iD Software Announces Doom Eternal Arcade

UPDATE: A small update has been added at the end of the post.

It’s been a roller coaster of a year so far, but outside of the current pause on the economy & subsequently the amusement industry, things have been shaping up to provide a strong line-up of games to the arcade business. Today, in some welcome news, we can add one more game to the list, and something that carries with it a huge name in gaming.

I can vividly recall the first time that I’d heard of Doom – it was the first day of 6th grade, and a kid was standing in line outside with a manual of an awesome looking game carrying that name. He was in my class, and out love of video games meant that we soon became friends. The game was pushing the boundaries in violence and graphics for the time, but I soon found out that my parents were not too happy about that – I brought home a shareware floppy disk of the game one day, and I hadn’t even made it into the first room (to your left) in the game before my mom saw it and subsequently grounded me from the computer for a month. Good times.

(She eventually relented on the stance and I was able to enjoy all sorts of games a few years later…but I was still a pre-teen at the time this happened, so I get it)

For those who weren’t grounded from the game, Doom would go on to become a cultural gaming phenomenon, moreso when Doom II came around. It’s primary home was on the PC, where intrepid coders could modify the game in all sorts of ways, but it also found it’s way to just about every game console of the 90’s too. Arcades were left out in the cold on this one though, excepting the Doom II Arcade movie prop, since first-person shooters have always had a difficult time making it work in our space.

Fast forward to today, where developers have figured out that FPS games don’t have to necessarily have a 1:1 translation when making the console-to-arcade jump. GlobalVR did this several times with the likes of Far Cry, America’s Army & The Swarm, taking an FPS game and completely re-tuning it into an on-rails light-gun shooter. Now, iD Software’s Doom Eternal is getting that treatment, bringing the company’s latest efforts to the coin-op format for the first time:

The Doom Eternal Arcade prototype render

As you can tell from the prototype render here, the cabinet pulls inspiration from the deluxe Aliens Armageddon by Raw Thrills. That said, it’s not a carbon copy of the Aliens cabinet, having enough in the design to stand out on it’s own. Do note that where this is a prototype, a lot can change between now and the final release; I also reached out to Raw Thrills for comment, and they said that it is not their game.

For the game itself, it’s running on a 4K 55″ screen, and while not much was said about the gameplay in the information that I received, it is clear that this will be a unique way to experience Doom Eternal, since it’s been tailored into an on-rails game. It will have at least 4 chapters to play through and additional songs added to the soundtrack. It does contain the ability for the operator to put it on “Yellow label” mode (aka, sans the gore and different colored blood) for locations that can’t stomach Doom Eternal in all of it’s standard glory.

We’ll also have to wait and see what the release date and distribution method will be for it; which will likely have to wait until the stay-at-home orders begin to be lifted. That said, iD does not have any experience in the arcade biz unless they have hired someone with that know-how, so we’ll see if they can manage it on their own, or if they’ve been talking with a partner.

Either way, what do you think about this bold new path for the Doom franchise? Are arcade goers ready to switch from shooting zombies and robots and take on the demon hordes of hell?

UPDATE: So yeah, this was an April Fools joke. We’ve done one every year and while I know that some were saying this year shouldn’t have one, I think it’s good to have a laugh in the face of adversity. This particular photoshop was based on an early render of the Aliens Armageddon cabinet by Scott Pikulski (who said that even though he drew the original, he was fooled by it for a moment), then the modification was done by AH contributor Jdevy. Even though it’s fake, who knows…maybe someone at iD would consider such a creation, given that Doom from 2016 did have an arcade mode 😉 In case you missed our April Fools post from last year, click here.