A newly leaked concept trailer for the canceled Doom 4 game shows a radically different, horror-focused take on the iconic demon-slaying franchise that never came to pass. Assets from the canned project have surfaced online on multiple past occasions, most recently in the form of some Doom 4 images which emerged in spring 2022.
Doom 4 entered pre-production in 2008, as previously revealed by id Software co-founder and former Meta VR Executive Consultant John Carmack. The project ended up in development hell and was ultimately scrapped come 2013, after the studio came up with an entirely new concept for a Doom reboot which released three years later.
While id Software officials were previously quoted as saying early builds of the game felt too similar to Call of Duty, this newly emerged concept trailer from 2012—shared by the same source who already leaked Doom 4 gameplay footage back in 2020—doesn't testify to those insider impressions. The 33-second video mostly focuses on the game's horror elements, featuring encounters with a wall made of abominable bodies, Xenomorph-like enemies, and a wide variety of other creepy crawlers. As such, the teased concept appears to be closer to a first-person Dead Space game than a typical Call of Duty experience, at least on the surface.
The fact that this newly emerged trailer is giving off suburban horror vibes isn't accidental, seeing how Doom 4 was supposed to take place on Earth. According to previous reports, the game would have tasked players with fighting off yet another demon invasion as part of a guerilla resistance force. It would hence appear that those early concepts were going for a modernized take on the 1994 Doom 2, seeing how the MS-DOS classic featured an identical premise.
Ultimately, the gameplay similarity to the Call of Duty series led the team to scrap the entire undertaking and come up with a full-fledged reboot in the form of Doom, which released for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC in 2016 before making its way to the Nintendo Switch a year later. The developers followed up on that critically acclaimed with Doom Eternal, launched in 2020.
A year later, id Software parent ZeniMax Media was acquired by Microsoft, and while the tech giant has a fairly hands-off approach to managing its growing Xbox Game Studios family, no mainline Doom games have been unveiled since then. Last month, however, id Software sister company Bethesda announced a new Doom game for mobile, which is scheduled to launch later this month.
