John Romero is dragging us back to hell in SIGIL II, the original Doom’s brand-new, devilishly devious, unofficial sixth episode
Fanniversary, legendary game developer and original Doom Guy John Romero has returned to the game that made id Software the most famous game maker in the world in the 1990s, designing an entire new unofficial episode for the iconic FPS.
SIGIL II, which is the unofficial sixth episode in Doom’s series of campaigns, sees the master level designer build on his 2018 release of Doom’s unofficial fifth episode, SIGIL, and promises to offer even more deviously designed levels and, yes, an even tougher challenge.
And, with SIGIL II releasing on Doom’s 30th anniversary of December 10th, we thought we’d call Romero up to chat about his journey back to creating content for Doom, SIGIL II’s new ideas, and Doom’s enduring legacy today in 2023.
Tell us about your journey back to creating additional Doom episodes in SIGIL, and now in SIGIL II?
With SIGILI, the idea was that in 2018 I was thinking, “Wow, it’s Doom’s 25th anniversary in December this year. I wonder what I could do?”Because usually I’m going to just tweet something, and maybe I’ll tweet some long-lost photo or screenshot or something like that. And I was like, “It’s 25 years. I don’t really want to just tweet something. Maybe I should just make something.”
And I thought, “Yeah, I haven’t made a bunch of levels…” In 2016, I made two levels that I released, but I hadn’t done a whole episode. And so I thought: what if, to celebrate the original Doomepisodes, I made another Doomlevel – or an episode of nine levels? And that was the idea behind SIGIL.
So it’s kind of like, “What if I didn’t stop making levels after Thy Flesh Consumed – episode four in 1995? What if I made more levels right after that, and the aesthetic and the gameplay and everything still felt original like that? What if I just did that? And made it so that it felt like when people were playing it, they were going back to that time, and playing the game as it was played back then?
So that’s how I came up with the idea for the design, and the idea to be like, “Yeah, I’ll put new music in there.” And then with the advent of these new source ports like GZDoom, there’s a way to play actual WAV files and MP3 files and stuff. It doesn’t need to be just MIDI.
And then I thought about: what kind of music would I have? Obviously, it’d be heavy metal, but where am I going to get it? What kind of metal would work? Alot of metal is, obviously, vocalised. There’s lyrics and everything.
I thought: this has to be no lyrics. Because you’re focused on the action. I don’t want people to be listening to the singing. I want them to focus on the action. It needs to support that. I was listening to Buckethead t
