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Doom celebrates its 21st birthday with a trove of unseen concept art

Doom, the genre-defining first person shooter that id Software released in 1993, just turned 21, and to celebrate designer John Romero released a treasure trove of previously unseen art from the game’s development. We’ve compiled a selection for you here in a gallery, but you can check out even more at Romero’s Twitter page.

Many of the images are simply textures and environmental details from the game’s source. Particularly intriguing is the use of clay models, which were sculpted and then scanned at various angles and poses to generate sprites for the game’s assorted demons or the iconic “Doomguy” protagonist. Coincidentally, Doom came out in the same year as the SNES fighting game ClayFighter, which also used clay model scans to create its sprites, but maintained the claymation aesthetic in the final game.

A reboot of the Doom series (originally announced as Doom 4, but later re-branded as simply Doom) was revealed at QuakeCon 2014 after years of rumored development. The new game in development at id Software, to be published by Bethesda Softworks. There’s no release date, but the developer is aiming for a simultaneous release on PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One.

Bethesda announced in February 2014 that anyone who pre-ordered Wolfenstein: The New Order would be granted access to the Doom beta when the time comes.

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Will Fulton
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…
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