Doom 64 Ends With the Hero Choosing to Stay in Hell Forever. Almost Nobody Talks About That.

Doom 64 has spent almost thirty years getting dismissed with the same line: it’s just Doom, running on the N64. That was the knock on it in 1997, and it’s still the assumption most people carry into it today. It’s wrong on nearly every level.

A different studio built Doom 64 almost from the ground up. It invented enemies and weapons the mainline games never had. And it ends with the Doom Marine doing something no version of Doom had done before or has really done since: winning, and then choosing to stay in Hell anyway, alone, so nothing like this can happen again. That’s not a Doom ending. That’s closer to a horror movie’s ending. And for over twenty years, nobody outside the people who actually played this one on N64 even knew it existed.

A Different Studio Built Doom 64 From Scratch

id Software didn’t build Doom 64. That job went to Midway’s San Diego studio, working under id’s supervision rather than id’s own hands. Development started in late 1994, under the working title “Doom: The Absolution,” a name the team liked enough to reuse for the game’s actual final level once it shipped. Midway originally planned it as a Nintendo 64 launch title.

id wasn’t happy with the level designs as the deadline approached. Rather than ship something they weren’t satisfied with, Midway pushed the release out for redesigns. Cartridge storage limits forced other cuts along the way too: entire enemy types and levels never made it in. What finally shipped, on March 27, 1997, wasn’t a rushed port under pressure. It was a smaller, harder game than the ones before it, built for hardware the original Doom engine never had to run on.

None of the 28 Levels Came From the PC Games

This is the part that actually settles the “it’s just a port” argument. All 28 story levels, plus four secret ones, are new. The PC releases don’t share a single one of them. They run on a customized version of the Doom engine that could do things the original couldn’t, dynamic colored lighting chief among them. That’s a big part of why Doom 64 looks and feels so different from its predecessors, even though the core moment-to-moment gunplay is recognizably the same.

Midway also added things no Doom game had used before. The Nightmare Imp is a new enemy Midway originally built for the PlayStation port of the very first Doom, then never used there. And the final boss, the Mother Demon, is unlike anything id had put in a mainline game.

The Unmaker Isn’t Actually New. It’s a Weapon id Cut in 1992

The best trivia in the whole game is the Unmaker’s backstory, and it has nothing to do with Doom 64 itself. The weapon actually goes back to id’s own 1992 Doom Bible, the original design document for the first Doom. id planned it there and then cut it before that game ever shipped. Doom 64 is where the team finally built it.

You don’t start with the Unmaker. Three hidden artifacts scattered across the levels upgrade it in stages, first boosting its fire rate, then adding a second beam, until the final upgrade lets it fire three auto-aiming lasers at three separate targets at once. It looks like a projectile gun, but it actually fires as a hitscan weapon, and it’s the only thing in the game that can put down the Mother Demon.

Id liked the idea enough to resurrect it decades later as the Unmaykr in Doom Eternal. That means a weapon id cut from the very first Doom game in 1992 finally shipped in 1997 on a Nintendo console, under id’s supervision but not their own hands, and didn’t show up in a mainline id game again until 2020.

Critics Praised the Doom 64 Graphics and Still Called It Redundant

At launch, this is where the “just a port” reputation actually came from, and it wasn’t entirely unfair at the time. GamePro gave it a perfect score across the board. Reviewers consistently singled out the lighting and level design as the best the franchise had looked yet. One contemporary review noted that “pushing door switches often causes whole rooms to rearrange and fold out into new shapes.”

But IGN’s Peer Schneider still summed up the general take: “Make no mistake about it, this is the best update to Doom so far, but if you’ve played the PC, PSX, SNES, Mac, Saturn, etc versions to death, you can do without this one.” GameSpot’s Jeff Gerstmann went further, calling the N64 control scheme a “bastardization of the original.” Doom 64 quietly out-built its own reputation, then launched into a wall of reviewers who’d already decided what kind of game it was before judging it on its own levels.

Then a 2020 Remaster Made It Official Canon

For over two decades, that’s where it stayed: well-regarded by the people who played it, invisible to everyone else, and completely outside the actual Doom storyline. That changed on March 20, 2020, when Nightdive Studios shipped a full remaster as a pre-order bonus with Doom Eternal. It didn’t just clean up the graphics. It added a new expansion called The Lost Levels: six new maps built to connect Doom 64’s ending to the modern games.

In it, the Mother Demon’s own sister, the Resurrector, stops the Marine from making good on that choice to stay in Hell. She strands him, unarmed, on a distant UAC base, and he has to fight his way back to Hell to finish what he started. The expansion’s closing text describes “a path of perpetual torment, a path through DOOM,” a direct nod to the Slayer Testaments that set up the 2016 reboot and Doom Eternal.

For the first time, Doom 64 became a real, canonical bridge between classic Doom and the version of the franchise everyone’s actually still playing. Wikipedia and most fans had filed it away as a side release. Not anymore.

One naming note, since it trips people up: this era of Doom never actually named its protagonist. Doom Slayer is the name that started with the 2016 reboot. Back in 1997 he was just the Marine, which is also the term Final Doom’s own manual used. Doom Eternal later confirmed they’re the same person, the Marine eventually becomes the Doom Slayer, but that’s a future identity Doom 64 has no idea about yet.

Worth More Than the “Just a Port” Label It’s Had Since 1997

Take all of it together and Doom 64 stops looking like a footnote. A different studio built it almost entirely from scratch, under a level of scrutiny most licensed console ports never got. It resurrected a weapon id itself had abandoned in 1992, and Doom Eternal eventually brought that weapon back in 2020. It ended its story on a note darker and stranger than anything the mainline games had tried. That ending sat unresolved and mostly unseen for over twenty years, until Nightdive Studios decided it was worth finishing. That’s a lot of history behind a game most people still describe in one dismissive sentence.

I don’t have a copy of this one in the collection yet, which is honestly part of why it stuck out enough to write about. It’s on the list for the N64 Project, and the story behind it is better than its reputation, and better than most games that are actually easy to find. If you played this one back on N64, or picked it up through the 2020 remaster, I’d like to hear whether the ending hit you the way it apparently hit the people who made the Lost Levels. Drop a comment.