Doom 4’s brown aesthetic marks it out as a late 2000s artefact.
Id Software followed Doom 3 with the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil (which, in another concession to popular trends, featured a Half-Life 2-style gravity gun) before moving onto its next project, the post-apocalyptic shooter Rage. But this wasn’t the only game id had in the pipeline. At QuakeCon 2007, John Carmack hinted that a new Doom game was in development, with Doom 4 being informally revealed the following year via a recruitment ad.
Snippets about the game trickled out across the next few years. Speaking to GameSpot in 2009, Hollenshead stated that Doom 4 was “very much deep in development”, and that “everything I’ve seen on it is classic Doom”. When asked how it related to Doom 3, Hollenshead’s answer was unclear, “It’s not a sequel to Doom 3, but it’s not a reboot either. Doom 3 was sort of a reboot. It’s a little bit different from those.”