who created the buildings in hell

This has been a thought that was bugging me ever since I started playing the Doom games. Who created the buildings and shrines in Hell? was it built by God when he constructed Hell to throw the devil in? ( I think that's how the story goes.) Because I don't imagine a bunch of monsters that don't seem that smart and get into fights with each other building sprawling architecture like that. Especially in Doom 64.

Maybe it wasn't always Hell. Maybe it was some forgotten civilization that didn't have a Doomguy badass to save them.

I guess they were transported to hell like the lost deimos base.

Also something seems odd about you and I can't quite place it.

Well you see, Hell used to have a much larger population of suffering humans, who were forced to build these structures via slave labor, after which they were housed in said structures during the breaks between torment sessions. Yeah, yeah, you're supposed to suffer for eternity, but who said it was NON-STOP for eternity? Anyway, everything eventually decays away to nothing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy), so eventually these people suffering in Hell need to be replenished. This was never a problem until man invented religion, and now nobody goes to hell anymore except terry wad authors, Brutal Doom fanboys, and the people who constantly complain about them on the Doomworld forums. Oh and atheists too I guess?

Herein lay the explanation for the empty buildings, and where they came from.

Avoozl said:

I guess they were transported to hell like the lost deimos base.

Also something seems odd about you and I can't quite place it.

What do you mean?

Obviously Sandy Peterson, John Romero and the other guys at id.

MeetyourUnmaker said:

What do you mean?

Well in your charlie horse thread you sound like English is like your fifth language and now it's like you read a whole English dictionary in one day and are speaking like English is your first language.

MeetyourUnmaker said:

Who created the buildings and shrines in Hell? was it built by God when he constructed Hell to throw the devil in?

Hell started out as a thriving community of freemasons who worshiped a rival holy trinity they referred to as the "Equilateral Triangle". For that blasphemy they were damned for all time, forced to learn carpentry and have Satan appointed their overlord/town planner. I hope that answers your question.

Doominator2 said:

Obviously Sandy Peterson, John Romero and the other guys at id.

I second Doominator2's notion.

Obviously OP, your question has been answered.

Anyone who knows me knows that I regard the monsters in Doom--even the cyberdemons and spider masterminds--as chess pieces devised by a sadistic, god-like race of sentient beings whose soul purpose for existence is to spread suffering across the universe. Therefore, the strange symbolism, ritual sacrifices and artifacts found in the hellish portions of Doom are also of their doing; it's all there to facilitate the endless suffering. The buildings, then, are torture chambers that add yet another element of pain to the mix. Recall there is a map in Doom called "House of Pain."

Well, in Dante's hell there were buildings and cities, so we might have to ask him!

During episode 2 the Tower of Babel gets erected gradually as you advance, so hellish denizens or powers evidently do construct stuff somehow.

Doominator2 said:
Well in your charlie horse thread you sound like English is like your fifth language and now it's like you read a whole English dictionary in one day and are speaking like English is your first language.

It just looks like he missed got in the first sentence and forgot to erase an you when he edited the before-last sentence.

GoatLord said:

The buildings, then, are torture chambers that add yet another element of pain to the mix. Recall there is a map in Doom called "House of Pain."

That sounds like the local podiatry clinic.

GoatLord said:

as chess pieces devised by a sadistic, god-like race of sentient beings whose soul purpose for existence is to spread suffering across the universe.

Sounds like Hexen.

Not a very well known piece of Doom trivia, but if you run through the game fast enough you can catch a glimpse of the imps in their construction hats as they finish up for the afternoon.

Alfonzo said:

Not a very well known piece of Doom trivia, but if you run through the game fast enough you can catch a glimpse of the imps in their construction hats as they finish up for the afternoon.

I'd like to see someone create a mod for that.

Doom 4 ought to have demons that shift the level's design.

That could look cool.

Summoned by id. Satanic Darkness.

Miltons "Paradise Lost" describes how Satan and his fallen angels build Pandemonium, the capital of hell. It was designed by Mulciber, who had been the architect of palaces in Heaven before his fall.

Doom's foes have that intriguing ability to be portrayed both as mindless and non-mindless at the same time.

We see maps and wads that show the hellspawn standing at and 'using' computers and we see them in cages, but we don't bat an eyelid at either set up.

Generally speaking, the foes in most other video games can't be portrayed both ways; I suppose it comes from the foes in other games often being from groups somewhat more defined in common literature.

I actually recall saying something like the above years ago somewhere on here :p

Another explanation could be that in the Doom games the monsters you encounter are just the lowest of hell's minions and thus stupid and beast-like, while the fallen angels and all the other high ranking demon lords are absent because the have something more important to do. They can't be bothered with a puny Space Marine.

Since the obvious answer ("the mappers") has already been said, I prefer to imagine that it's "nobody". It's not our physical world anymore, it's a metaphysical world. The surreal buildings aren't there because they were built, they're there because that's how that world is. Maybe they come from a material world and were twisted and corrupted when taken over by demons and moved to Hell, like Deimos. Maybe they just always were here, as chronology is meaningless in Hell.

I don't necessarily think that the demons are stupid. They're chaotic evil, so of course they're going to act barbaric. You only ever see them in combat situations and they likely speak their own language(s) and not English, we don't know how they act amongst themselves during whatever they consider to be "peace". For all we know, their grunts and roars are actually communication to one another (sight sounds being "enemy spotted!" and active sounds being something like "I smell him in this general direction!").

And death sounds are "Ouch, it hurts!". :)

I hear archviles have a fetish for marble

Inkie said:

I hear archviles have a fetish for marble

Lol where did you hear this?

Once there was an epic demonic alien entity named ID software, there they grew the biologically enhanced designers of Doom.
One overdevelloped brain in a human like body specialized in mathematics, one long haired metalhead with photomodel apearances,
and a bunch of followers to help that which can not be done alone.

Soon the world could experience that which was designed to be !

Gez said:

Since the obvious answer ("the mappers") has already been said, I prefer to imagine that it's "nobody". It's not our physical world anymore, it's a metaphysical world. The surreal buildings aren't there because they were built, they're there because that's how that world is. Maybe they come from a material world and were twisted and corrupted when taken over by demons and moved to Hell, like Deimos. Maybe they just always were here, as chronology is meaningless in Hell.

This is my interpretation of the Doom universe's version of hell and its demons in general. I would think that aside from "it's just a video game" that "hell doesn't have to make sense given its chaotic-evil nature, it can all be explained away with deus ex machina" should be the immediate (and hopefully obvious) answer to many of these over-analytical threads about demons/hell in the Doom universe.

Inkie said:

I hear archviles have a fetish for marble

Tetzlaff said:

Another explanation could be that in the Doom games the monsters you encounter are just the lowest of hell's minions and thus stupid and beast-like, while the fallen angels and all the other high ranking demon lords are absent because the have something more important to do. They can't be bothered with a puny Space Marine.

Indeed. We actually meet one such, in Doom II MAP30. His head has been integrated into some kind of gigantic diabolical machine that gives him the power to form his thoughts into hellspawn, which are "given birth to" in a figurative sense from his forehead, just as Satan's daughter Sin was born in Milton's Paradise Lost. In the same work you'll find descriptions of the demons laying bound in the depths of Hell, being utterly gigantic (when the Icon of Sin/Baphomet is slain, its thrashing limbs are said to devastate "untold miles" of Hell's surface).

I imagine all the higher spirits of Hell to be similar creatures in the Doom universe - gigantic eldritch abominations with unknowable power.

Imps and the hand of evil.