Lost_Soul

Interesting interpretation. Come to think of it, the Phobos Lab is the very first location on the game that features a "dimensional shambler/teleporter" in that secret room which can be accessed on one of the two elevators on the double-stairway. Since the manual makes it clear that the UAC is experimenting with dimensional gateway technology, an argument could possibly be made that the Phobos Lab is where all the magic happens ( so to speak ). The idea that the UAC's top scientists deliberately intended the Phobos Lab to be a place to study demonic phenomena also adds an interesting plot twist to the whole story, suggesting that the top brass had a secret agenda that they were keeping under wraps from the public in a vein very similar to the Umbrella Corporation's intrigue in the first "Resident Evil" game. In "Quake III Arena", a new character was introduced which was basically a palette swap of DOOMguy, simply known as "Phobos" because he was billed as being the commander who led the failed counterattack against the invading demon hordes. Although Quake III's canonicity is questionable, Phobos' bio actually states that he was "betrayed by superiors who seemed to think they could learn more from watching him die than reading his reports" - I remember that bit very well. The character that Phobos would probably correspond to most closely in the book is Weems; seems kinda odd that he was only a lieutenant and not a colonel or higher though. Now if we were to seriously entertain this premise though, would it not have made more sense for the developers to make Phobos Lab the penultimate map right before Phobos Anomaly with the two "Bruiser Brothers" guarding the obvious beachhead that got the demon's foot into the door for their invasion of Phobos? Sorry to go all Game Theorists on everyone there...well, actually I'm not...kinda why I'm here. By the way, I'm very glad that you mentioned the JP films. I would actually pay good money to see a B-movie where the dinosaurs are going around leaving park workers crucified on the walls, talking backwards in Latin, harvesting people's organs for arts and crafts projects, and setting up weird Satanic shrines, and casting Sam Neil's character in the role of "Fly" ( aka Doomguy ). The stone wall reliefs depicting the Baron faces in DOOM could be replaced with Carnotaur faces ( and so on ). It wouldn't make any sense at all but it would still be totally awesome. LMAO Seriously though, we should trademark that idea. That would explain for some of it. Tom Hall I believe was the guy who wrote the DOOM Bible and originally intended for DOOM to basically be a clone of "Zero Tolerance" on the Sega Mega Drive, where there would be different characters each with their own attributes.

Hi, I'm new here as a forum member but I am definitely a retro DOOMer. I have not played any of the more recent iterations and reboots ( not even DOOM 3 ). In recent years, there have been tons of info released regarding the history and development of the original DOOM Trilogy ( UD, DOOM II, Final DOOM ) which has been helpful in explaining certain trivia regarding designs and where some of the names and music were derived from. I will humbly admit that there are probably still many interviews and articles that I have probably not seen yet. In either case, there are still certain aspects to the whole Classic DOOM Universe ( maybe call it the DOOMiverse Gen 1 or something ) that still leaves me puzzled to this day. I grew up playing the console port that everyone loves to make fun of ( and probably rightly so ) - "Poor Man's DOOM" on the Sega 32x ( poor me ). Although it was vastly inferior to most of the other versions of the game, I always used to enjoy it in spite of that. I had tried playing it on the PC off and on during those years but was never any good playing it on the keyboard or the mouse. It was only later during my formative years that I finally graduated to playing the full versions on the PSX and the PC after I was finally able to make a game controller work reliably on a desktop system. Classic DOOM was already in the retro-gaming niche by that time; seriously, I don't care if it's old, a good game is a good game. Back on the main idea for this thread though, one of those burning questions for me regarding the DOOMiverse, is what is the deal with the maps E1M5 and E2M4?? I learned that these stages had names when I started playing the PC version, and one of the things I discovered is that both of these two decidedly creepy maps had the term "Lab" as a qualifier in their names. When people picture labs, they immediately associate the term with beakers and vials full of chemicals presumably accompanied by a 'tech base' aesthetic, not all of this gothic medieval stuff. I say this while still understanding that the architecture around the entire base is being physically altered by some reality warping enemy - presumably by the Spider Demon for lack of anything more to go on plot-wise. The only way that this would seem to make sense is if one reads the map names according to their significance in Greek Mythology and the chosen setting for the story - Deimos and Phobos. If anybody else here has some insight that can help explain why the devs chose those particular names for these maps, I would greatly appreciate that. A lot of people would probably react to this and think, " dude, it's just an electronic game! there is nothing to understand, you're reading way too much into it!" Before anyone asks, I have had the pleasure of also reading the novelization, "Knee Deep in the Dead" - great book, highly recommended. So what about everyone else? Are there any unresolved points to the plot that you are unsure about and have always wondered what the dev team was thinking? Probably the other biggest elephant in the room concerning those WTF moments from the original game was the infamous secret map from episode 3 ( "Warrens" ), which the novel actually gives a nod to. Would anyone like to share their thoughts?