DOOM 2016: 10 years of the FPS that resurrected the Slayer

There's one scene that stuck in the memory of everybody who played DOOM in 2016: you wake up in a metal sarcophagus, tear off the arm of a demon that tried to hold you down, grab the shotgun mounted on the wall and start running. No tutorial. No ten-minute cutscene explaining the story. No cover mechanic. No regenerating health waiting for you to crouch. Just you, the hell on Mars and the obligation to kill everything before it kills you. Ten years ago today, on 13 May 2016, id Software released the game that saved DOOM — and redefined what an FPS could be.

1993: where it all started

The original DOOM doesn't need much context for anyone reading this blog. In December 1993, id Software — the same people behind Wolfenstein 3D — released a game via shareware that took down corporate networks, got banned from universities and sold more than a million copies before it even had a box on a shelf. It was fast, violent and technically absurd for the time. John Carmack wrote a graphics engine that simulated depth without being genuinely 3D, and John Romero built levels people still play today.

The franchise had sequels, expansions and a classic-FPS phase that lasted years. Then came DOOM 3, in 2004 — a technically impressive game, with dynamic lighting and a new engine, but one that took a radical turn: survival horror, slow pacing, a torch you couldn't hold at the same time as your gun. It was a competent game. It just wasn't DOOM the way the fans understood the name.

The "Call of Doom" that nearly destroyed everything

What most people didn't know in 2016 is that the DOOM that reached the shops almost didn't exist. For nearly five years, id Software worked on a version known internally as Doom 4 — a project heavily influenced by Call of Duty, with a cover system, regenerating health, scripted cinematics and a narrative centred on human soldiers defending Earth from a demonic invasion. Developers and fans who saw the internal material called the project "Call of Doom".

Bethesda and id itself agreed the game had no identity. In 2013, all of it was scrapped. The team was reorganised under Marty Stratton as game director and Hugo Martin as creative director — hired in August of that same year. The two took the first DOOM from 1993 as their central reference and started from scratch.

Back to hell at 60 mph

What Stratton and Martin did was simple to state and hard to execute: give DOOM its original philosophy back. Constant movement, mandatory. Health from pickups on the floor, not from standing still behind a crate. Scarce ammunition that forced you to use Glory Kills — brutal executions on staggered enemies that dropped recovery items. The level design reinforced movement instead of building corridors for cover.

Bethesda released the game on 13 May 2016 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The result was immediate: positive reviews, relieved fans and a real conversation about what a high-tempo FPS could be in a market dominated by tactical and military shooters.

The soundtrack nobody saw coming

One of the things that most defined DOOM (2016) was the soundtrack by Mick Gordon, the Australian composer who had worked on Wolfenstein: The New Order before. The initial brief from id was: no metal. The worry was that it would sound generic. What Gordon delivered was a mix of industrial metal processed through analogue gear, distorted synthesisers and textures with no easy name — some call it djent, others glitch industrial.

The result won The Game Awards for best soundtrack, the SXSW Gaming Award and the D.I.C.E. Award for original composition. To this day, "BFG Division" turns up in gym playlists, trailers for other games and guitar covers on YouTube. It's one of those soundtracks that exists outside the game that created it.

The numbers and what came next

DOOM (2016) sold 500,000 copies on PC alone in the first month. By August 2016, it had hit a million on PC. In total, the game reached two million copies by July 2017 and generated more than $133 million in revenue. By comparison, DOOM Eternal — the sequel released in 2020 — doubled its predecessor's launch numbers.

The franchise carried on. In May 2025, id Software released DOOM: The Dark Ages, which reached three million players in its first week. The series that nearly died in a project called "Call of Doom" arrived at the tenth anniversary of its rebirth with a new sequel and a bigger audience than at any point in its history.

Ten years on, and the Slayer still doesn't stop

What DOOM 2016 got right was something that seemed to have been forgotten: action games don't have to slow down to be taken seriously. Aggression can be a design principle, not a vice. The player can be treated as somebody capable of coping without arrows on the screen and without a cutscene every five minutes.

Ten years is long enough to see the game's influence on other shooters released since — the emphasis on mobility, the enclosed combat arenas that force constant movement, the refusal to turn the protagonist into a cinematic character with dialogue and a development arc.

If you've never played DOOM (2016), it's available on PC, PlayStation and Xbox and still holds up beautifully. If you played it at launch, this might be a decent excuse to revisit the hell on Mars one more time. And if you want to understand where DOOM came from before all that, there's a post here about 34 years of Wolfenstein 3D — the grandfather of every FPS, also from id Software. Tell us in the comments what you made of the reboot, or whether you prefer the franchise's classic era.