Summary
- Doom: The Dark Ages game director Hugo Martin tells us about how the team was inspired by iconic Batman comics Year One and The Dark Knight.
- The team wanted to capture the raw power of Batman, his sheer size and weight, in everything The Doom Slayer does.
- And with The Dark Ages being a prequel, telling the origins of The Doom Slayer and how he was imprisoned, it’s no surprise that they’d look to Batman’s own beginnings.
Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel to the 2016 soft reboot, unravelling how Doomguy was imprisoned by the denizens of Hell (spoilers: they had to drop an entire temple on his head). But it isn’t just inspired by fantasy: it’s also drawing from Batman.
Year One And The Dark Knight Returns: Re-Shaping The Doom Slayer
“So the prototype name of the project was Slayer: Year One, and that’s a homage to the Batman: Year One comic,” game director Hugo Martin tells TheGamer. “[executive producer] Marty Stratton and I read [it] at the beginning of 2016. It’s one of my favourite comics.”
Batman: Year One, written by comic legend Frank Miller, with art from the talented David Mazzucchelli, is a reinterpretation of Batman’s origin story. As the name suggests, it follows his first year fighting crime in the streets of Gotham. No surprise then that for The Doom Slayer’s origin, the pair would be inspired by the beginnings of one of the most iconic superheroes in history.
But it’s the size and sheer power of Batman that really caught their attention.
“My all-time favourite comic which, you know, big surprise, I think it’s a favourite comic of many people, is Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight [Returns],” Martin says. “He showed a depiction of Batman that was huge. It was amazing. He was powerful and he looked like a tank.
“He has that great fight with the head of the zombie punks. He fights him in a mud pit and says that famous line, ‘This isn’t a [mudhole], it’s an operating table. [And I’m the surgeon].’ He’s just powerful […] It was like I’d love to make a Slayer like that”.
When [Doom Slayer] walks you [can] hear it. Everything he does is big and powerful and it feels awesome.
Stratton adds that one of his favourite things about The Doom Slayer in The Dark Ages is how he jumps off a ledge; “I think it’s true of everybody on the team. Everybody just likes the sound of it, the feel of it, the way of the impact. I mean you really feel like a bomb landing.” If Doomguy broods on the ledge before he jumps off, he may as well be Batman.
So, as we rip and tear through the hordes of demons later this year on May 15, it might feel a lot more Arkham than we’re used to.
