The Doom Marine aka “Doomguy”

---

Context

Released in 1993, Doom is one of the most seminal video games.

Its gameplay, technical, marketing and look-and-feel innovations were numerous, and helped define the First Person Shooter genre – which remains the most popular core video game genre to this day.

It was the successor of the Wolfenstein games.

The story was minimal, as was the Player CharacterRPG characters played by a player, rather than the gamemaster or the computer.. The point was to shoot armies of demons with an arsenal of guns in nightmarish labyrinths. And we liked it that way, dangit.

There exists other versions of the DooM space marine (aka “Doomguy”, aka the Doomed Marine). These include the protagonists of Doom 3 and its extension, the character in the novelisation, the character in the movie adaptation, whatever might exist in fan fiction, etc.

But this profile focuses on the original, nameless, silent protagonist. And it was done before the DOOM revival of the 2010s.

Background

Video

For readers unfamiliar with the original Doom games (or experiencing nostalgia), here’s some quick footage.

It the first two levels of the classic game, with what few secrets I remembered from all the way back then. Though yes, I waste a bit of time unsuccessfully trying to recall how you get the third secret of the first level, sorry.

I simply used a 2018 GZdoom package with upscaled textures  . Nothing fancy – as per the cliché I was going for a “the game as you remember playing it during the 1990s, rather than as it actually existed” effect. Plus mouselook to show the environments.

The footage is available in 4K, because heh why not.

Powers and Abilities

The space marine is a big, beefy leatherneck with a “Never say die” attitude. He’s one of Earth’s crack soldiers. Hard-bitten, tough and heavily armed.

Although he’s pretty much shell-shocked by the time of DooM ][, he still has an impressive ability to wield an arsenal of close combat weapons and kill, kill, kill and kill again. His coolness under fire, durability and coordination are remarkable.

The marine wields an odd mix of law enforcement weapon and experimental energy weaponry. See the DooM Weapons Locker article for more.

Running and gunning

This profile is written from a 1990s perspective, when the movement speed in DooM had become the norm for First-Person Shooter video games.

However, many later games would angle for greater realism, which means that in hindsight the DooM marine moves real fast.

This isn’t just an impression. The usual scale speed calculation has the marine running at… 80km/h (50mph). Not too shabby, especially since the same is true when strafing or backpedalling.

Unstoppable

At this point there’s no explanation as to why the Doom marine is so fast, so tough, so capable in combat, etc.. The game doesn’t need to explain, it just is.

But as discussed in our Mass Effect Commander Mandala Shepard character profile, we can always posit that human population in the time of DooM is in the low ten digits. And someone among these billions has to be the toughest, most combat-capable mofo of ’em all.

Such a person, from such a vast population, would be an extremely unlikely combination of assets. And that this very person just happened to be on site when all Hell literally broke lose sure was an amazing stroke of luck.

(Our game stats also assume that the running speed is because of something within his body armour. Perhaps a light exoskeleton to operate within the Jupiter gravity well).

Sprite upscale by Hidfan  . So this is the 1990s sprite, with neural networks making up additional resolution.

History (part 1)

The Doom series takes place in a not-that-distant future.

Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), a multi-planetary conglomerate with too many ties to the government, was using a military base on Phobos  (a satellite of Mars) to conduct experiments with ground-breaking teleportation technology. It allowed for transdimensionalSomething that goes across two or more universes. space travel.

The military and UAC were able to open gateways between Phobos and Deimos. They could throw a few gadgets into one and watch them come out the other.

Gateways

However, after a few weeks, the gateways grew dangerously unstable.

Military “volunteers” entering them either disappeared or were stricken with a strange form of insanity. Such stricken individuals babbled vulgarities, bludgeoned anything that breathed, and finally suffered an untimely death from full-body explosion.

Matching heads with torsos to send home to the folks became a full-time job. However, military reports stated that the research was suffering a small setback, but everything was under control.

A few hours after the last statement of this type, an experiment resulted in probably the biggest botch in history. It inadvertently opened a gateway to Hell. Soon afterward, Deimos simply vanished from the sky.

The few combat troops available were rounded up and sent to Phobos. Their job was to secure the perimeter of the base housing the lab.

After hours of intense combat, the demons overcame the military forces assaulting the base. They began to set their sights on Earth.

The 1990s sprite, but rebuilt in 3D using voxels. This was done in the DooM Voxel Mod.

Knee-deep in the dead

Unfortunately for them, there was one survivor. This man was a particularly tough marine, who had been ordered to protect the rear of the assault elements.

Three years before, he had assaulted a superior officer for ordering his soldiers to fire upon civilians. The officer and his body cast were shipped home, while the marine was transferred to Mars, home of the Union Aerospace Corporation.

With no action for 50 million miles, his days consisted of suckin’ dust and watchin’ restricted flicks in the rec room. Until the crisis on Phobos.

Knee-deep in the dead, and originally armed only with a pistol as all the heavier weapons were taken by the assault teams, the marine managed to blast his way through armies of demons. He stopped the invasion by himself.

Mars and the rest of the solar system were thought safe, and he was made a war hero.

However, the dauntingly violent and stressful experience had taken its toll. The marine took a leave of absence from the military a few months later. He went back to Earth.

Hell on Earth

The marine’s drop pod landed just outside his home city.

The first thing he met was bands of refugees heading out of the metropolis, which was consumed by flames. He quickly met his first undead, legions of which were now marauding all over the planet.

Hell had found another way to invade, and this time had directly targeted Earth. Billions were dead, most of them transformed into flesh-eating undead mutants. Even Daisy  , the marine’s lil’ pet bunny back on Earth, had been massacred.

Assault

A small minority was still alive and fully human. United behind the surviving leaders of Earth, they had a plan : leave Earth aboard a few ragtag generation ships  .

Unfortunately, there was but one ground-based spaceport on Earth. And the demons had erected a barrier of flame around it, making it unusable.

The survivors begged the marine to take charge of the remnants of Earth’s soldiers on an assault on the starport. The goal of this ragged fighting force was to destroy the flame barrier and allow the generation ships to soar for the stars. But in any case, the assaulters would be left behind.

The desperate storming action went badly. The soldiers were scattered during heavy fighting and died inside the starport.

However, the marine was still alive. Although alone, he again was humanity’s last chance.

The shores of Hell

He made his way into the heart of the starport. There, the marine disabled the demonic techno-magical machinery that was projecting the fire barrier.

Watching the ships bearing the rest of humanity fly into the ether, the marine took solace in the knowledge that he’d saved them. He prepared for a final stand against the hellspawn infecting his world.

The marine was pulled out of his rêverie by a message from the fleeing spacecraft. Their sensors had narrowed down the location of the gateway to Hell that the demons were pouring through.

In a stroke of luck, the stygianRelated to the Styx river, and by extension the not-nice afterlife such as Hell. portal was located within the city beside the spaceport.

A 2010s depiction of the DooM marine. It’s much more detailed, of course, but it’s about the thing.

To free Earth

With renewed hope the marine worked his way through the city.

It was a new kind of fighting, trading the close-quarters battle of the Mars base and the starport for the wide-open killing fields of the metropolitan streets. After ducking the thousandth sniper shot by a demonic grunt, the marine found himself getting oddly nostalgic for the killing boxes he’d so recently escaped.

The marine began encountering smaller portals between Earth and Hell on his way to the main Gate. He used this opportunity to slip back and forth between dimensionsOther realms of existence that are not our universe., evading pursuit.

During these trips, the marine ended up in an isolated part of Hell populated by Nazis. The marine wasn’t sure what delighted him more, seeing these filth languishing in Hell as the lowest form of demons or watching them die a second time as he cut through their ranks.

Baphomet

Wading through the ichor of slaughtered monstrosities, the marine arrived at the main Gate and plunged into Hell. There, he found the dread Baphomet at the heart of the alien army.

The gigantic demon’s body was enmeshed with a mountain of artifacts imbued with the foulest magic. Baphomet was immobile but not defenseless ; he bombarded the marine with an army of demons continually teleported on to the field of battle.

The marine would not let himself be stopped by such desperate measures. In the end, a well-placed rocket slipped through Baphomet’s defences and utterly annihilated the demonlord’s brain.

With the demons literally blown back to Hell, humanity returned to Earth and began to rebuild civilization.

Soundtrack

Mick Gordon’s BFG Division track from the 2016 DOOM game has become the iconic DooM sound. It’s, uh, metal. Very much metal.

History (part 2)

(From there on it’s just the same basic story that keeps on repeating).

All the top management members of the UAC were dead, as were most of their personnel down to the janitors. Nevertheless, the corporation survived, now under strict government supervision.

The UAC still sought the secret to matter apportation, and continued its experiments under vastly increased safety measures.

Their new base was set up on one of the moons of Jupiter. The idea was that the increased distance would enhance Earth’s safety if something went wrong. Marines were stationed at the base, ready for anything, trained and led by the marine who had beaten Hell twice before.

Soon after the UAC opened its first Gate, the minions of Hell made their first attack.

Inferno

Suddenly, through the Gate flowed spiked, fanged, dripping techno-terrors. Meat machines flailed their armored limbs and slavered with bloodlust, seeking soft bleeding manflesh to rend.

But in their seeking, they found only death. The Space Marine Corps was prepared for such an event, and they poured molten death into the hordes of Hell.

More demons massed, hoping to overwhelm the defenders by their endless numbers. But mass alone was no match for the marines. Set up in defensive positions around the gate, they were able to slaughter the monsters by the hundreds, taking few losses. Hell had failed.

For the longest time, this low-res shot of what seems to be a pewter figurine was one of the best depictions of the marine that we had for this entry.

Change of plans

The research went on, more boldly and less cautiously. All the marines received the Silver Star  from a grateful government, and the UAC made an enormous contribution to the Veteran’s Fund.

The defensive positions were strengthened, and the marines watched closely for another attempt, all their attention drawn inward towards the Gates.

They were looking in the wrong direction.

Months after the Gate incident, the yearly supply ship came ahead of time. On radar, the ship looked far larger than usual. And it was coming from the wrong direction. The lax radar operators reported the ship’s approach, and personnel went out to the landing field to meet it.

The men and women looked up at it, and saw that something was terribly wrong. The ship could not have come from Earth.

It was huge, kilometers long, and was built of bone, steel, flesh, corruption, and death. It was a bio-mechano-magical construct from the depths of Hell and it had come through space for its vengeance.

Battle for Jupiter

Enormous doors, large as football fields, raised open and hideous demons poured out, plunging to the ground and blanketing the entire base with their throbbing, pulsing bodies.

The marines’ defenses, set up to prevent an attack from the direction of the Gate, were worthless.

The monsters poured through the sewers, the air vents, the hallways, everywhere, rampaging, corrupting, and feasting. Once more, the surviving humans were left as zombified brain-dead monstrosities, existing only to kill and kill and kill.

The Slayer

Only one man escaped death or zombification : the marine commander.

He wasn’t at the base when the skies opened and devastation poured from the stars. He was miles away, enjoying a walk across the moon’s rough-hewn landscape when he was attacked by an Imp.

Dispatching the demon and hot-footing it back to the base, the marine realized what had happened in a flash. He entered the base with pistol in hand, intending to avenge his troops and thwart the demons one more time.

Once more unto the breach

The marine caught the hellspawn attempting to use the Jupiter Gates to reach Earth. He quickly put a stop to this, going through the newly-established Gates to Egypt and the Caribbean and killing the Demons that were trying to set up a beachhead on Earth.

The marine then returned to Jupiter through the Gates to finish his mission. Charging into the heart of the Jupiter base, he found another demonspitter like Baphomet. Fortunately, this one was much weaker as it was just establishing itself in the base.

Shooting his way through the hellish guardians of the demonspitter, the marine once again plunged a rocket into a demonlord’s brain. This brought another invasion from Hell crashing down in abject defeat.

The box art of the original DooM game – with, IIRC, John Romero doing the pose. Puzzling from a realism standpoint, but of course it was the main depiction of our laconic protagonist.

Continued !

This profiles continues in its second half. Which you can open in a new tab if you want the soundtrack from this tab to keep playing.

The second half is mostly the stats and stats discussion. But there’s also the end of the History section, the Description and Personality notes and other titbits.

---

---

---