"Who Is the Doom Marine?" A DOOM background/lore overview. **SPOILERS**

Hello fellow gamers!
In this installment, we’re going to discuss the protagonist in Doom, a game that looks like a reboot of the classic games. In the original games, the Doom Marine (Doomguy) was intended to be You! Yes you, staring at this screen. You are the guy who went through literal Hell and back. You’re actually kind of a badass and you didn’t know it. In the reboot, however, you play the Doom Marine, who isn’t you. You’re still a badass though.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

That guy, you play that guy.

He’s known by a few names, the Doom Marine, the Doom Slayer, the Hell Walker, the Unchained Predator. They all tell their own pretty tale about how well-liked he is in Hell.

He’s not.

Now, you may be wondering where such a man came from. The Codex entries in Doom tells us everything we need to know about him! If you can find them, that is. The first comes up near the beginning of the game, titled, appropriately, The Doom Marine. The UAC went on an expedition to Hell and found a sarcophagus, a discovery they labelled DM1-5, but the scientists gave the man inside the moniker ‘Doom Marine.’ A discovery in the same expedition, the book of Daeva, depicted the Doom Marine, in his Praetor Suit, fighting demons as a hooded figure looked on.

We also find another Codex entry titled The Praetor Suit early on, which tells us that the suit he wears is impervious to damage, but the scientists were unable to activate it. The catalyst to activate the suit was likely the Doom Marine himself, which we prove by putting it on at the beginning of the game. The suit itself is not what makes the Doom Marine a badass, however. As we find powerups throughout the game, we discover that he can survive things that would kill a normal human. The Codex entry for the Haste buff tells us that, when a normal person is subjected to the Soul-Breaker energy, it greatly increases their speed, but inevitably leads to myocardial rupture, the heart literally exploding. The Doom Marine isn’t even adversely affected by this.

No comment

Later on, after reaching Hell, we find runes that update our Codex, telling us the Slayer’s Testament, which is the exploits of the Doom Slayer, from a demon’s point of view. Which demon, however, is unclear. The first portion of the Slayer’s Testament tells us that in the First Age, a man stood, and chose a path of perpetual torment, and this man finds no peace because of his unending hatred. He was a member of the Night Sentinels, and those who fought him called him the Doom Slayer.

In the second Testament entry, we discover the other names he’s called, the Hell Walker, the Unchained Predator, and he was the only one able to take those names, and the only non-demon to traverse Hell as he did, cutting a path of diabolical cruelty in his wake. The third Testament tells us that he did all of that unaided, and *then* he was blessed by the seraphim (angels?) with great power and speed. He went to the Blood Temples and destroyed the obsidian pillars. He shows no pity for the minions of hell, and was unbreakable, incorruptible. And he was on a warpath to bring Hell down. The fourth Testament tells us he left broken bodies and souls of demons in his wake for *eons* according the demons. Every battle brought the servants of Hell more terror, and his name was spoken with fear. He drew power from killing demons, and he always came for them.

*This* is his vacation spot.

The fifth Testament says that no other had been able to stand before the horde, other than the Doom Slayer, but now, the demons, too, had a champion. The Great One, the Titan, those were its names, and it brought the fight to the Doom Slayer with the fury of every demon he had left dead in his path. The Titan was still no match for the Doom Slayer, and was felled. The sixth Testament brings to light a heresy amongst the demons, a betrayer that adorned the Doom Slayer in great armor (likely the Praetor Suit) that was wrought in Hell’s forges, impervious to damage. Because he needed more help. The seventh Testament details the Doom Slayer’s capture. Even after destroying the Titan, he was insatiable. He sought the tombs in Blood Keep, where the priests of Hell had laid a trap, capturing him in a cursed sarcophagus, and leaving the mark of the Hell Walker on the tomb, as a warning to all of Hell to never let him escape.

Which brings us back to the first Codex entries. The UAC can’t read the writing of Hell, apparently, and set him free, and gave him his Praetor Suit, so he could go on the rampage called Doom.

In short, the Doom Marine is a man, fueled by the death of demons, striking fear in the hearts of the servants of Hell, captured and held for god only knows how long, alive and awake the whole time, then released, and given some pretty big guns, into a world starting to be overrun by demons.

In every visceral, mindless rampage, there is a story to be told, it seems.