Doom Bible



The Doom Bible is the original design document for Doom, written by Tom Hall in 1992. Much of the content seen in the document is not featured in the final version of the game. There have been several attempts by fans to make custom WADs based on the content seen in the document.

One of the prominent features of the Doom Bible is the extensive story, calling for in-game cinematics and cutscenes. The exact opposite is true for the final release of Doom. It is known that John Carmack felt that the emphasis on story slowed down the game more than it helped it. This disagreement eventually led to Tom Hall's departure from id Software before the game's release.

The game originally took place on a planet or moon called Tei Tenga and featured multiple playable characters, with plans for six episodes and a follow-up commercial release.

The Doom alphas feature much more, albeit progressively less with each successive version, of the Doom Bible's content than what made it into the final game. Some of the locations that are mentioned in the Doom Bible are fully realized in Doom 0.4. Office chairs, a rifle sprite that is not seen in the final release, and a bayonet sprite and animation can be found. There are also several Doom marine models seen in a lounge-like area playing a game of cards. This was mentioned in the Doom Bible as the setting for the game's opening cinematic.

The film Aliens, released in 1986, is frequently cited by Hall in the document as a point of reference and inspiration. Star Wars is also mentioned several times, and is known to have influenced the game's texture art direction.

Some sections of the Doom Bible are only skeletal or are completely empty, while others contain substantial information, some of which continued to inform the design of the game all the way to its release. The below information covers the content of substantially filled-out chapters.

Command-line parameters
The first chapter details 13 different planned command-line parameters, however none of these were ever implemented as-is; some have close analogues in the released versions of the game.

End of game
Chapter 5 details various ways of ending a game, including "user abort" (deliberately exiting), death, and victory. The first option was to kill the player and then return to the menus. When the player died, a third-person camera view was suggested to be displayed - this was never implemented, however. The "win" condition suggests that a slideshow ending with text similar to those that occurred in Wolfenstein 3D would be employed at the end of each episode.

Characters
Chapter 6 details the planned characters, both playable and non-playable. Given id Software's plans to design Doom for four-player multiplayer, the game was to feature four distinct playable characters with minor mechanical differences including differing speed, strength, stamina, health recovery, and weapon proficiency statistics.

One named non-playable character of note is Buddy Dacote, a fit and powerful warrior described as "popular and courageous" who got sent to Tei Tenga for showing up a superior officer. He acts as a security advisor. He wears a hat that says "BEOS", which is short for "Butt End of Space," an unofficial nickname for the Tei Tenga outpost. He was to disappear during the opening cinematic of the game where the player characters are engaged in a card game. He would then later reappear in the first episode's ending, only to be quickly torn in half by a demon. As such, his name is stated to be "insider" code for "Dies at the conclusion of this episode". It is notable that in the released game, the Doomguy himself seems to die at the end of the first episode, making this a surviving plot device.

Further possible NPC names are given as Roland Trague, Warren Apisa, Taradina Cassatt, Melanie "Butch" Bucelli, and Janella Sabando, but these names have no details associated with them.

The playable characters would have included the following:

Lorelei Chen
Age: 27; Weight: 151; Height: 5'10" Described as tall, muscular, and attractive, but with "too-intense" eyes. She was assigned to the Tei Tenga outpost after losing a bet which meant she had to pull an existing application to a better post. Her speed was to be fast, and she would be proficient in use of the pistol. Her wound recovery would be poor due to her tendency to push herself through the pain, and she would be inefficient with the bayonet.

John "Petro" Pietrovich
Age: 34; Weight: 190; Height: 5'9" Described as a black balding man with thick eyebrows and a missing fingertip. He was the former head of security at the Advanced Weapons Research Labs, but became frustrated with the UAAF bureaucracy, and deliberately committed an act of insubordination. He was, however, able to request a post on Tei Tenga, which allowed him to escape this annoyance. He was to be proficient with bullet-based weapons (which would have included the shotgun), and was to have high damage capacity. His speed, however, was to be average, and his performance with missile weapons was to be poor.

Dimitri Paramo
Age: 37; Weight: 191; Height: 5'11" Described as an overweight Greek-Spaniard with a swarthy and unkempt appearance - his hair was said to "explode" from his head. He is a low-ranking military grunt with no ambition for more than a chance to take out his aggression using the UAAF's high-powered weaponry. He was to be a "jack of all trades", good with all weapons and having high endurance. His downside was to be slow movement.

Thi Barrett
Age: 22; Weight: 130; Height: 5'6" Described as red-haired, trim, and "stout but gorgeous," with a "bewitching dimpled smile." Her father was a UAAF sergeant, giving her a strong sense of duty. She was a medalist in unarmed combat, and took the Tei Tenga post simply to have variety of experience. She was to be faster than average, with high evasion, and could inflict high damage with the bayonet. However, she was to have low hit points.

Episodes
Chapter 7 begins detailing the episodes of the game. The game was to feature six episodes, much like Wolfenstein 3D before it. As in the released game, the first episode was to be made available as shareware, with the rest only being available to registered users.

Episode 1: Evil Unleashed / All Hell Breaks Loose
The players are interrupted during a game of cards in a hangar bay, and Buddy Dacote disappears after strange occurrences begin to sweep through the Darkside base. At the end of the episode, you learn you have been fighting against demons and are now trapped in Hell. Like the eventual Knee-Deep in the Dead, the enemies to occur in this episode would include demon-possessed humans, imps (then called "Demon Troops"), demons (then called "Demon Sargeants"), and the Bruiser Brothers, the twin barons of Hell which occur at the end of the episode. Also to be included were flying imps, the description of which is quite similar to the gargoyle enemy which eventually appeared in Heretic and for which there is no analogue in any of the released versions of Doom, nor any known unreleased resources.

Other episodes
The other remaining episodes are only sparsely detailed, with a basic story. There are no plans for the levels.

Commercial game
As with Wolfenstein 3D's follow-up, Spear of Destiny, id Software already intended to develop a commercial retail game as a sequel before the first game was completed. The team would reunite for a vacation, but would find that the General Demon has awakened powerful ancient demons in order to attack the Earth. The entire world has to fight back against the demons while the team works their way to the General Demon's palace. Again, he cannot be attacked directly, and throws the player into a cage. However, the player is able to use the probjectile on a nearby machine. The resulting damage causes the ancients and the General to be sucked into it and rendered into giblets.

Weapons
The following weapons were planned. It was intended that players would change color using palette translations when using different weapons, but this was never implemented.

Other

 * A reference is made to grenades and a grenade launcher in the ammo subsection, but it is not listed in the table of weapons, nor do any resources ever occur for these in any of the alphas or the press release beta.
 * A reference is also made to the plasma gun in the same section. It is not clear if this was added later as the design evolved, or if like the grenade launcher, it was already a discarded idea in initial development that was later brought back.
 * The level section for episode 1 refers to the ability to find a sawed-off shotgun, but it is unclear if this is meant to be the ordinary shotgun weapon that is described everywhere else.
 * The level section also refers to the presence of homing missiles. Accordingly, a homing missile sprite appears in the Doom 0.3 alpha's resources as a gold-barrelled missile pickup with a red tip. The notion of this ammo type disappears after this version.

Items
The following items are described:

Item gallery
Virtually all of the items described in the Doom Bible have pickup sprites in the Doom v0.3 IWAD, though most go unused. All of the sprites are also still in the slightly different palette which was used by Doom v0.2, meaning that those which do appear look incorrect. Additionally, the behavior of sprite offsets changed between the two versions of Doom, making those pickup items which are present render deep inside the floor. The following screenshots were all taken with a source port in order to avoid these various issues. Items are all named from left to right, assuming that they occur in the same order in the IWAD as they are named in the Doom Bible, which seems to be universally true for all the sprites which are 100% identifiable.

Press release
Chapter 15 contains a basic blurb and the extended press release text which was eventually released on Usenet and elsewhere by Jay Wilbur.

Remnants in Doom
Some bits and pieces from the Doom Bible still show up in various places in Doom itself:
 * The WAD file extension, a backronym for Where's All the Data?, was coined by Hall in this document. According to John Carmack, however, the name "wad" was originally envisioned by himself as being the logical name for a collection of lumps, and Hall's expansion was added after the fact.
 * The prefixes TROO and SARG on IWAD lumps for the Imp and Demon come from their Doom Bible names: Demon Trooper and Demon Sergeant.
 * Of all the proposed episode names, only Knee-Deep in the Dead made it into the final game. It was originally to be the third episode of six.
 * Some of the Doom computer panel textures still contain the text "UAC BASE TEI TENGA". Button labels below this text on one monitor further comprise a list of the abbreviations of several locations outlined in the Doom Bible.
 * The four characters that were featured in the Doom Bible as playable were all supposed to be similar in appearance in-game, presumably to save time on development. The only major difference would be the color of their outfits. This manifests as the four translations for the marine in the final game.
 * The demon troops were described in the bible as very damaging at close range. The document also stated that later troops would be able to cast magic of some kind. In the final game, these demon troops are Imps, and they are able to throw fireballs from the beginning, and they are, as the document says, damaging at close range.

In other Doom-series games

 * The basic plot element of "Hell on Earth" as implemented in Doom II was already outlined in the Doom Bible.
 * The Unmaker, an evil weapon described in the Doom Bible as being made entirely of demon bones, would later appear in Doom 64.
 * Some features suggested by Hall could be considered prescient of things to come in future games, and perhaps even too far ahead of their time to yet be practically implemented. Amongst these, his ideas for monorail transport systems and in-game interactive consoles would much later find a place in Doom 3.
 * The Doom Bible proposes the idea of a severed hand that the player must use to open a door. In Strife, there is a place where the player must use a severed hand to unlock a door. Similarly, in the movie, Sarge uses a severed hand to unlock the BFG room. Both of these may be coincidences, however. In Doom (2016), a direct homage is paid to the idea with the player being required to rip a dead captain's arm off and then use it to unlock a door via a security scanner in the Foundry level.

In other games and media

 * The 1995 game Terminal Velocity  also featured a planet called Tei Tenga.
 * All of the playable characters in Rise of the Triad, a contemporary of Doom also designed by Tom Hall, had origins in the Doom Bible. Some had their names altered, and one only appeared as a possible name, but a few were unchanged from their original descriptions.
 * In the Doom movie, the BFG 9000 is named "BFG 3.14"; The original description of BFG can be found in section 14 of the document. (This likewise may be a coincidence.)
 * The Doom Bible is one of the bonus items offered for download along with The Ultimate Doom on GOG.com.