Who came up with the Daisy ending?

[incel]

 

Whose idea it was to kill a sweet innocent bunny? What do you think? My money's on Adrian Carmack (after all, he drew corpses of Commander Keen). I won't be surprised if Daisy was Tom Hall's pet rabbit xD.

 

I looked up the forum, and it seeems this question was raised 11 years ago, but with no fruition. So, any new info? it's like the question you think someone would have asked during an interview... I'm surprised to discover that there's not even a consent about spike/hand on the picture. And one interesting theory states that the strange perspective is due to it being POV shot through Doomguy's visor.

[JCST]

I suspect it might be two culprits instead of one.
The E3 Ending just impalled a generic rabbit for the shock value (probabbly Adrian Carmack that was tired of cute things thanks to Keen)

and latter someone decided to tie it in with Doomguy in Ultimate.

[Doomkid]

When you say spike/hand, what are you referring to? Those spiky things on the left are traffic lights, I always thought they were impaling spikes as a kid for some reason. I think you're talking about the spike the rabbit's head is impaled on, if that's the case it's definitely a spike - It's half as wide as the rabbit's neck, which would be smaller than a baby's wrist.

 

I would like to know who came up with the idea, this ending freaked me out when I was really young. I was playing in Doom95 which has an edited version of this image on the launcher's splash screen:

 

 

When I first beat the game I was expecting to see a cyberdemon and doomguy fighting over there, I freaked out when it panned to a dismembered rabbit! Later on though I beat e4 and despite finding it freaky, I thought it was cool that doomguy actually showed just a hint of character by being pissed off that his pet rabbit had been killed.

[incel]

5 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

what are you referring to? <...> I think you're talking about the spike the rabbit's head is impaled on...

Yes, I was refering to the spike on which the head is bestowed, but some people think that it's Doomguy's hand, distorted with the fish-eye perspective, I presume.

[crazyflyingdonut]

Personally, I don't believe the buildings or scenery in that particular image were drawn very well at all. There's something about the way some of the taller buildings look. If people actually lived in that city at one point before the demons invaded it, I feel sorry because everyday they had to see that the skyscrapers look so damn ugly.

[GuyMcBrofist]

As a kid I thought the spike was the rabbit's neck being stretched out as some supernatural force was pulling its head off.

[Xaser]

@GuyMcBrofist Heh, so it's not just me, then -- that freaked me the hell out as a kid at first, but then it got way less scary when I realized the "neck" was just a spike.

 

Violence is weird.

[Jimmy]

I thought it was a deer at first.

[CyberDreams]

According to the old DW's 5 Year's of Doom interview with John Romero:

 

 

 

[Gunstar Green]

3 hours ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

Personally, I don't believe the buildings or scenery in that particular image were drawn very well at all. There's something about the way some of the taller buildings look. If people actually lived in that city at one point before the demons invaded it, I feel sorry because everyday they had to see that the skyscrapers look so damn ugly.

At least it matches how ugly the city levels are in Doom 2 so... continuity? 

[crazyflyingdonut]

1 minute ago, Gunstar Green said:

At least it matches how ugly the city levels are in Doom 2 so... continuity? 

...you know what? You just gave me an idea...

 

The fact that the city in the bunny picture and the city levels in Doom 2 both look so ugly... could it have been done on purpose? Or was it because of how limited technology was around 1993-1994?

 

This is starting to get weird.

[dmslr]

2 hours ago, GuyMcBrofist said:

As a kid I thought the spike was the rabbit's neck being stretched out as some supernatural force was pulling its head off.

I've always thought it's just the Doomguy's hand holding a bunny's head.

[printz]

Initially I thought that the burning buildings were actually Dis itself getting destroyed after I defeated the spiderdemon. They looked too alien to me and I couldn't associate them with skyscrapers.

 

Also I thought the rabbit died because I killed the Spiderdemon. I thought I was supposed to find and rescue it before killing the mastermind, so that I'd get the happiest ending, as in Strife.

 

Another interpretation: the rabbit had been possessed to turn into a spiderdemon, so killing it restored its body to that of a rabbit, in a creepy kind of way. I thought the "spike" was actually rabbit's neck extending in a cartoonish way, and bleeding just like the former humans. It looked like it was dying.

 

I also thought the dude at the end of E4 wasn't Doomguy, but just a regular Former Sergeant who got Daisy (probably dead) as a trophy.

[SaladBadger]

the interview with John Romero back in 1998 suggests that it's Adrian's idea. not much surprise there, seeing as he's the one that loves all that gore.

[Lila Feuer]

I always got the impression it was Adrian Carmack.

[Havoc Crow]

3 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

I always got the impression it was Adrian Carmack.

Not sure how could you get that impression, Carmack looks nothing like a rabbit :)

7 hours ago, crazyflyingdonut said:

...you know what? You just gave me an idea...

 

The fact that the city in the bunny picture and the city levels in Doom 2 both look so ugly... could it have been done on purpose? Or was it because of how limited technology was around 1993-1994?

I'm not sure if I completely understand your point, but these featureless, windowless buildings in the ending sure are reminiscent of what in-game structures look like — their surfaces even remind me of in-game textures.

Could these buildings have been originally built in the game engine, screenshotted and retouched?

[The Nate]

47 minutes ago, JudgeDeadd said:

I'm not sure if I completely understand your point, but these featureless, windowless buildings in the ending sure are reminiscent of what in-game structures look like — their surfaces even remind me of in-game textures.

Could these buildings have been originally built in the game engine, screenshotted and retouched?

No, here's Adrian's original concept art for the scene:

[Doomkid]

What’s with the (building?) on the far left that just looks like a reversed part of the sky, anyway? Is it meant to be a completely reflective or see-through building?

 

Theres a lot of abstract elements to Doom, mostly in terms of map design, but for some reason the city art always looked out of place to me. No other scene in Doom has such a warped perspective.. not a complaint to be clear, it’s interesting, it’s just strange because every other scene (intermission maps, Deimos above hell, etc) doesn’t have any such effect.

[SaladBadger]

honestly I always assumed the weird transparent building was just being erased from existence with hell magic. I couldn't think of any other explanation after looking it for a while when I first started toying around with Doom modding eons ago.

[BrassKnight]

I always believed the reasons why the buildings looked so bad is because Hell is taking over Earth itself. If you looked around the Earth maps in Doom 2, most of the buildings and areas doesn't look like anything like an actual city. Maps like Industrial Zone and Suburbs looks more like Hell than Earth to me. Structures from Hell could have also appeared around Earth too but I'm not sure because I haven't played a Doom game for a long time.

[Chow Yun Thin]

I remember looking through the Doom Companion CD that my copy of shareware Doom came on. There was a folder of .pcx files and I eventually figured out MSPaint could read them. That was the first picture I saw and it threw me for a loop to see such grotesque violence directed at an innocent creature. I thought it was some kind of sick joke and it wasn't until I got Ultimate Doom and played through it that I got the context.

 

I also thought the distortion of the buildings was due to the corrupting influence of Hell.

[GuyMcBrofist]

I also found the buildings sort of odd. It's the only image to my knowledge where the camera is angled upwards at something, maybe that's got something to do with it. There's also only so many fullscreen artworks in the game that you (I, at least) rarely see some of them and that makes them feel a little disjoint anyway. The deimos above hell screen is one I totally forgot about.

 

Which makes me wonder, why no post-episode artwork for KDITD? The text definitely does a nice setup for one, yet it isn't there, which I think further adds to the strangeness of the other two.

[incel]

26 minutes ago, GuyMcBrofist said:

It's the only image to my knowledge where the camera is angled upwards at something, maybe that's got something to do with it.

 

A well known Doom fact: walls start to get wonky if you look up or down.

[Revenant100]

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

What’s with the (building?) on the far left that just looks like a reversed part of the sky, anyway? Is it meant to be a completely reflective or see-through building?

It's a reflection. You can see in Adrian's original sketch that the dark upper corner of the building is a reflection of the center smoke plume.

 

[CyberDreams]

1 hour ago, Revenant100 said:

It's a reflection. You can see in Adrian's original sketch that the dark upper corner of the building is a reflection of the center smoke plume.

 

I can finally tell that it's a pike or stake that Daisy's head is on. For the longest time i thought it was Doomguy's hand. You can clearly make out the woodgrain on the stake in this picture a hell of a lot better then the in-game graphic imo.

[LadyVader1138]

3 hours ago, CyberDreams said:

I can finally tell that it's a pike or stake that Daisy's head is on. For the longest time i thought it was Doomguy's hand. You can clearly make out the woodgrain on the stake in this picture a hell of a lot better then the in-game graphic imo.

It was 320x200 in 1993 for CRT monitors, cut them some slack.

[Memerz1]

Most people I knew thought it was a neck, or spike. I actually thought it was a 2x4 plank. But if someone slaughtered my pet bunny, I'd go to the depths of hell to avenge my bunny too. Maybe Doom Guy was made to be relatable.

[Gunstar Green]

I remembered it as being an arm when I was young but today I see it clearly a wooden spike of some sort.

[Lila Feuer]

I thought it was an arm too. 😂

[crazyflyingdonut]

What if it's the same stick that Romero's head was put on in Doom 2?