For Doom’s 30th Fanniversary, legendary game developer and original Doom Guy John Romero has returned to the game that made id Software the most famous game maker in the world in the 1990s, designing an entire new unofficial episode for the iconic FPS.
SIGIL II, which is the unofficial sixth episode in Doom’s series of campaigns, sees the master level designer build on his 2018 release of Doom’s unofficial fifth episode, SIGIL, and promises to offer even more deviously designed levels and, yes, an even tougher challenge.
And, with SIGIL II releasing on Doom’s 30th anniversary of December 10th, we thought we’d call Romero up to chat about his journey back to creating content for Doom, SIGIL II’s new ideas, and Doom’s enduring legacy today in 2023.
Tell us about your journey back to creating additional Doom episodes in SIGIL, and now in SIGIL II?
With SIGIL I, the idea was that in 2018 I was thinking, “Wow, it’s Doom’s 25th anniversary in December this year. I wonder what I could do?”Because usually I’m going to just tweet something, and maybe I’ll tweet some long-lost photo or screenshot or something like that. And I was like, “It’s 25 years. I don’t really want to just tweet something. Maybe I should just make something.”
And I thought, “Yeah, I haven’t made a bunch of levels…” In 2016, I made two levels that I released, but I hadn’t done a whole episode. And so I thought: what if, to celebrate the original Doom episodes, I made another Doom level—or an episode of nine levels? And that was the idea behind SIGIL.
So it’s kind of like, “What if I didn’t stop making levels after Thy Flesh Consumed—episode four in 1995? What if I made more levels right after that, and the aesthetic and the gameplay and everything still felt original like that? What if I
