Bite-Sized Game History: The Strange Saga of Doom 3DO’s Scrapped FMV Scenes

Thanks to its flexible system requirements, id Software’s Doom has become a popular piece of software to use to test the processing power of some rather unorthodox devices. A group of dedicated modders have managed to install the classic shooter on a wide range of hardware over the years, including an ATM, a home pregnancy test, a piano, and a whole lot more. But before all that, not every console platform could contain the awesome power contained within the game’s Martian corridors.

Believe it or not, one consolemaker even tried to inject a little live-action into the franchise long before The Rock starred in 2006’s Doom…

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

While John Carmack himself assisted with the game’s Super NES conversion, the development team that attempted to bring Doom to the 3DO wasn’t so lucky. The game would eventually launch for the embattled console in 1996, thanks almost entirely to a marathon crunch session by developer Rebecca Heineman, but it would ship without several promised upgrades.

One of the new features under consideration for the game’s 3DO launch was a series of live-action cutscenes that would have expanded upon Doom’s simple story. According to Heineman, filming took place in developer Art Data’s offices, though none of the footage was useable. But several promotional images were captured to present to investors and share at media events.

The four surviving production stills have been floating around the Internet for years, but a new round of discourse and delight was kickstarted when they were reposted recently by Low Poly Depression:

These stills are a wild teaser of what could have been, including a possible romance with another survivor for our plucky Doomguy, and the real star of the show, a latex-and-foam bodysuit that exists halfway between a terrifying Baron of Hell and a minor league sports mascot.

This renewed interest in the development of Doom for the 3DO encouraged Heineman to reach out to her former colleagues for permission to share a few additional behind-the-scenes pictures from the shoot. While we don’t get to see any other demons, we do get a closeup view of some impressive practical creature effects in these never-before-seen images:

The 3DO promised to bring full motion video to the living room for the first time, so it’s easy to see why Art Data would want to add a live-action component to the biggest PC game of the decade. But it was also a trick that few games from the era could pull off, and you could argue that none did it well.

Even still, it almost feels like a tragedy that the public never got to see the completed cutscenes. Thankfully, Heineman returned a day later with even more pictures from the shoot:

That’s it for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History. Huge thanks to Low Poly Depression and Rebecca Heineman for guiding us down one of the stranger development dead ends from the 1990s.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.