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RederickDeathwill

What do you think inspired id software into "satanic themes"?

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Countless 70s witch/"satanism"-related movies? Metal bands? Is there anything that shows how Carmack and the others got inspired into such "satanic imagery"? (Nothing LaVey related obviously, just a general "horror" concept). Anyway, what do you think? The very usage of lovecraftian references in Quake1 already gives us a glimpse of literary preference (Which could be extended to other forms of art). Doom is like a mix between Carpenter's They Live, with Alien and the late 60s Coven band.

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Well they like metal wich is full of satanic imagery,Doom was originaly going to be a movie licence game based on Alien and the H.R Giger theme looks nice with hell stuff,they played a ton of DnD and in one session Romero fucked up and demons invaded earth and the hell theme both mature and edgy enough for edgy teens and more mature gamers.

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1 minute ago, SOSU said:

Doom was originaly going to be a movie licence game based on Alien and the H.R Giger theme looks nice with hell stuff

Well, this certainly makes a lot of sense. Giger was severely inspired by H.P Lovecraft, so that explains even further the reference on Quake1. Just one more thing to add to the list of people that Lovecraft directly or indirectly influenced. AND Giger painted that Celtic Frost album cover. Lovecraft ALSO inspired John Carpenter, that despite having a movie with such cliché action-hero as protagonist (Which certainly fits the protagonist of doom), had The Thing, which was quite lovecraftian. All things connect.

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7 minutes ago, SOSU said:

I wonder who inspired H.P Lovecraft :o7

Edgar Allan Poe above all, and some random fantastic stuff like One Thousand and One Nights. Experiment reading some of Lovecraft's early poetry, you can feel how much he wants to sound like Poe. Lovecraft was a geek who used to read a lot. Lovecraft skipped the "weeping for dead beautiful women" part of Poe and got the fantastic / mystery part of him.

Edit: There's a subtle reference on the title on this one.

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Sandy Petersen was the primary Lovecraft guy I think.  At least, he's specifically referenced Lovecraft as an influence, I think his story was that as a kid he found a book in his dad's library and read one of the stories and was creeped out by it.  Quake went further in that direction since he had more influence over the development there (with Doom he'd been brought in a bit late in development).

John Romero was the one (or at least one of them who did) who had a lot of heavy metal albums (that he lent to Bobby Prince for inspiration).

Adrian Carmack was supposedly into drawing creepy stuff even before he joined up with id but I'm not sure if he's ever talked about his inspirations for that.  I seem to recall it being said that the hanged Commander Keen was his idea because he'd disliked how cutesy that series was.

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27 minutes ago, RederickDeathwill said:

Edgar Allan Poe above all, and some random fantastic stuff like One Thousand and One Nights. Experiment reading some of Lovecraft's early poetry, you can feel how much he wants to sound like Poe. Lovecraft was a geek who used to read a lot. Lovecraft skipped the "weeping for dead beautiful women" part of Poe and got the fantastic / mystery part of him.

Edit: There's a subtle reference on the title on this one.

Who inspired Edgar Allan Poet then :o7

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4 minutes ago, RederickDeathwill said:

The women in his life that he loved and... died :p Not kidding, guy had a serious obsession. Read the short-story Ligeia or Eleonora. If you're not in the mood to read right now, just the poem Annabel Lee should suffice.

Oh shit o.o;

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Also helps that demons are an easy target, who's going to complain about you slaughtering demons en masse? There isn't the slightest bit of moral dilemma there.

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1 hour ago, MetroidJunkie said:

Also helps that demons are an easy target, who's going to complain about you slaughtering demons en masse? There isn't the slightest bit of moral dilemma there.

But even so, the violence itself was enough to trigger the conservatives. Damn, back in the 90s my mother used to hide my Mortal Kombat cartridge because of all the blood (Ironically enough though, she never complained about me playing doom2, either she never actually paid attention to the game, or Mortal Kombat appeared to be more violent because of all the humans non-demons dying brutally).  Nah, don't think it's a "political" decision (Even considering the incident of the release of Wolfenstein3D in Germany). Think the guys enjoyed some dark stuff :p That's why doom is special, it's both revolutionary AND of good taste :p (Sorry half-life, you were also revolutionary and brilliant, but doom almost had no PLOT (Ok, sorry again half-life, your gameplay was also brilliant, but you wasn't *scary* (And when you tried later on, you actually became annoying))). 

Sidenote: Painkiller also had good taste, by the way.

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3 hours ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Sandy Petersen was the primary Lovecraft guy I think.  At least, he's specifically referenced Lovecraft as an influence, I think his story was that as a kid he found a book in his dad's library and read one of the stories and was creeped out by it.  Quake went further in that direction since he had more influence over the development there (with Doom he'd been brought in a bit late in development).

John Romero was the one (or at least one of them who did) who had a lot of heavy metal albums (that he lent to Bobby Prince for inspiration).

Adrian Carmack was supposedly into drawing creepy stuff even before he joined up with id but I'm not sure if he's ever talked about his inspirations for that.  I seem to recall it being said that the hanged Commander Keen was his idea because he'd disliked how cutesy that series was.

this is correct as Sandy developed the Call of Cthuhulu rpg and was more famous for that for the longest time.   https://www.chaosium.com/sandy-petersen

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4 minutes ago, joepallai said:

this is correct as Sandy developed the Call of Cthuhulu rpg and was more famous for that for the longest time.   https://www.chaosium.com/sandy-petersen

Holy Yog-Sothoth, didn't know that :o!!!

"Sandy got his start in the game industry in 1980, where he first worked on paper roleplaying games. His best-known work from that time is the cult game Call of Cthulhu, which has been translated into many languages and is still played world-wide."

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They were passionate players and nerds, technically, they had a lot of influences on themselves but they also had the guts to implement them perfectly. The most accurate is that the horror movies, metal bands and medieval fantasy games are his greatest inspirations.

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Welp, late at the party and apparently we've already got our answer, so I guess the main sources of inspiration would be some metal bands, Lovecraft and Giger (something that is explored much further later in Quake), and horror movies.

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One thing getting left out here is definitely Dungeons & Dragons, which has plenty of demons in its bestiary. Thanks to Romero insisting on taking the cursed sword that Carmack tempted him with as DM, their entire game world was overrun with them. Hence, the plot of Doom. Probably also why they were cool with letting Sandy balance the game like an RPG, with dice rolls everywhere.

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I always thought they liked Metal, It's influence is clear in the game, It even uses some Metal music for some of it's soundtrack.

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It's been a while since i read masters of Doom, but I'm sure its said in there that id did actually get the green light from 20th century fox for the Aliens license but i think Fox was putting all sorts of restrictions of what could and couldn't be included in the game and Carmack and Romero decided to just do an original project.

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Evil Dead... but other than that demon invasion is easy enough to imagine when they want to avoid alien / xenomorph invasion. Just like if you don't get the Indiana Jones license you make the protagonist a woman.

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4 hours ago, GhoulDesecrator said:

It was mostly a 'The Evil Dead meets Alien' kind of thing, with a lot of metal music as catalyst.

I've seen both and literally said, "Well, there's Doom!"

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Honestly, anything could have made them think satanic themes would go with Doom great.

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4 hours ago, Quasar said:

One thing getting left out here is definitely Dungeons & Dragons, which has plenty of demons in its bestiary. Thanks to Romero insisting on taking the cursed sword that Carmack tempted him with as DM, their entire game world was overrun with them. Hence, the plot of Doom. Probably also why they were cool with letting Sandy balance the game like an RPG, with dice rolls everywhere.

Haha, and wasn't the name of said sword "the Daikatana"?  Cursed, indeed.

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Was playing Cthulhu wars the other day down my local club, and its just twigged that this is the same Sandy Petersen.

 

What a fucking legend!

 

However Cthulhu wars was a kickstarter that went a bit wrong nearly bankrupting him I think. Still good game thou and the models are gruesome.

 

(sorry slightly off topic)

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From what i've read about doom development, the demon theme was brought because of D&D.
During one of the D&D sessions the guys at id used to play, romero got greedy and ended up unleashing a demon invasion that ruined their D&D world, based on that experience, they decided to use demons for their next game. Adrian carmack had a taste for the dark and morbid, so that really must have played a part in defining doom's look, add a couple of horror movies such as evil dead (were they took inspiration for the chainsaw, shotgun, and maybe the possesed soldiers) or aliens (sci-fi evil corporation unleashes an unstoppable horde), and not to mention the whole heavy metal music taste of romero's (a genre that's no stranger to demon and satanic themes on it's lyrics, not to mention that the doom cover art looks perfect for a heavy metal album) and you pretty much can see how doom starts to take shape from those things.
Sandy petersen it's been named as an influence since he's a really big cthulhu mythos guy,  but as far as i know he was brought late in development and i think that by then doom style and shape was already well defined, but I might be wrong about that

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The Satanic aspect of Doom and Quake/Q3A are really what I think I like the most about id's art direction. There's something that feels very personal about it, both in terms of the dark visions of the team and my own innate fascination with heavy metal, the occult and science fiction. 

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Easy. Heavy Metal, Horror and Sci-Fi Horror movies, Dungeon & Dragons, and of course, the angst and nihilism of the 90's youth!

 

Sandy Peterson probably pushed for the Lovercraft themes. I believe when he left id, he worked on Age of Empires for a bit, but then went back to Pen & Paper games that focus on the Lovecraft lore, and I believe he even worked on a Lovecraft themed movie. So he's definitely a big fan.

 

Edit: And I could be wrong, but later in id I think I heard the aesthetic of machine and flesh that you see in Quake 2 and 3 was mostly Paul Steed's choice. (R.I.P.)

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The idea of Doom started in September of 1992, right after Spear of Destiny was shipped. John Carmack, who came up with the name 'Doom' after watching a movie (The color of money) where Tom Cruise shows up at a pool hall with a custom pool cue in a case. "What do you have in there?" someone asks. "Doom." Cruise replied. He started making the engine while the rest of id worked on Spear of Destiny, which was later used instead for Shadowcaster. This engine was basically his initial research into coming up with the DOOM engine. Said Carmack. The game was originally the game for the Aliens movie but that idea was scraped at the last minute because id wanted total creative control. Carmack said that instead of aliens we should use hellspawn.

/

from https://www.doomworld.com/pageofdoom/doomhist.html

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On 12/22/2017 at 1:39 AM, RederickDeathwill said:

But even so, the violence itself was enough to trigger the conservatives

A lot of them didn't even look at the game and decided, because it has Satanic imagery, it must be glorifying it.

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