Doom co-creator John Romero reveals he is Doomguy... kinda

While developer id Software rolled out its newest update 6.66 for its Doom reboot, the series co-creator and veteran designer John Romero has revealed an interesting tidbit about the original 1993 game. Earlier this week, Romero took to Twitter to ask fans which of his old game series they would like to hear "a piece of game trivia" about.

The informal poll saw 40% of fans requesting the designer to reveal some trivia about Doom, followed by Quake (23%), Commander Keen (21%) and Wolfenstein 3D (16%).

In a blog post on Wednesday (19 July), Romero decided to reveal the identity of Doomguy, the helmet-wearing protagonist on the original game's iconic box cover. As it turns out, Romero said he was the model for the original Doomguy.

"Don Punchatz, the illustrator who created the DOOM logo and the famous front box cover art came over to id in mid-1993 with a male body model", Romero wrote. "Don brought a nice camera to take pictures. The model's job was to strike various poses for the marine who would be on the cover of the box.

"The body model took his shirt off and started posing with our plasma gun toy. Don asked us for suggestions so I started telling him that the Marine was going to be attacked by an infinite amount of demons. It would be cool if he was on a hill and firing down into them."

As the model held and posed with the gun in various positions, Romero said none of them seemed to appeal to him.

"He did this for about 10 minutes and we just didn't see anything that we thought would look cool on the cover", Romero said. "I kept telling the model what to do but he couldn't see the scene in his mind."

Finally, a frustrated Romero decided to take off his own shirt and do the pose himself.

"I threw my shirt off and told him to give me the gun and get on the floor – grab my arm as one of the demons!", Romero continued. "Defeated, he deferred. I aimed the gun in a slightly different direction and told Don, 'This is what I'm talking about!' I moved the gun some, the demon grabbed my leg, other arm, etc."

The arm-grabbing pose ended up being the final shot for the Doom cover.

"And that's the story of how the cover composition was created", Romero said. "I am the Doomguy (at least on the cover)."

Doom's 2016 reboot was released in May last year to critical and commercial acclaim. Starting today (20 July), id Software has done away with the game's premium season pass and made all of its multiplayer DLC content free for all players. The latest, aptly numbered Update 6.66 also revised the gory title's multiplayer progression system and introduces a number of other changes as well.

Doom is out now for PS4, Xbox One and PC.