool id Software, there are only so many hit singles and good albums that any given rock band can make. It's not like it would have lasted forever or all have been perfectly okay absent some kind of CURSE!

 

As a fan, a gamer, and a consumer, I gotta ask myself, what really matters more to me?

Having something like Quake and DOOM and all the things they inspired, or knowing that somewhere in Silicon Valley or Hollywood, John Carmack and John Romero are still besties sipping tea and noshing scones? I mean, I never wish anybody or their friendships ill, on the contrary, but they don't go into work to be buddies, they go into work to make us kick ass games.

And so they have.

 

If they got sick of each other eventually, that's probably inevitable and might have had as much to do with ego as any legitimate work related issues that may have come up. So, the creative process may regularly give rise to "curses" that cost some creators their friendships or make things awkward or difficult between them for a while, but more often than not that's a blessing for us because they still release a kick ass product.

 

Of course there are exceptions. There's all kinds of films and games I would like to have seen or played that died in development Hell, and I consider us to have missed out as a result. But I think that more often than not, when things get messed up in production, if the finished result survives the process, it's brilliant as a result.

 

Just to offer some context, we're talking about the possibility of a curse hovering over the production of a franchise of computer games where the basic idea is that you go into Hell, alone, to kill and to survive. The End. That's the whole point of the game. And having done it once, we are all still doing it again, again and again. If that's not a curse I don't know what is, but that's DOOM, that's what we do. And since we all seem to enjoy it so much, isn't some vague ironic curse hanging over all of us a good thing? No matter how long this goes on we keep coming back to play DOOM games which are marketed to us. And a great many people, a few of them are here on this Forum, even make their own versions of the game for everybody to play.

 

So if it's true that for us as the gamers, playing DOOM is a state of being in which you are consigned to eternally battle an infinitely regenerating horde of relentless Demons, why shouldn't the production of these games and the people who made them also be cursed? They created the curse. Honestly, how could DOOM be what it is if there wasn't some kinda grim dark aura here? I don't think the Masters of olde skool id Software are ruined and miserable, as far as I know they've all been doing well enough and, generally speaking, are all prosperous and still doing the things they love to do. And I sure do hope that those of us who are still playing this game, some of us literally since 1994, are all, on the whole, happy and well. At the very least, it seems that we all DO want to keep playing this game. I know I still want as much as I can make time for.

 

What is a cursed production or franchise? What is a curse? I understand the definition you've linked to, but I am speaking epistemically here. Maybe as far as DOOM is concerned, it is self evident that a curse is a desirable thing. Maybe by continuing to play, we all therefore share the justified belief that it is a curse which has had the effect of keeping this going for us.

 

 

 

Edited March 5, 2023 by TheEyeOfStone

[Gez]

I think if you look in-depth at the production history of any large team project, you're going to find enough issues and failures and broken dreams to declare it "cursed".

[Faceman2000]

Yes. I have definitive proof of this but I refuse to share it.

[Xaser]

As someone who's been around the Doom community for just about 2 decades now, here's my take on this topic:

 

 

wat

[mrthejoshmon]

2 hours ago, Man of Doom said:

With possibly the exception of Doom Delta (which is strictly a gameplay mod), every attempt at creating the full six-episode pitch of Doom: Evil Unleashed

This "what if we make the beta" thing falling flat is a reoccurring trend in every modding scene, Half-Life is also an infamous example (wierdly enough it also has it's own promising standout like Doom Delta).

[Shepardus]

3 hours ago, Man of Doom said:

I admit I'm not that much of a spiritual person, but I'm now beginning to suspect that there's some divine power who doesn't want me to see this project through to the end.

Yeah no, that's just you.

[⇛Marnetmar⇛]

When John Carmack broke into the school library to steal an Apple II, it created a split in the timeline and the one we're living in is marked by strife, horror and anguish. This is why you obey your local anti-trespassing laws, kids -- you never know what unimaginable horrors you might unleash.

Edited March 5, 2023 by ⇛Marnetmar⇛

[Fiber Wire]

No the franchise isn’t cursed but maybe the fanbase is. 

[Eon Toad]

A favorite writer of mine has a line that the default state of any project is not to get made.

 

Big franchises look especially cursed because they've survived long enough to rack up that many setbacks. We don't see all the franchises we didn't get because they didn't survive those same problems. Almost every piece of media that succeeds does so against the odds.

 

I was briefly the head writer for a small studio that folded before completing a game, and stories like that are more common than not.

[Bridgeburner56]

As far as I can tell every Doom game released has been a smash hit and has given rise to one of the strongest modding communities of any game.

Imma go find the eldritch deity that unleashed this curse and get some of that sweet curse action myself.

[Kinsie]

24 minutes ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

As far as I can tell every Doom game released has been a smash hit and has given rise to one of the strongest modding communities of any game.

Imma go find the eldritch deity that unleashed this curse and get some of that sweet curse action myself.

[Devalaous]

There are four things I see as 'cursed'.

• Doom Bible related projects. Whether its because noone realises the full scope of effectively making a full video game, or clashing personalities ruining the projects, not to mention that without a paycheck, there is nothing but personal interest keeping a big project together. As such, each and every one of them fails inevitably, and eventually the reputation for this both scared off new attempts, and caused 'We'll see about this curse!' bold challengers who quickly gave up.
• 3D Models and hi-res sprites for Doom. Like the above, people do not realise just *how* much work it is for just one monster, and the results almost always ended up looking like a horribly blurred mess coated in vaseline, or entirely failing to capture the art style that made Doom's sprites so good. The only success I know of, is Voxel Doom.
• Pretty much everything TNT. Evilution was bought out and the cause of huge amounts of drama and salt, and today it is incredibly divisive with maps like Habitat reaching meme levels of 'its a crime against nature'. Devilution has been in development hell, been engaged in drama, and changed hands so many times that its reached meme status, and has only recently shown signs of nearing completion after something like a decade. Revilution was born from an extremely messy and hostile drama, forged out of broken remnants and depression, and shattered and reforged in a different image after the founders all left the project for various reasons (whoops!). Convilution was meant to release alongside Revilution, as the B-Side maps that didn't make it to the final 32. Instead it became 'TNT Forever', incorporated rejected maps from Devilution as well to the point it may surpass 32 maps, and cannot release until Devilution releases, which as mentioned above, has until recently been considered a cursed project that will never see the light of day. To rub salt into my wounds, TNT Forever now contains almost every map I ever tested, which basically tells me 'everything you ever liked about TNT was apparantly deemed shit'. Finally, theres 'Final Doom the way id Did' which despite a very promising start, was suddenly thrown into the cryopods alongside D2TWID's Lost Episodes to be thawed out some other decade, and most have long since forgotten about it. I used to love TNT, but due to the above stuff and how much drama ive found myself dragged into, now its unlikely I'll ever play a TNT project without a groan and heavy coercion.
• Hexen and Strife projects. Heretic sees a lot of action because its similar enough to Doom in all aspects. Enough so that most of the Master Levels designers back in the day had already tinkered with it and made levels for it. Hexen and Strife on the other hand are much more involved games. Both have large hubs, inventory systems that are much more involved than Heretic, and Hexen has three classes to balance for while Strife has the huge conversation system to take into account, with voiceacting and portraits and so on, as well as stores to buy things, and stat upgrades to plan out. Its all far too much for the average mapper to take in, and to this day there has never been a full Hexen megawad outside of Deathkings, or one for Strife. Chex Quest is similarly unloved despite being simple in theory.

[Murdoch]

9 hours ago, Xaser said:

As someone who's been around the Doom community for just about 2 decades now, here's my take on this topic:

 

 

wat

 

I see you wat and raise you a huh?

[PsychEyeball]

Huge projects tend to take their toll on a team of people and drama will eventually creep out of it. This isn't a phenomena exclusive to Doom in any way, shape or form. Not saying it's impossible to have a team project have no drama whatsoever but I'd say it's more likely to occur than not.

 

I'd guess people would pay more attention to Doom-related drama because Masters of Doom made it so easy for everyone to reach out to the drama. If it happened once, why couldn't it happen again?

Edited March 6, 2023 by PsychEyeball
masters of doom tidbit because why not

[Not Jabba]

8 hours ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

As far as I can tell every Doom game released has been a smash hit and has given rise to one of the strongest modding communities of any game.

Imma go find the eldritch deity that unleashed this curse and get some of that sweet curse action myself.

 

"Oh Thgagh-Ygoth, I curse your name, that you may curse me in turn to have a happy marriage and make a billion dollars, and that my descendants shall rule the world, amen."

[Noiser]

Life is an eternal clash of contradictions, conflicts and interests. There's nothing mystical about it.

Edited March 6, 2023 by Noiser

[Worm318]

I wonder how that list would look like for any project from Activision-Blizzard, EA, Riot Games or Ubisoft...

[LadyMistDragon]

Honestly, no. As with any project that has had large time investments and has lasted as long as it has and been successful as commercially as it has, it's had its ups and downs. Perhaps Doom 3 is a divisive game but it ultimately sold well enough for 2004 and is generally regarded as good for what it is. The Mick Gordon drama excepting, Doom Eternal has been an incredibly successful game ultimately despite one man getting rather screwed.

 

tl;dr: Just read Noiser's post.

[The Nate]

On 3/5/2023 at 2:32 PM, Man of Doom said:

Contrary to popular belief, Doom Annihilation was not intended to be an ashcan copy outright, as director Tony Giglio mentioned that he had worked on the script as far back as 2014/2015 (long before The Legend of the Doom Slayer came along). However, his script was ultimately relegated to the "direct-to-video" pile, and the budget was much smaller than it should've been. The end result is a Doom movie that's actually not that bad in the writing department but likely would've been given more of a chance if it had a much larger budget (apparently, demons like Pinkies were also supposed to show up and the original antagonist would've been the Bruiser Brothers).
A silver lining here is that apparently a sequel is on its way to being greenlit and Gregor Punchatz has expressed interest in joining that.

I've been trying to tell people this the whole time (especially Reddit), Annihilation wasn't some malicious attempt to defile the franchise, it was a passion project that kinda went sideways. It probably wouldn't have had much backlash if not for certain Tweets and the fucking annoying casual community 2016 spawned. I'm both glad and scared out of my goddamn mind that there's a potential sequel.

[Man of Doom]

Welp, don't say I didn't warn you when I said I might end up looking like this:
 

 

 

 

But in all seriousness, though, I also did say that I couldn't really say if "the franchise is cursed" because, well... I really can't.

Barring things like my own personal tragedies and weird development-related quirks (Evil Unleashed never seeing completion, TNT-related stuff always being mired in controversy and development hell, a bunch of attempts to create 3D versions of Doom monsters, also there's a reason why the Mordeth Cacoward is a thing), there's like about 30+ years of history, plus id is like one of the older game development studios that's still around.

Hell, barring Doom Eternal (which like I said, seemed to have been covered in a cloud of constant bad news for some time; aside from the Mick Gordon Incident, it's mainly fan backlash ranging from Denuvo to "microtransactions" to how the story went), if I were asked if the franchise was cursed, my answer would've actually been much closer to "not really".

One may argue that it's really nothing special, and you'd be right.

I mean, it's natural for franchises to have ebbs and flows (peaks and troughs, if that makes sense), and that would go the same for game development studios. And yes, that goes the same for... well, any large project.

(I'd probably argue that with maybe the production of Arcane, Riot Games has seen mostly nothing but troughs; also, Valve is like one of the more memorable studios out there for many, many reasons but mainly on the weirder side of those reasons.)


But going back to the reasons why I broached this topic: again, it seems like history with id had somehow managed to repeat itself with Doom Eternal as the follow-up to Doom 2016 (just like things did with Quake after the release of Doom 1993). I didn't even start to think that it was some sort of supernatural coincidence, just that it was strange history somewhat repeated itself just like that.
(Eternal Masters of Doom, anyone?)

And again, a "curse" doesn't necessarily have to equate extreme cases of "literal suffering and death", or that it even necessarily has to envelop an entire thing like a full-blown franchise.

TL;DR- I did not say "lol the Doom franchise clearly got punked by the King In Yellow", just more that I asked a legit question that I ultimately didn't really feel is my place to answer because, well... it doesn't make all that sense to immediately jump to conclusions that there's some sort of supernatural going-on, let alone assign it to what are objectively viewed as coincidences. Even after a rash of dealing with personal tragedies.

And even if I did jump to such conclusions, it likely would've been done more as a joke and wouldn't really have warranted a big conversation like this, if that makes sense. Ultimately though, it was something I actually became curious about, and that's why this thread exists.

Edited March 7, 2023 by Man of Doom

[Marisa the Magician]

On 3/5/2023 at 11:21 PM, mrthejoshmon said:

This "what if we make the beta" thing falling flat is a reoccurring trend in every modding scene, Half-Life is also an infamous example (wierdly enough it also has it's own promising standout like Doom Delta).

Applies to Unreal as well. Those involved in anything related to the recreation of alpha/beta concepts (or stuff like the canned PSX port) happen to be "cursed" as well. If I had a dime for every time the Unreal PSX remake guy had some life-threatening event happen to him, I'd have enough to start my own bakery.

 

It seems that with Doomreal I saved myself because I also kept it as just a gameplay mod and decided against tackling all the other parts.

[Man of Doom]

On 3/6/2023 at 12:46 AM, Devalaous said:

Doom Bible related projects

Funny enough, I actually did try my hand at a Doom Bible project like well over a decade ago, at least. It wasn’t even an attempt to religiously follow the text, but rather do a modern spin on it, from what I remember.

 

Things went pretty well for the most part (I even managed to be just about finished working on the gameplay, plus I already drew out a large portion of the maps), but once it was time to actually start mapping, the project ended up dead in the water due to a sudden shift in priorities I faced at the time.

 

And sadly, even the gameplay aspect is dead too since while I technically still have the file, it was long split up into separate files due to a shitty backup system and there’s pretty much no way to salvage said game files.

 

Quote

Pretty much everything TNT

 

Another funny thing: in regards to the Doom manga that I’ve been working on, the first major story arc is in fact supposed to be an adaptation/retelling of TNT (as to make both parts of Final Doom fit into a Doom timeline because by the time of the manga beginning proper, both the events of that timeline’s Doom/Doom II have already happened; it’s all supposed to be a “separate timeline” rather than just a hard reboot).

Edited March 7, 2023 by Man of Doom