John Romero reveals the identity of “Doomguy”

One of the minds behind the iconic shooter series, Doom, is John Romero. He was there at the start and while he hasn't been involved with the series for quite some time, it's hard to say Doom would be what it is without Romero.

One of the great things about Doom is its mysterious protagonist who is never seen or really heard. It allows the player to envision themselves in the boots of the character who is one of the ultimate badasses in fiction. Of course, there is a face under that helmet and you can sort of make it out on the cover of the first game but no one really knows who that man is supposed to be.

Luckily, John Romero has revealed the character's identity over two decades after the release of the first game and it is… none other than John Romero himself. Yes, the "Doomguy", "Doom Slayer" or "Doom Marine" is John Romero.

Romero stated in a blog post that initially they had brought in a model to pose for the cover but after spending about 10 minutes trying to direct the model, Romero got agitated. He ripped off his shirt and showed the model what he envisioned for the cover and the rest is history. You can read Romero's full account of the story below.

"Don Punchatz, the illustrator who created the DOOM logo and the famous front box cover art came over to id in mid-1993 with a male body model. Don brought a nice camera to take pictures. The model's job was to strike various poses for the marine who would be on the cover of the box.

This scene took place in the art room where Adrian and Kevin spent their days creating the STARTAN tech base texture set, clay modeling characters, digitizing them with the NeXTCube workstation, scanning hospital slides for bloody walls, and listening to the screams from the dentist's office next door.

The body model took his shirt off and started posing with our plasma gun toy. Don asked us for suggestions so I started telling him that the Marine was going to be attacked by an infinite amount of demons. It would be cool if he was on a hill and firing down into them. The model was holding the gun in various positions and none of them were interesting to me.

He did this for about 10 minutes and we just didn't see anything that we thought would look cool on the cover. I kept telling the model what to do but he couldn't see the scene in his mind.

Frustrated, I threw my shirt off and told him to give me the gun and get on the floor – grab my arm as one of the demons! Defeated, he deferred. I aimed the gun in a slightly different direction and told Don, "This is what I'm talking about!" Don took several pictures. I moved the gun some, the demon grabbed my leg, other arm, etc. At the end of it we all decided the arm-grabbing pose was going to be the best.

And that's the story of how the cover composition was created.

I am the Doomguy.

(at least on the cover)"

Doom (2016) released a brand new update today that includes a number of things including the free inclusion of all multiplayer DLC. You can click here for more details.