From the archives: Doom 2016 interview at GDC

(Originally published on March 15, 2020 on my old Wordpress blog.)

Sometimes, freelance assignments just don't work out. Whether that's because of budget cuts (which happens all too often at media outlets) or timing issues, it's easy for stories to slip through the cracks and never see the light of day.

That tends to be true for big events like E3 or the Game Developers Conference (GDC), where you have so many stories and meetings that, unless you have a specific assignment from your editor to cover something, you have to prioritize which games you actually need to write about, and which ones, well, fall to the wayside. And by the time I’m free to get to these stories, the information might no longer be relevant in the 24-hour news cycle.

But it never feels good to leave a story behind. So from time to time, I hope to showcase some of my unpublished work here. I don't have a lot of them (otherwise I'd be a terrible freelance writer!), but I think it'll be fun to revisit these forgotten pieces and finally give them a place to call home.

This first entry is from GDC 2017, where I interviewed Doom creative director Hugo Martin and game director Marty Stratton. At the time, it had been almost a year since the reboot debuted to critical acclaim, becoming sort of a redemption tale for what was largely considered a dead franchise. Not only was Doom satisfying to play with its combo-like combat system and ridiculous amounts of gore, but it was also surprisingly self-aware, with a satirical story reminiscent of films like Starship Troopers and Robocop.

In the weeks leading up to this interview, I watched NoClip’s excellent Doom documentary as part of my research, where host Danny O’Dwyer spoke to a ton of Id Software employees about the making of the reboot. One of the big highlights of that series is the relationship between Martin and Stratton, and how they play off one another with jokes and anecdotes about development. You can tell they really care about the franchise — and that they have a lot of fun making games.

I was happy to see that dynamic in person when I met both of them at GDC. During our 30-plus minute chat, we covered a wide range of topics, from Doom’s rousing success and how it affected the team, to Id’s development philosophy and its relationship with parent company Bethesda. The interview is a bit outdated now — especially the part about the franchise's future, since this was way before the release of the 2022 sequel Doom: Eternal – but it still has some great stories and insights about the studio.

Here’s the full 4600-word transcript of our chat, with some light edits made for clarity.

Q: Where's your head at now, almost a year after launch?

Marty Stratton: It's awesome. When we launched — obviously it's a relief, it's rewarding. It's really fun to have the game out there and watch people play on Twitch and all that kind of stuff. But we pretty quickly moved into a lot of new updates, so we were already in the middle of development of the multiplayer DLC, which we spent the balance of last year working on quite a bit. We ported over to Vulkan. We got that out there. We made Arcade Mode for the campaign. So we pretty much headed straight into a whole bunch of new stuff.

So it's kind of fun to now be in the award season, watching people debate their game of the year and all of that. So it's fun to relive the launch seven or eight months later and have people still talking about the game. That's the best part ... to be part of the conversation about the best five games of the year or the five best action games, it's freaking awesome. There were some great games last year.

Hugo Martin: The best part has been – especially now as people discover the game and during the debates of game of the year ... a lot of sites [had] articles come out that were like, 'Doom is kind of like a Nintendo game' and analyzing what makes Doom fun. That post analysis and dissection of what makes the game work has been super satisfying for us because those were – the stuff that they're talking about now and discovering and analyzing is [similar to what we] discussed during the development of the game.

That is super satisfying because that means you connected with the audience. Because if you spend a lot of time talking about [how] the chainsaw is going to compliment the combat dance and it's going to push the player and then nobody says anything about the chainsaw post-launch, you're just sort of like, 'Well, that didn't work!' But that's probably my favorite part about it.

Q: For Doom to have this long tail is pretty cool. You don’t normally see that with single-player shooters.

Martin: When you invest as much time into one aspect of your game – which is combat – as we did ... I always say this analogy, 'If you have 10 bucks and eight of them is spent on combat, that means you're going to have some fairly nuanced combat.' And I love that. I love that Doom is satisfying to the casual gamer because it's pick-up-and-play.

But there's also a lot there to satisfy a Brad [Shoemaker] from Giant Bomb, who's really looking for the subtleties of combat and picks up on it. So we were able to tap into both people: The casual and the hardcore gamer because the combat itself is deceptively simple. There are a lot of subtleties going on there with the chainsaw and the glory kills and the way the AI is set up.

Stratton: It's interesting how all of that comes together to make you feel something, and you hear people feel that way and comment on it – like he said, comment on the individual things that they figured out. It's super rewarding.

Martin: It is. Especially for us. We're the first people to say our game – we joke about it, but it's true – our game is kinda stupid. And that's awesome. Not unlike a lot of our references that we've talked about [in the past] like Robocop. Robocop is dumb, but it's not that dumb. And Doom 2016...

Stratton: It's actually brilliant when you watch it.

Martin: I'm not gonna be the person to say Doom 2016 is brilliant, but I will say Doom 2016 is not as stupid as it seems.

Q: Is it the Robocop of shooters?

Martin: I'll take that!

Stratton: Sure! We'll take that any day.

[We go on a tangent about how Robocop feels even more relevant today.]

Stratton: [Hugo] is a film buff, comes from that side of things, he really opened my mind to looking at films differently. We watched Robocop early on. We watched Armageddon early on.

Martin: That's another film that people say is dumb. 'Ah, it's fluff!'

Stratton: It's so smart! And it's so good.

Martin: It's not easy to make art – like Doom, a movie, or game – that appeals to a mass audience. If you make something that appeals to a mass audience, there's no way it's stupid. That's not easy to do.

Stratton: I actually watch movies differently now, and even looked at some of the old movies we've referenced and go, 'Oh! I totally get it now.' When we talk about the reward of a journalist or [someone else] playing the game and talking about those things – it's really cool when you see that level of connection, that level of observation happening related to something you make.

Q: When you wrapped up development, did you have any time to reflect on what worked and what didn't? Or did you go straight into patching the game?

Stratton: As we were doing all that other stuff in parallel, we probably spent three months dedicated to just self-evaluation more than anything. ... When the game first came out, it was cool because we got to watch people play on Twitch. That's the first game we've released at Id when Twitch was a thing, so you get this window into people playing, which is hugely influential and just amazing.

You can just tune in and somebody's reacting live to their first playthrough of your game, which is awesome. You look at that stuff, you look at message boards for what people are talking about. The Reddit community and the Doom World community have both been awesome. They're so vibrant and always talking. Also internally, [we ask ourselves] 'What do we think worked?'

Martin: Or even how we make stuff.

Stratton: How we make stuff, yeah. It's pretty extensive – we say postmortem – but really, it's just getting people together constantly and trying to extract information, like what felt good and what didn't from both a gameplay and a development perspective.

Martin: It's funny. Even internally, people have asked us this question a couple times ... a lot of the reflection came also from how we just make content – what worked and what didn't work about our processes. Even in the team's postmortem of how the game's development went, it all came out in the wash. Maybe there were some people who liked gore nests or didn't like gore nests. But then when you saw the fans' reaction, you read a piece of postmortem from a team member who didn't understand why we put them in there – you try to reach everybody on the team, but you can't go around the office and sit down with everybody [and say] 'Here's the point of this.'

I think [the postmortem] is a great opportunity for people to all get on the same page, for all the reasons that he just said. 'Oh yeah, people really like this about the game. Okay, I get it. We should steer into that.' Where maybe throughout development, they're sitting there being like, 'Why are we doing this? This doesn't make any sense.' There's a lot of stuff in our game that was unconventional. The hero doesn't have an arc. There isn't a conventional villain and stuff like that, or narrative beats.

Throughout development, there were certainly people who said we should have this stuff, or why don't we have this stuff, or what's with the Doom Slayer stuff, or can the game be all about combat. And when you saw the fans' reaction, I think it helps get everybody on the same page.

Stratton: Also, I think Doom's a game that, to really get it all, to feel it fit together, you ... have to play it for a while. When people react to the Doom Slayer and the new lore and mythology we've built around him, it's because they've played the game and they've invested time to listen to the Slayer Testaments and read the Codex and observed how he uses his hands. Little subtle looks and nods and all that stuff.

It's all very subtle. And we keep it out of the player's way from an action perspective. So I think even internally, like [Hugo] said, somebody would be like, 'I don't know how this fits' or whatever. Most of the time it was because it was fit in subtly. And that was one of the things ... we were cranking right till the end on it, and there was only a handful of us – more at the end, there was almost the entire team – but for a good part of the development ... because there's so many things that are subtle and they have to fit together so well to really work. There were a few of us that were playing the game a lot.

But a lot of the team doesn't have time to play the game a lot. They're making assets and animations and all that kind of stuff, or programming and fixing bugs. So [they] get little pieces of it. It's just like somebody outside [the company] after the game releases that hasn't played the game.

They're just like, 'Oh, I heard that Doom is about killing demons and all that kind of stuff.' It may seem shallow. But when you play it, you really start to get it. As we got toward the end of development, more and more people in the studio had time to play it, to really play it, and really dig into it. It was cool because for a lot of people, at the end, things were really clicking and they understood [the game], 'Oh, this makes a lot of sense.'

As this ties into the postmortem: How do we reinforce that moving forward? How do we illustrate that stuff and do a better job of communicating that stuff as we go through so everybody gets it? It's interesting. There are entire books and whole conferences here [at GDC] dedicated to how you do that kind of stuff. It's been a lot of fun.

Q: It’s a common thing I hear, how a game doesn't shape up till the end of development. Seems like that was true with Doom.

Stratton: Honestly, it's a trick to try to do whatever you can to keep everybody on the same page. Actually, to get into a specific example, one of the more effective things we did part-way through development – it was right around the time we got to [the beta version], it was kind of our push to beta – was a daily two-hour theater play session where the leads were required to be there, but anybody in the studio was invited to come into our screening room.

And we would have a two-hour portion of the game we would play every day. Somebody would play it, and people would make comments about stuff they saw, what they liked and didn't like. Hugo would make comments so that everybody's kind of hearing the same conversation about the game. And that was tremendous, whether you're making comments or you're just listening to how people are talking about the game. It's almost like getting on the same page by osmosis.

And it's an opportunity – if you spend the rest of your day writing code or doing animations or making models, you're still seeing the game in its consumer form for at least a couple hours. You're seeing a good chunk of the game every day in that form. That was a really good period of time where we were doing that constantly. It was fantastic.

Q: Like more members of the team getting more context into how everything fits?

Martin: And contribute to [the game], too.

Stratton: Yeah, absolutely.

Martin: We have departments – it's funny, there was this article written on IGN that said we don't have departments. We do have departments at Id: We have animation, we have level design. But to Marty's point, we have a lot of cross-disciplinary meetings. You want an LD, an animator – someone representing each department, typically leads and principals. But we don't make it exclusive to leads and principles. If somebody's got good ideas, they're going to be in the meeting.

You want them in the story meeting and the combat meetings and reviewing different things – within reason, as long as the schedule allows – because they're going to understand all aspects of the game, so they're going to know what their animation is linking up to or how the little piece of the game that they're working on fits into the overall project. But also that they can contribute to that stuff. I think that's the best way for the game to feel nice and tight and [be] a really cohesive experience.

So yes, we do have departments. But we have a lot of cross-disciplinary meetings. People from all over the studio are contributing to the game. That is my favorite part of [development] without question. I love that. You got a story idea? Cool. Who you are and did you write a script and did you go to this film school – nobody fucking cares. It's like, 'That's a cool idea. Do you write? Do you wanna write Codex entries?' [Laughs].

Most of the lines from the UAC spokesperson was written by our sound guy. Somebody said that he writes comics. It's not like, ‘Oh, he writes, so he'll do this.’ No. For sort of a test, he took a couple of swings at it, and it was successful. And then he wrote them all. For the most part. Some people contributed other stuff.

I think that's fucking awesome. That's a place that I wanna work at, you know?

Stratton: You do work there.

Martin: I do! I work there! [Laughs]

Q: Coming from the movie world, where everything is a lot more strict, game development must be more freeing for you.

Martin: It is. We just had this discussion. I wrote an email to the group that we're working with at Id: 'The collective intelligence of the group is always greater than the contributions of just a single individual working in isolation.' There's just no question. Four creative people are stronger than one creative person. But I think the myth is that [in a serious tone], 'Well, I came up with Star Wars in a white room with nothing in it and just some sheets of loose-leaf paper. And I wrote down Star Wars.' That stuff just doesn't happen.

I had an opportunity to scratch that itch. After working in a [movie] studio, I saved up a bunch of money and went on my own for six months to develop my own IPs. They just weren't that good. [Laughs]

Whereas when I was at Blur, we were on a team. Creativity is a team sport. ... It's like tennis. You're volleying ideas back and forth, and really great stuff comes from that.

Stratton: It's one of the best parts about Id right now, too. We're at a size where – I can't tell you our size exactly. ... But we are still a size where the way we run development, for the most part, does allow – we still feel like a team. We don't feel like these teams that, you always hear, 'Oh, there's the design team, and they're pretty much responsible for the design. They write all the game design documents. ... And there's a script that's written and that gets thrown over to a narrative team.'

We're still a size where within 30 seconds, I can walk this one little area [in the office] and see everybody on the team. Everybody works together. There are really no barriers to how we work. And it worked particularly well for Doom because it was definitely a game that was created through the process of making it, if that makes any sense. It was always a game in discussion and in process.

We would do something and it would be like, 'That doesn't work at all. Let's do something [else].' Games are always about iteration. But almost every aspect of Doom was iterated on through the course of development a lot. So there wasn't like this grand design at the very beginning or a grand script. We had these pillars and these foundational elements that we were building on.

But a lot of it was just people getting on the same page. [Whether] that was a meeting or the theater session or whatever, where you just hear the discussion and you talk.

It's like this churning of thought. And then that turns into a churning of play that then [turns into] churning a revision. And you just kind of cycle [through] that. And it worked because we were the right size to be able to do that. We were agile enough to be able to make those little bends and twists as we go, but big enough to create a triple-A game that could do what it has done.

It really hit the sweet spot when it came to that.

Q: You hear that with indie teams a lot, that agility. Do you consider yourself an indie studio under Bethesda?

Martin: I like to think of it as like a Navy Seal team. You don't want an army of dudes. You want 12 kick-ass, versatile soldiers. It just feels more efficient that way

Stratton: I will say that's a pretty huge tribute to Bethesda as well. I don't know that they always get enough credit for how they let their developers be creative. A perfect example: If you look at the last three games that have come out of Bethesda – Fallout 4, Dishonored 2, and Doom – those are all games that have been, broadly for their time, considered game of the year-type games and have won awards for that.

I think the fact that they either purchase or hire really talented teams that they believe in, and they make sure to understand what they're making but then let them make the game, is tremendous. We didn't have to [say] 'Can you please approve this script?' or 'This is our full design document and any deviation from this is going to cause a problem,' or anything like that. We have a group of people that we constantly talk to. Top to bottom of their organization, they're really supportive of just making the best game possible.

If that means, in our case, we were very flexible and agile and could kind of act in a pseudo – you can say that at our size, we're kind of indie-feeling. I do think there are times where we do approach it from that perspective. To support us through that and buy into it is a real – not a lot of big publishers look at games like that and approach game development and publishing like that. It's awesome. We're very lucky from that perspective.

Q: It doesn't sound like you have to cut through a lot of red tape to get your ideas approved.

Stratton: There's definitely a high level of understanding that needs to be had because again, there are big bets that are made when you're doing these kinds of things. But on a daily basis, we really have an immense amount of flexibility. And there's a lot of trust both ways.

We're very transparent about what we do and how we do it. We have awesome developer [support] -- their VP of development, Todd [Vaughn], and our main producer over there, Laffy [Taylor]. Those two guys are amazing. They know games. They love games. They love development. They've almost become part of the team. So we're very transparent with them.

They're as involved in what we're doing as anybody. We just feel lucky, as much as anything, to be able to make games in that kind of environment and culture.

Q: Do you feel like your team is firing on all cylinders right now? After going through Doom 4's cancellation and into the development/success of the new Doom?

Martin: I think so. We still have work to do. We were just down on the couch talking about it. We have big goals as a studio, where we want to get to – just the culture of the studio and developing that culture ... the Id way, and what that means to new people coming in, to people who are already there, and empowering people and all those great things. Because great teams make great products. Great studios make great games. So we have an opportunity now to focus on the studio, chip away the parts that didn't work, and put a little bit more time into the parts that did.

I do feel like we're the best – I haven't been there as long as Marty, obviously – so for me, [the studio] definitely feels the best it's ever been and it's only getting better.

Stratton: Yeah, it's one of the fun things [about the process] – it's like making a game. There is no perfect [team]. There are great teams. We always look at teams, like Bethesda Game Studios that's run by Todd [Howard], as a shining example on the hill – that's a team that just continues to do it right. And their products are the ultimate example of that.

But like [Hugo] – I've been at Id 17 years – and I think this is the best we've ever been. It's a super exciting time. There's no end to trying to do things better and more efficiently and more as a team. Pixar is another great example we always use. They're still evolving to be better and to be a better team, even now. They're probably one of the best examples out there of how a team creates unbelievable entertainment.

Q: Pixar does it on a consistent, yearly basis.

Stratton: Exactly. Now, we're the best we've ever been. But ask me in six months or a year, and I'll tell you we're even better than we were sitting here today.

Q: What does Doom mean to you? Is it just fighting demons and being the Doom Slayer? What's the DNA?

Martin: Only because we continue to talk about this: you've gotta be fast and strong. That's basically it [Laughs]. It's all about making the player feel powerful and not making any sort of concessions – don't do anything that takes away from the player feeling incredibly powerful. So really fast and strong: I think that's what a Doom game is.

And then the tone stuff. It's got to be the right tone. It's very comic book, it's fun, it doesn't take itself too seriously. And simplicity. We feel like the best products – movies, games, iPhones, product design, whatever – the simpler, the better. It doesn't mean that it's stupid. Obviously, Doom is a deceptively simple game because there's a lot of subtlety going on there, but you just want to have that immediate connection with the consumer. Fast, strong, and simple.

Stratton: It's always interesting with the 'simple' though, because ... to make something simple generally takes a lot more consideration and thought and execution than making something complex. The more simple you try to make something, the more difficult it is, and the more thought it takes and more subtlety and all that kind of stuff. When [Hugo] says deceptively simple, that's what takes a long time [to accomplish]. The player is like, 'This is freaking amazing!'

That's the kind of reaction you want. But to get there is a lot of work.

Q: Doom had an interesting world. Are you interested in expanding that world more, whether in a sequel or as DLC?

Martin: [To Marty] You had a great way of summarizing that before.

Stratton: Yeah. We approached this, from the beginning and throughout development, with the idea that we were building for now and the future. Every step of the way, we wanted to leave questions in the player's mind. We wanted them to want to know more about the Doom Slayer, about the world, about the UAC, about Samuel, about the crucible.

As I like to say, we left ourselves a very big canvas and a lot of paint. It's always exciting to think about the next game. But we've also had fun with like – there's a board game, we used the original Doom comic as a reference ... there's lots of opportunities when you create a creative world.

One of the things Hugo does really well is think in terms of, 'What's the Star Wars universe version of Doom?' and that kind of creative energy being injected into the team and broader thought really helps us. I think it helped us throughout the development, to really think like, 'This is just the foundation piece for something that could be just about anything.' So yeah, we're super excited about where we left things [in the game].

Martin: We're really excited. [The Doom Slayer] is a legendary badass now. He's been doing this a really long time, so that's a pretty big stage, a pretty big canvas.

Stratton: One of the main reactions to the campaign is people want more. They want more combat. We've always said the game is about combat first and foremost, and the fact that they got to the end of it and they still want more combat is tremendous. Even outside the realm of narrative, the Doom Slayer, the world, hell, and all that kind of stuff – the fact that people want to play more Doom combat is probably the best compliment.

Q: Speaking of Star Wars, will we, like in the upcoming Solo movie, see a young Doom Slayer just going through Hell for the first time?

Stratton: [Laughs]

Martin: The fact that you would say that – that's what we wanted. Because that sounds awesome to me!

Q: We need to know how he got so angry!

Martin: Or like – I can say this because people talk about it all the time – the Night Sentinels and what is their connection to him and this ancient army that he used to command, and different things like that. It's all in the Codex now. We love when movies do that and when books do that. So yeah, I like that you said that. [Laughs]