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Development:Doom II: Hell on Earth (PC)

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This page details development materials of Doom II: Hell on Earth (PC).

And you were just a scroll away from being fired too...
Oh dear, I do believe I have the vapors.
This page contains content that is not safe for work or other locations with the potential for personal embarrassment.
Such as: Fake interpretation of a decapitated head on a spike.
Hmmm...
To do:
Romero released more early and unused art and maps, archived here.

Sub-Pages

Miscellaneous tidbits that are interesting enough to point out here.
Notes

Early Maps

These maps were retrieved from a backup image of one of id's NeXT development servers by an anonymous source. The maps themselves were not released, just captures of them loaded in Doom Builder.

(Source: http://doomwiki.imgur.com/)
Doom2-earlymap10.png

The map that would become Level 10: Refueling Base. Some small additions and changes have been made since the Doom 0.5 alpha.

Doom2-earlymap28.png

This map contains many of the rooms from Level 28: The Spirit World, but its layout is almost entirely differentǃ A bunch of simple, boxy corridors and rooms would be dropped from the final layout, and the cavernous section enlarged, with nearly everything else shifted around.

Doom2-map35.png

American McGee's id Map01 — a deathmatch map that was released standalone. There are no noticeable changes to the geometry of things, but it's named MAP35.WAD, hinting that it may have been intended for release with the game proper.

It might be worth noting that Heretic included a hidden conversion of this deathmatch map as E4M1 (which was moved to E6M3 in the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion) that is only accessible with the change level cheat and command-line parameter. Perhaps something similar was planned for Doom II?

/temp Directory Level Differences

Level 1: Entryway

/temp directory Final
Doom2-tempMAP01 spawnroom.png Doom2-MAP01 spawnroom.png
  • Drastically different from the final version of Entryway, the player starts off inside an elongated room, lacking a view of the outside, and a chainsaw.

Early Progression

Two early orders for level progression can be found in the map sources. All of the game's map files were backed up to an /old directory on July 29, 1994. They were then copied to a /temp directory in a new order, evidenced by their timestamps. The /temp order closely matches the final order, outside of levels which are missing.

The level table below uses the ordering in the /old folder by default, but can also be sorted by the /temp or final order. Only one map is exclusive to the /old folder, while the final slotting has two maps that aren't in the /old or /temp folders.

Level Name /old Slot /temp Slot Final Slot
Entryway MAP01 MAP01 MAP01
The Catacombs MAP02 MAP04 MAP22
The Crusher MAP03 MAP06 MAP06
Dead Simple MAP04 MAP07 MAP07
The Pit MAP05 MAP09 MAP09
Refueling Base MAP06 MAP10 MAP10
Tricks and Traps MAP07 MAP08 MAP08
The Waste Tunnels MAP08 MAP05 MAP05
Tenements MAP09 MAP17 MAP17
Circle of Death MAP10 MAP11 MAP11
The Factory MAP11 MAP12 MAP12
The Citadel MAP12 MAP19 MAP19
The Courtyard MAP13 MAP18 MAP18
Downtown MAP14 MAP13 MAP13
Industrial Zone MAP15 MAP15 MAP15
Bloodfalls MAP16 MAP30 MAP25
Nirvana MAP17 MAP21 MAP21
The Gantlet MAP18 MAP03 MAP03
Suburbs MAP19 MAP16 MAP16
Gotcha! MAP20 MAP20 MAP20
(alternate The Spirit World) MAP21 MAP22 N/A
Barrels o' Fun MAP22 MAP23 MAP23
The Chasm MAP23 MAP24 MAP24
The Inmost Dens MAP24 MAP14 MAP14
Underhalls MAP25 MAP02 MAP02
Monster Condo MAP26 MAP26 MAP27
The Abandoned Mines MAP27 MAP25 MAP26
The Living End MAP28 MAP28 MAP29
(alternate Grosse) MAP29 MAP29 N/A
The Spirit World MAP30 MAP27 MAP28
Wolfenstein MAP31 MAP31 MAP31
Grosse MAP32 MAP32 MAP32
(alternate Bloodfalls) MAP33 N/A N/A
The Focus N/A N/A MAP04
Icon of Sin N/A N/A MAP30

21st Birthday Art Release

John Romero included a number of Doom II assets in art he released on Doom's 21st birthday.

(Source: John Romero's Twitter)

Graphics in Development

Doom2-sk-fist1 1.png Doom2-sk-fist3 1.png

Captures of the Revenant's punching animation.

Doom2-archvile-scan-2.png Doom2-archvile-atak5.png

The Arch-Vile model in two different attack poses.

Doom2-archvile-pose-scan.png Doom2-archvile-scan.png

Large Arch-Vile captures, before being rescaled.

Doom2-rom 1.png

A photo of John Romero, with six different conversions into the game's palette. This would be edited into the normally unseen sprite used for the killable part of the final boss.

Doom2-ssw6v 1.png

The SS's death animation contains a sprite from the undeveloped EGA version of Wolfenstein 3D.

Various spritesheets for the Chaingunner, which include eight directional sprites.

DevDoom2- backup lbm RomeroHead1.png DevDoom2-boot lbm.png

A very minuscule change of Romero's pain state has 2-4 pixels that have been changed on the right of his mouth.

Speaking of the Icon of Sin, his (stitched together) wall texture had a few changes. Two variations of the Icon of Sin exist within the Romero dump, and the Icon of Sin consisting of nine walls. If the walls were connected together, we get the complete version of the wall that would've been seen in the game. First being from the scanned drawing directly (similar to the marble wall textures from the first game), next one has half of the face edited, next one after had a few tech wall textures, and the last one is a near complete version of just the Icon of Sin's face (albeit minor shading needs to be done and to have the Icon of Sin bound within the wall.)

Unused Graphics

Doom2-pumpssg1.png Doom2-pumpssg2.png

Two frames of a pump-action super shotgun.

(Source: http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?p=799932#p799932)

Doom2-meat2 1.png

Unused gore decorations: A huge pile of marine bodies and skulls around a stake, and an eviscerated corpse hanging over a fire pit.

Doom2-wfall.png

Waterfall patches for an animated texture. The code to animate these is present in the executable.

*warbling screech noise* Did I scare you?

Test capture of the Arch-Vile, oddly titled manmon_lbm.

Early Music

Just like Doom 1, Doom 2's music was influenced by rock and metal bands at the time. Bobby Prince composed the music for both games and had some "inspirations" for the music, and also notable that these tracks were composed when the original Doom was being developed, and were later reused for Doom 2. All tracks that were set to play in the game will be using DOS/Windows MIDI for comparison.

Cover Tracks

The original song a track is derived from is seen on the left, with the MIDI cover in the middle, and the final release's track on the right.

MAP 7, 19, and 29 - Shawn's Got the Shotgun
Original Song MIDI Cover Release

The main melody is heavily reworked into a more original tune, along with changing the guitars with an electronic bass as the main instrument. The percussion timings are adjusted, but mainly the patterns are exactly the same.

MAP 9 - Into Sandy's City
Original Song MIDI Cover Release

Stone Temple Pilots' "Sex Type Thing" was reworked into a more original track similar to Shawn's Got the Shotgun, but on a much more heavier scale. The guitar was changed into a harpischord while also with a reworked but similar melody,

MAP 23 - Bye Bye American Pie
Original Song MIDI Cover Release

Very minor note changes. Also, the track title's name is possibly a reference to the lyrics of the song "American Pie" by Don McLean, while also pertaining the name of ID Software employee and developer of Doom 1 and 2, American McGee as other tracks of Doom 2 reference ID Software employees such as Sandy Petersen with the track "Into Sandy's City", and Shawn Green with "Shawn's Got The Shotgun" as some examples.

MAP 25 - Adrian's Asleep
Original Song MIDI Cover Release

Some instrument changes, such as timings of the hi-hats.

Early Tracks

MAP 30 - Opening To Hell
Early Final

The Icon of Sin's theme has a bunch of changes, such as the bass instruments being more subtle and the high pitched ringy background instrument has a much annoyingly higher amplitude and persist longer compared to the release's. It seems like the track is also highly unfinished as we only hear a short segment of the whole track.

Early Sounds

Icon of Sin

Name Original Audio Modified Final (reversed)
DSBOSSIT.wav (Sight sound)


(Source: doom_txt's Twitter)

Upon seeing his head on a pike during the development process of the game (placed by Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud as a joke, and John Carmack programmed it so that the final boss is a kill-able monster), Romero recorded numerous phrases with Robert Prince. Robert chose the final line, "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero." Sound processing was applied to the recording, and then reversed the track to make it sound more "demonic," in reference to several religious fundamentalists accusing popular bands at the time for allegedly using a process called "backmasking" in order to give out demonic messages praising Satan.[1]

References