Third graders at Stephen F. Austin Elementary School in Richmond, Texas were lucky enough to take part an exclusive preview of Id Software’s upcoming reboot of the Doom franchise early Monday morning. In their behind-closed-doors preview, the students were treated to several of Doom’s new mechanics, story elements, and unimaginably horrific death sequences all played out by a professional troupe of puppeteers and countless buckets of pigs blood.
According to sources inside Id Software, the Texas-based company was not ready to reveal the new game to the world quite yet, but wanted to test it on an audience they believed hadn’t heard of the Doom franchise to see how it stacks up to today’s games. As one anonymous designer told us, “Being that these kids are only ten or eleven, we know they probably have never seen Doom but play a lot of modern games like Call of Duty, Halo, Spec Ops: The Line and Dead Space so it was important to us that we show them what our game is going to look like to compare it to their favorite games.”
Id Software’s decision to use handcrafted puppets instead of the usual pre-rendered and scripted "gameplay" trailer like they did at Quakecon was allegedly an attempt to give the third graders the real experience of being in a nightmarish landscape and being attacked by hell’s demons. When they began spraying the warm pigs blood across the room during segments of the puppet show that represented ripping off the limbs of enemies, the kids really seemed to get into it. Some of them even ran from the room screaming and covered head to toe in dripping blood; too excited about the reboot and realistic blood effects to contain their sobbing and tearfully demanding to see their parents to share in the excitement.
“I’m still blown away that they thought this was a good idea,” one parent whose child was struck in the head by the severed wooden arm of a Cyberdemon puppet told us, “but I’m happy to hear the Doom franchise is going back to basics with solid shooting mechanics and I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle multiplayer. Do you think it'll have a leveling system?” He also went on to tell us that, while he has no idea when or if his son will come out of the life-threatening coma, he hopes the ten-year-old will be conscious in time to experience the game when it finally releases so he can fight the demon spawns of hell worry free.
Overall, Id Software claims the reveal to be a success, stating in a blog post shortly after cleaning the blood-soaked carpet as much as possible and leaving the school, “We would like to thank all the children of Stephen F. Austin for staying in their locked classroom and letting us show them the wonders of the Doom franchise. On behalf of our puppeteers of we would also like to apologize for ripping the head off the class guinea pig and squeezing its insides over Ms. Smith’s desk; we ran out of puppets to severe and really needed to show how the new disembowel assassin kill would work.”
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