Call of DOOM died because it "didnt match the game we thought people wanted"

Way back in 2012, Call of Doom nearly happened. That semi-serious name was coined because of its more contemporary styling - a group of plucky rebels fighting back against the demon invasion of Earth. It was every inch 'COD does Doom' and we only found out about it from leaks after it was canned. And now we know why: it just wasn't what id thought fans wanted, says Doom's Marty Stratton.

This is a teaser of what it looked like:

Marty, who's executive producer, explains that there were issues with "the whole package". During the game's development he says the team sat down ("you kinda throw everything up onto a big white board") to evaluate everything. That led to a "week or two where we went through an evaluation, and looked at the old Doom games, Doom 3 and what our preconceived notions of [what] a new Doom game would be. We moved stuff around and crossed stuff out", he explains.

Ultimately Call of Doom was cancelled because of its 'personality' says Marty. "Personality is a very good word: we want this personality, and are we really doing that?" he says. In the case of the 2012 Doom 4, "it didn’t match". Once the call had been made to scrap that version, says Marty, "Zenimax and Bethesda supported us on that path".

That doesn't mean it wasn't good, he thinks, "we always do high quality work, so it was good. But when we sat down and went through what we really wanted, to make Doom the game that we thought people wanted, fans wanted, and we wanted to make? It didn’t match. So far, in all of the times we’ve shown it [the current Doom], we think we made some good decisions".

You can see what Dave thought of his Doom hands on to see how right that decision appears to have been.

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Leon Hurley
Managing editor for guides

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for guides, which means I run GamesRadar's guides and tips content. I also write reviews, previews and features, largely about horror, action adventure, FPS and open world games. I previously worked on Kotaku, and the Official PlayStation Magazine and website.