Doom (1993 video game)
Because id planned to self-publish the game, as the game neared completion they had to set up the systems to sell the game. Jay Wilbur, who had been brought on as CEO and sole member of the business team, planned the marketing and distribution of "Doom". He felt that the mainstream press was uninterested in the game, and as id would make the most money off of copies they sold directly to customers—up to 85 percent of the planned US$40 price—he decided to leverage the shareware market as much as possible, buying only a single ad in any gaming magazine. Instead, he reached out directly to software retailers, offering them copies of the first "Doom" episode for free, allowing them to charge any price for it, in order to spur customer interest in buying the full game directly from id.
Development of Doom
Adrian Carmack was the lead artist for "Doom", with Kevin Cloud as an additional artist. Additionally, Don Ivan Punchatz was hired to create the package art and logo, and his son Gregor Punchatz created some of the monsters. "Doom" was the style of game that Adrian Carmack had wanted to create since id was founded, one with a dark style and demons. He and Cloud designed the monsters to be "nightmarish", and developed a new technique for animating them. The intent was to have graphics that were realistic and dark as opposed to staged or rendered, so a mixed media approach was taken to the artwork. Unlike "Wolfenstein", where Carmack had drawn every frame of animation for the Nazi enemy sprites, for "Doom" the artists sculpted models of some the enemies out of clay, and took pictures of them in stop motion from five to eight different angles so that they could be rotated realistically in-game; the images were then digitized and converted to 2D characters with a program written by John Carmack. Adrian Carmack made clay models for the player character, the Cyberdemon and the Baron of Hell, before deciding that the problems of keeping the clay consistent under lighting while moving the models through animations was too great. Later, he had practical effects specialist Gregor Punchatz build latex and metal sculptures of the Arch-Vile, Mancubus, Spider Mastermind and Revenant demons. Punchatz got the materials from hardware and hobby stores and used what he called "rubber band and chewing gum effects". The weapons were toys, with parts combined from different toys to make more guns. They scanned themselves as well, using Cloud's arm as the model for the player character's arm holding a gun, and Adrian's snakeskin boots and wounded knee for in-game textures. Romero himself was the body model used for the game's cover; while trying to work with a male model to get a reference photograph for Don Ivan Punchatz to work from, Romero became frustrated while trying to convey to him how to pose as if "the Marine was going to be attacked by an infinite amount of demons". Romero posed shirtless as a demonstration of the look he was trying for, and that photograph was the one used by Punchatz.