Two Creators of the Original Doom Are Arguing About its History on Social Media

The 1993 first-person shooter Doom is legendary. Its place in history is both untouchable and inarguable. The details of that history, though, are currently being debated on social media. Not by fans, mind you, but instead by two of the very people that created it. Doom co-creator John Romero and Doom level- and game-designer Sandy Petersen took to X (formerly Twitter) to dispute each other’s recollection of the origin of Doom’s groundbreaking DeathMatch PvP multiplayer mode.

It started with Petersen posting a thread titled, “How Doom changed the world.” He discussed his history in the video game industry prior to getting hired at id Software to work on Doom – specifically on a real-time strategy game released in 1990 called Command HQ, and how designer Danielle Bunten Berry “thought that since 65% of gamers had modems it would mostly be played head-to-head. It bombed. I think it had about 40,000 sales.” That set up a memory he shared next about working on Doom, about which he said, “We all agreed at id that it was unlikely anyone would ever play Deathmatch, except in very small numbers. After all, zero games had a robust head-to-head experience, and my personal time with