【2007 Archives】

007 Archivescover of the original 1993 Doomgame is iconic. After nearly 25 years, we finally know the model behind the famous Doomguy.

John Romero, one of the developers behind the classic first-person shooter Doom, revealed in a blog post that he's basically the model for the muscular Marine on the cover of Doom, illustrated by artist Don Ivan Punchatz.

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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable SEE ALSO: Against all odds, 'Doom' not only works in VR — it's lots of fun, too

Romero said that Punchatz came to the Id Software studio with a model and a camera in order to get a reference for the Doomcover, but the model just wasn't cutting it for Romero.

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. The model was holding the gun in various positions and none of them were interesting to me.

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

Frustrated, 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! Defeated, he deferred. I aimed the gun in a slightly different direction and told Don, "This is what I'm talking about!" Don took several pictures. I moved the gun some, the demon grabbed my leg, other arm, etc. At the end of it we all decided the arm-grabbing pose was going to be the best.

Punchatz used Romero's pose as his inspiration for the cover, which has become one of the most iconic video game covers of all time. Romero did not mention whether he was that muscular at the time or if Punchatz took some liberties in that regard.

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