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Patrol1985

Where does Doom 64 take place?

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It's an official sequel to "Doom II" and the manual says that "The military episodes code named "DOOM" were not actually completed". There is also a mentioning of "A long forgotten relay satellite".

Does it mean that:

1) Doom 64 takes place in some entirely new location.
2) It takes place on Phobos / Deimos (since the demons have apparently been resurrected)

Also, what's with all the libraries present in the game? I'd think that all the data would be stored on CDs or some other digital media. Have they been brought together with the demons?

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The majority of the game (MAP09 and onwards) takes place in Hell; it's implied by the intermission text and the theme-shift that the end teleporter (basic as it is) in Final Outpost is the gate to hell.

As for the first eight maps, the intro text is indeed rather nonspecific, but I'd wager you're on Mars. The intro text refers to bathing "a planet" in radiation to seal off the invasion, and Doom's intro text mentions that the UAC has bases on Phobos, Deimos, and Mars (though you never do see the latter). Add two and two and there you go: You're on Mars for a bit, then Hell. Rather Doomy, if you ask me. :P

The pragmatic answer, of course, is "it really doesn't matter," but that's no fun at all. :P

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It can't be Mars, the sky looks nothing like it. I suppose we'd have to ask the devs, and they might not have ever decided on which planet/moon/asteroid the first maps are on.

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It's a little ambiguous, but to my mind, Doom 64's initial setting seems to be within (either reimagined or previously unexplored areas of) the same installations on Phobos that were involved in the events of the first game. After the invasion, the moon base was flooded with radiation to eliminate the lingering demons, and then quarantined for an unspecified amount of time. These high levels of radiation may have accidentally created the mother demon, or at least allowed it to thrive. I actually rather like the idea of the mother demon as a heavily mutated arch-vile, or something like that.

So, unbeknownst to humanity, the demons have been hard at work (re)spawning their horde (the mother demon's influence is presumed here one way or another), corrupting the place (sort of echoing the extended demonic influence seen at the Deimos base, explaining why it no longer looks like Knee Deep In The Dead), and mutating themselves (hinted to be caused at least partially by radiation, which is as good an excuse as any for the modified monster behaviour and appearances).

Anyway, everyone assumes the old Phobos base is dead and empty, when some crappy old forgotten satellite broadcasts weird energy signatures from the area, tipping off humanity that there is indeed weird stuff still going on. You're sent you in to clear the place out again, since you did it once before already.

The barren grey rocky sky textures reinforce the impression that it's almost certainly Phobos. Of the other places mentioned in the prior two games' stories, Mars would presumably have a reddish surface, Earth would not look so cold and lifeless, and Deimos is still floating around somewhere in Hell. The tongue-in-cheek reference to both the events and level structure of the first game (The military episodes code named "DOOM") hint that you're returning to a place from the original, as well.

The use of the word "planet" vs. "moon" in some text is mostly a semantic quibble.

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Sodaholic said:

It can't be Mars, the sky looks nothing like it. I suppose we'd have to ask the devs, and they might not have ever decided on which planet/moon/asteroid the first maps are on.

Phobos mountain range and sky in E1 looks nothing like it actually would on Phobos, what's your point?

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I always assumed it was Phobos because I thought the background text mentioned the Mother Demon coming from a forgotten damaged base, which again, I assumed was the Phobos base.

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Sodaholic said:

It can't be Mars, the sky looks nothing like it.


You've played doom before right?

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Not many people can imagine the surface of Phobos => you can get away with various kinds of stuff. Representing Mars as something dark and grey is an entirely different thing - everyone is used to it being red in fiction.

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BaronOfStuff said:

Phobos mountain range and sky in E1 looks nothing like it actually would on Phobos, what's your point?

40oz said:

You've played doom before right?

Phobos is grey(ish), which is enough similarity to justify the sky texture. As Werecat notes, it'd make more sense that it was Mars if it were red.

The intermission screen is probably less representative of the intentions in the released game, as its very brown appearance would match up better with the beta sky.

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Remember that these are scary demon monsters that warp reality.

Either that, or the Martian night is blue for the same reason Phobos has an atmosphere, because it looks good.

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Sodaholic said:

It can't be Mars, the sky looks nothing like it. I suppose we'd have to ask the devs, and they might not have ever decided on which planet/moon/asteroid the first maps are on.


Doom 2 can't take place on earth either, because it looks nothing like it. These kind of threads always cracks me up. Nerding at epic levels.

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darkreaver said:

Doom 2 can't take place on earth either, because it looks nothing like it. These kind of threads always cracks me up. Nerding at epic levels.

The brown sky likely represents pollution from burning, destroyed buildings.

And why is everyone jumping on me for this? Of course Doom isn't realistic. I'm just saying that the color scheme is enough to justify what it "looks like", I don't care about the finer details.

Phobos IRL = brownish grey
Phobos in Doom = grey with atmosphere
Deimos IRL = brown
Deimos in Doom = brown with bits of snow

Close enough to me. However:

Mars IRL = Red with atmosphere
"Mars" in Doom 64 = Blue with no atmosphere?

Nah, not likely to be Mars. There is also no indication that Mars itself was ever invaded in the first two games.

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darkreaver said:

Doom 2 can't take place on earth either, because it looks nothing like it. These kind of threads always cracks me up. Nerding at epic levels.

To be fair, I have seen some yellow / brown skies akin to what's seen in Doom 2. However, those were always exclusive to adverse weather, typically hurricane or tornado conditions I think.

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Sodaholic said:

It can't be Mars, the sky looks nothing like it.

Going by this logic Doom couldn't take place on phobos either, the sky looks nothing like it.

But even still, your point doesn't even apply here because the martian sky is plenty dark and starry at night (which you could easily argue Doom64 is taking place in).

Sodaholic said:

Phobos is grey(ish), which is enough similarity to justify the sky texture.

Phobos has no atmosphere. The sky texture from the alphas and betas better approximates the look of that moon than the sky they ended up with.

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Sodaholic said:

It can't be Mars, the sky looks nothing like it. I suppose we'd have to ask the devs, and they might not have ever decided on which planet/moon/asteroid the first maps are on.

I'd imagine it's nighttime.

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Huh. I've honestly never thought about where Doom 64 was set until now. If we're going by the manual's "story," then I guess you're back on the moons.

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I think it was meant to be Phobos. The game explains that the Mother Demon went back through the abandoned base and resurrected all the demons you killed. Never has an IWAD taken place on Mars, so how can the MD resurrect demons on Mars where there was never dead demons on Mars to begin with?

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I was always told Mars was really more brown on it's surface..the red colour coming from atmosphere dust and image edited photos. If it is red, it's pale.

As for it's real colour, well people will say different things, brown or red.

I tried looking up the actual colour of Mars...and I got this.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/outthere/2013/03/20/what-color-is-the-red-planet-really/#.VMKeWubP6Hs

As for Doom 64, I always thought of it as the same place as Doom 1, only perhaps another part of the base. With the sky colour and whatnot....there is always artistic license...always. They may try to get a similar colour to Phobos's sky but creativity often comes into play and it isn't always shown as entirely realistic....hell, often totally wrong as games even set on earth use unrealistic sky colours.

But I suppose for this game and the series in general, you could say terraforming and radiation affect the colours so it may make things looks different.

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Again, Doom64 could very easily take place at night, and night on mars does not look dissimilar from night on earth (or anywhere else, for that matter). In fact the atmosphere is thin enough that on a clear night (no dust) you'd probably see space better than you do here.

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Sodaholic said:

Nah, not likely to be Mars. There is also no indication that Mars itself was ever invaded in the first two games.


Makes sense I think, because I think Doom's backstory actually says that Doomguy's team comes from a base that was established on Mars.

None of the other stories mention Mars at all otherwise, unless we're gonna assume that Hell is Mars, and the chunk of Deimos is hidden on Mars somewhere. In that case, Doomguy rappels down onto a red surface at the end of E2, which perhaps is him heading to Mars.

But that's just a bunch of assumption.

Edit: Aw yeah, I'm a Forum Legend now.

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I firmly believe it's meant to be on Mars. The story starts out by mentioning an old relay satellite, "battered by neutrons," suddenly re-activating for just long enough to broadcast horrific messages from "the long abandoned corridors," as well as mentioning a "strict planetary quarantine ensured by massive levels of radiation".

This doesn't fit Earth, because Doom 64 follows Final Doom and Final Doom takes place partially on Earth.

This doesn't fit the moon because you wouldn't orbit satellites around the moon (there's direct line-of-sight radio communication) and it says "planetary," not "lunar".

It's clearly not Phobos because the installations don't match up and are built in a different style. It can't be Deimos because Deimos disappeared into Hell (you're not going to convince me it was able to come back, the gateway was shut down).

That leaves the radioactive waste facilities that were built on the surface of Mars. Presumably they were invaded by the demons as well.

Oh well it's only eight maps anyways. After that, you go straight to fucking Hell and you stay there - FOREVER.

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After rereading through the story texts, my personal take is that Doom 64 takes place "wherever the hell you were in the first game, fucked if we remember, or even care to check" as far as the writers were concerned.

Worth noting: the Doom 2 story text is rather inconsistently written also, as it actually does seem to imply in a few places that the first game took place on Mars itself, rather than the moons ( "...the alien invasion struck Mars..." "...you stopped the invasion, saved Mars base...", "...it's all starting again, just like on Mars..."). Going further back, Doom's original "Story So Far" even refers to Phobos as a planet after you realize your squad has been killed ("...you'll never navigate off the planet on your own..."). Whether that's lazy writing, poorly used synecdoche, or some combination, it doesn't really matter.

I'm still not convinced that Midway had ever consciously decided that the game begins on Mars. Even if you want to interpret the details in the text seriously, Mars itself could've been abandoned along with its moon as part of the quarantine, with the action itself still taking place on Phobos.

It's very easy for me to handwave the differing map layouts and architectural styles between E1 and Doom 64 via a combination of 'demonic corruption' and 'this is a previously unexplored wing of the moon base.' After all, "...the monsters have brought their own reality with them..." is justification for all the bizarre warped aesthetics in Doom 2's Earth maps.

It seems much less likely that some huge invasion of Mars itself happened in the space between games, for reasons unknown. Doom's story implies that the cool secret military research is all happening on the two moons away from prying eyes, while the planetary facilities on Mars are just boring UAC waste processing plants; i.e. the sort of dead-end place you'd get transferred to when you've pissed off your boss. Even weirder that Doom 64's story would be lumping these hypothetical events on Mars into the antecedent action of the first game ("...the military episodes codenamed 'DOOM'...") without any other exposition. And kind of weird that there is inexplicably human-looking teleportation tech on Mars, given that all the gateway experimentation was done in dedicated installations on the moons.

If a definite Martian setting was actually the intent, I do think they'd have made it more clear, especially in the visual sense. The realistic plausibility of Martian soil looking different under certain lighting conditions is kind of irrelevant. "Reddish orange landscape" is standard sci-fi shorthand for "Mars". It seems implausible that they'd deliberately go against that and make it blue if they actually wanted you to think you're on "the red planet."


Some more inconsistency for fun:

The ending of Inferno says you escaped Hell via a direct portal to Earth (already seen under seige), while Doom 2's background text disregards that, instead saying that you saved Mars, were recognized as a war hero there, then resigned from the military to take a "drop pod" back to Earth. Only after stepping out of the pod do you see the buildings in flames, etc, and realize what's happening.

Unless we assume the marine from Doom 2 / Doom 64 is a different guy from the marine in Doom (i.e. Doom2guy was saving Mars base from some offscreen invasion while Doom1guy was kicking but on the moons and in Hell), these details seem contradictory. There are enough differences between the first two games' stories that I wouldn't be surprised if Midway basically said, "None of this makes sense, let's just keep everything ambiguous."

In summary, I find it hard to believe that any of the hackishly written plot dumps in the series were composed with any real consideration of "hard sci-fi" stuff like the distinction between moons and planets. They kind of fail at that, but they serve great in their real role of set up a certain mood and sense of atmosphere, cloaked in just enough technobabble to let you know you're in the future.

It's fun to think about, but for my money, it's not worth trying to make any serious sense out of the story. The people who wrote it certainly never did. <insert Carmack's porn metaphor>

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Quasar said:

Doom 64 follows Final Doom.


Does it really? I thought "Final Doom" was considered non-canon as each of its episodes takes place directly after "Doom II", thus allowing you to decide what happened next. On the other hand, "Doom 64" was considered the official sequel to "Doom II", or so I've thought.

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Mithran Denizen said:

Doom has a messy story.


Yeah I agree with this for the most part. You could look at Doom's story as that the Hell invasion is indeed taking place actually on Mars...but you never actually SEE this part of the invasion. Like a War story, you are seeing the story set in say England, but backstory tells us it also taking place in another place, France or something although we don't see any of the French action in the story. I imagine it is like that...it is taking place on the Moons and on Mars, but we only see it happening on the Moons, and then later Earth and Hell itself.

I dunno about the duel Doom marine though haha, I think it's the same guy. The pod and teleport contradiction is probably just some over sight...sequels do it all the time. I'd like to say he really took a pod to Earth, as the story established teleportation technology was only experimental for humans, so how can it be on Earth if the labs of Phobos and Deimos are still developing them? But it also makes sense to have them on Earth oddly as this is how the demons got to the moons and Mars...but I still think it was a mistake to tell us it was a teleporter, I don't think humans have any on Earth. As for the demons getting to Earth teleport free, well I guess they took their own space pods too.

If there are any teleporters in any Doom 2 maps, then perhaps the demons brought them with them and set them up there as opposed to humans having them.

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