DOOM II Final Boss
This comes from
Bobby Prince's
Little Known Facts.
Little Known Fact #4 [DOOM II Final Boss]
It was a late night and the walls were shaking at id Software. Why? There
could be only one reason -- Romero is in the building! Otherwise, it was a
quiet, unassuming office -- better yet, a library. Then things quietened
down, and I supposed that Romero had left. In fact, everyone but Romero had
left, as I discovered when he came into the room I was using for "sound
development." He sat down next to me and said that we needed a sound for the
final boss to make when a player enters that level. I said that I had some
possibilities roughed out and since he was there we could plug them into the
code to see how they'd work. We went into John's office to look at the level
(he had the only 21" screen). While he was whizzing around the level, all of
a sudden he said, "Wait, what's that?" He had clipping off, which means that
he could walk through otherwise "solid" objects. He had walked into the wall
where the final boss head was attached. Lo and behold, there inside the
brain of the boss was Romero's head on a stick! We both laughed a while and
Romero decided that the artists (Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud) had put it
there as a joke. As it turned out, John Carmack had programmed the code so
that Romero's head was the object that a player had to hit in order to kill
the boss. And this head was down a shaft inside of the wall so it was
normally out of sight. It was at that point that Romero and I decided to
record his voice and use it as the final boss sound. We went back into the
sound room and John started saying different things in a very pumped up
voice. He finally said, "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero." I
took that phrase and put some phasing on it and then reversed it. Shades of
the rumors of "Satan" on different pop recordings! We decided not to tell
anyone else what it said. We had the fun of seeing the artists' expressions
when they first entered the level with this sound going. We made them sweat
a long time before we played the phrase in its original form. Can you tell
that we always had a great time doing this stuff?