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.

Doom Lead designer
Hall was originally the creative director and lead game designer for Doom, and is the author of the Doom Bible, the original 1992 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, essential for gameplay although visual in nature, were concepts such as having the door trim match the color of the needed key.

He has stated he ultimately "was totally unhappy" working on the game, because he felt the development team "were getting way too minimalistic in player reward", saying "[I] wanted a reason for the person to go through the levels, rather than [just flipping] a switch". The game turned into what Hall characterized as "just a raw shooter", and the gaming world he envisioned, with character abilities, puzzle elements, environment interaction, cinematics, back story and game content, was being minimized or deleted altogether.

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

Post id designs
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.

Doom design legacy
Hall's input is not limited to Doom alone; his designs still appear in the subsequent installments of the franchise. A level of his design found its' way to Doom II; Refueling Base. The Unmaker, a weapon involving spiritual soul powers described and presented in the Doom Bible, can be found in the 1997 port for the Nintendo system; Doom 64. The non-linear hub system he envisioned--and which was partly implemented in Doom 0.5--can be found in Doom 3. The third installment of the series also uses a monorail, the transportation system laid out in Hall's design document. Another feature in Doom 3 from 2004; interactive computer terminals; were already designed a decade earlier by Hall.

Post id career
After programmer and designer John Romero left id Software, Hall and Romero teamed up again and founded Ion Storm. After the company was closed Romero and Hall founded Monkeystone Games. Hall later left for Midway Games and is with KingsIsle Entertainment since 2005.

Level design
Hall 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)