John Romero will release a free Doom mod in February

John Romero, one of the programmers behind the original 25-year-old shooter game Doom, has announced that he and his studio Romero Games will release an unofficial mod of Doom next February.

This mod of the original Doom is called Sigil and will be completely free, although two different limited editions will also be sold. There is a collector’s edition that will cost $166 and a cheaper version with a price tag of $40. With both versions, the mod comes on a 16GB USB stick that looks like a 3.5″ floppy disk.

Sigil is due out sometime in mid-February next year and picks up where the fourth episode of the original game left off. According to Romero it can therefore be regarded as the ‘unofficial successor’ of this fourth episode.

The mod contains nine maps for single player, the same number of playing fields for multiplayer and comes in the form of a Doom wad file, which the original already used. This means that Sigil can only be played by owners of the original, registered version of Doom from 1993.

This Monday, Doom will be exactly 25 years old. The game was released as a shooter from id Software on December 10, 1993. The shooting game was not the first fps on the market, but it did make the genre very popular. It was also possible to make mods for Doom, which further increased its popularity. The rights to Doom still rest with id Software, although none of the original developers like John Carmack and John Romero are still with the studio.

Screenshot of the original Doom.