Tom Hall

Tom Hall is a Wisconsin-born game designer who, along with John Romero, John Carmack and Adrian Carmack was a co-founder of id Software. He was originally the lead game designer for Doom, and is the author of the Doom Bible, the original design plan for the game. Although he lost his job after several disputes with John Carmack over the design of the game, several elements of his documentation carried over into the release of the game. Hall introduced several central gameplay elements during development; teleportation devices--now seen as rather standard fare in FPS games--were unfavored by the team, and Carmack and Romero only added them after considerable argumentation from Hall. This reflects the same situation Hall faced when arguing for the inclusion of "secrets" in Wolfenstein 3D, the previous FPS effort by id Software. During development of Doom "secret areas" were already expected, having become a natural part of the FPS vocabulary. Other elements introduced by Hall, while essential for gameplay although visual in nature, were concepts such as having the door trim match the color of the needed key.

Hall is also credited with naming the file format; WAD.

Having written the design document for Doom, including the back story taking place on Tei Tenga, he reused parts of it during his later career. As example; Hall co-produced the game Terminal Velocity for 3D Realms, and used Tei Tenga as an episode setting for the game. Game characters found in the original Doom design documents also make an appearance in Hall's next effort; Rise of the Triad, developed for Apogee. The game received Ziff-Davis' Shareware of the Year Award in 1995, making Hall the only person who has received the award twice. His first was for Wolfenstein 3D in 1992.

He was the designer of several maps in Doom and Doom II, although these were tweaked or expanded in varying degrees by Sandy Petersen or John Romero.

A complete list of these maps follows:

Doom level design credits

 * E1M4: Command Control (finished by Romero)
 * E1M8: Phobos Anomaly (finished by Petersen)
 * E2M1: Deimos Anomaly (Petersen)
 * E2M2: Containment Area (Petersen)
 * E2M3: Refinery (Petersen)
 * E2M4: Deimos Lab (Petersen)
 * E2M7: Spawning Vats (Petersen)
 * E3M3: Pandemonium (Petersen)
 * E3M7: Limbo (Petersen)

Doom II level design credits

 * MAP10: Refueling Base (Petersen)