The phrase "God Mode" to mean invulnerability - where did it come from?

[Bauul]

I've always presumed it first appeared in Quake, but I've come across what seems to be a general belief across the wider Internet that it comes from Doom.

 

Obviously we all know it's called "Degreelessness Mode" in-game, but was it called God Mode internally somewhere? Or was it named that by fans before Quake came out?

 

Or is it genuinely from Quake and this is a mass case of Internet misremembering?

[Chow Yun Thin]

I'm looking at the Doom FAQ by Hank Leukart, uploaded on Doom's first birthday on gamefaqs, and it calls IDDQD God mode. Perhaps earlier versions of the FAQ called it that as well?

[reflex17]

I think Commander Keen was the first to use the term, the code in that game was the keys G-O-D and from then on I guess it stuck

[lazygecko]

It's from one of id's earlier (pre-Doom) titles which I'm fairly sure was primarily meant as a cheat for debugging, giving you both invulnerability and noclipping at the same time among other things.

[Quasar]

id do seem to be one of if not the first video game companies to use the term, but it also exists in roleplaying, so it's possible it entered their vocabulary through D&D.

 

EDIT: Here's a reference from 1989:

1989 September 22, Kent C. Brodie, “wizard/god help (was Re: wizard password, um, what IS it?)”, in rec.games.moria, Usenet‎[3], message-ID <2755@moocow.uucp>:

The difference is that wizard mode is a SUBSET of god mode. For example, both wizard and god mode let you "teleport", but only GOD mode allows you to "allocate treasures" or "create object".

[Havoc Crow]

I did some research on the subject in my spare time and ended up with this handful of early quotations.

 

@reflex17 might be right, Commander Keen IV was the earliest occurrence of the "invulnerability" sense that I could find.

[Jaws In Space]

I have no idea where it came from, but from a personal standpoint I decided to say I was in god mode whenever I was using IDDQD. I was 6 years old & Doom was the first game I ever played, so I wasn't influenced by any other games when I decided to do that.

 

One possibility for many people calling it god mode is the fact that the enemies of Doom are demons from hell. When you go around with glowing eyes & don't take any damage from them, it basically makes you a god.

[Bauul]

That's some good research guys!  I too was digging about a bit, and I think it seems entirely plausible that id Software picked up the phrase from their DnD games and subsequently used it in Commander Keen.

 

One could hypothesize that they tried to come up with something more fancy for Doom (hence "degreelessness mode"), maybe even citing that "god mode" is meant to mean something else (e.g. summoning items in DnD), but the name stuck among fans and developers and by the time Quake rolled around they just called it God Mode again.

[Gez]

2 hours ago, Quasar said:

id do seem to be one of if not the first video game companies to use the term, but it also exists in roleplaying, so it's possible it entered their vocabulary through D&D.

I don't think it's been used in tabletop D&D, though. (Besides, you're not supposed to cheat. And, as every munchkin knows, in D&D, being a god doesn't make you invulnerable -- it just means you'll yield even more XPs!)

[[McD] James]

I can't find anything predating Invasion of the Vorticons. 

[Not Jabba]

2 hours ago, Jaws In Space said:

I have no idea where it came from, but from a personal standpoint I decided to say I was in god mode whenever I was using IDDQD. I was 6 years old & Doom was the first game I ever played, so I wasn't influenced by any other games when I decided to do that.

Seconded. I always called it God Mode as of 1994 even though I was aware of the game using Degreelessness Mode -- I think I picked it up by word of mouth, from the friend who gave me the code. I didn't play Quake until about 2009 and always associated the term with Doom.

[Vanessa]

If god was real I'd ask him.

Okay, all atheist jokes aside, honestly not sure where it came from. But I would say that there is a big chance that it came from Dungeons and Dragons...

...here's why. See, Dungeons and Dragons was the first well-known game to use the term. Commander Keen may have been the first video game to use the term, but DnD was made in 1974, or it was released in that year. And when was Commander Keen released? 1991. So this means DnD was released 17 years before Commander K. was, so there's no way C. Keen used it first. But it may have been the first video game to use it, so if non-video games don't count, then yes, I'd say it came from C.K. Now, I will say that it is possible that Commander Keen was not the first video game to use it, and it's equally possible that the term "God Mode" came to be before even Dungeons and Dragons. I'm just saying that I believe DnD brought us this term.

[DooM_RO]

Because Gods are immortal.

[Havoc Crow]

14 hours ago, Vanessa said:

See, Dungeons and Dragons was the first well-known game to use the term. Commander Keen may have been the first video game to use the term, but DnD was made in 1974, or it was released in that year.

Hmm? Where did D&D use the term "god mode"?

[Vanessa]

5 minutes ago, JudgeDeadd said:

Hmm? Where did D&D use the term "god mode"?

"I was reading the latest OFFICIAL U.S. PLAYSTATION MAGAZINE (OPM, Issue 83), and on page 47 noticed a WOTC ad for the 30th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. Although I can't say I like the ad (text was in the wrong place, art was too chaotic, etc.) it purports that "We Invented Godmode", the "We" being the Dungeons & Dragons game system."

https://www.gamegrene.com/node/370

[Vanessa]

1 hour ago, DooM_RO said:

Because Gods are immortal.

I mean well yeah I guess that is msot likely how they came up with the term--the question asked, though, is where it came from, not why it came to be.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

20 hours ago, Quasar said:

id do seem to be one of if not the first video game companies to use the term, but it also exists in roleplaying, so it's possible it entered their vocabulary through D&D.

 

EDIT: Here's a reference from 1989:

1989 September 22, Kent C. Brodie, “wizard/god help (was Re: wizard password, um, what IS it?)”, in rec.games.moria, Usenet‎[3], message-ID <2755@moocow.uucp>:

The difference is that wizard mode is a SUBSET of god mode. For example, both wizard and god mode let you "teleport", but only GOD mode allows you to "allocate treasures" or "create object".

This quote appears to be referring to Moria, one of the old guard of roguelike games, not tabletop D&D.  But I'm more familiar with its spinoff, Angband, which did indeed have a "wizard mode" that let you cheat in various ways but I forget whether it also had a corresponding "god mode" (IIRC it was still quite possible to die to the endgame enemies even after cheating yourself all sorts of crazy high-end equipment and such).

[Gez]

55 minutes ago, Vanessa said:

"I was reading the latest OFFICIAL U.S. PLAYSTATION MAGAZINE (OPM, Issue 83), and on page 47 noticed a WOTC ad for the 30th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. Although I can't say I like the ad (text was in the wrong place, art was too chaotic, etc.) it purports that "We Invented Godmode", the "We" being the Dungeons & Dragons game system."

https://www.gamegrene.com/node/370

 

Perhaps, but there's a difference between inventing a concept and coining an expression. I don't think D&D ever used the "god mode" phrasing in any prominent way. It does allow you to play characters that can become very powerful, and even become gods themselves, but that's not the invulnerability cheat.

[Havoc Crow]

2 hours ago, Vanessa said:

"I was reading the latest OFFICIAL U.S. PLAYSTATION MAGAZINE (OPM, Issue 83), and on page 47 noticed a WOTC ad for the 30th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. Although I can't say I like the ad (text was in the wrong place, art was too chaotic, etc.) it purports that "We Invented Godmode", the "We" being the Dungeons & Dragons game system."

https://www.gamegrene.com/node/370

Umm, that's an ad from 2004. Doesn't mean that the original D&D used the term "god mode".

 

Anyway, what we can say for sure is that "god mode" was already used at least since the 80's to mean "a mode with high privileges in a computer system", and it was seemingly used in the context of roguelikes/mainframe games, so perhaps that's where id got the term from.

[Vanessa]

2 hours ago, JudgeDeadd said:

Doesn't mean that the original D&D used the term "god mode".

well, yes, but the point is, they still created god mode itself.