They look so damn similar, from the style and color of their armor down to their behavioral traits. Seems like Bungie simply saw the success that Doom had over their Marathon series and thought to themselves “you know what our next game needs? A massively overpowered super soldier in green high tech armor who spouts sarcastic one liners in the face of an overwhelming alien invasion” and went to town with that concept. And it worked like a charm, they cranked out six massively successful games before id/Bethesda decided it was time to reboot the Doom franchise 2016.
Perhaps it was payback for them to give Doomguy the Crucible in the reboot games (which looks a lot like the energy sword from Halo), but I can’t help but think these two are essentially the same character.
Why would they? Getting inspiration or doing something similar to something that already exist is not illegal. And it shouldn’t be. All art is derivative, and that’s ok.
Doom guy (from Doom 1 and 2) is derivative of Ash from Army of Darkness, down to the facial expressions, the chainsaw, and the shotgun.
I reckon it’s way too generic to sue over
For the same reason that two boring white dudes can star in two different movies in the same year about the White House being taken over by terrorists
Because similar isn’t the same. As long as they can argue that specifics are different enough, that’s all that matters.
Originally doom guy was just a face at the bottom of the HUD that grunted and got bloody as you took hits. The only images of him I remember was just a marine in green combat armor, not too dissimilar to modern real world combat armor, standing on a pile of dead demons and zombies(1993) and the 3rd person cinematics from Doom 3 (early 2000s ish?) where again he looked just like a normal human marine.
Halo come around in the mid 2000’s and Master Chief was never shown outside his armor or with his helmet off. Outside the TV show I’m not sure if that is still the case.
Not sure when the modern images of doom guy came about but I think it was around 2015. Probably not earlier.
For those of us who played Doom multiplayer over a network back in the 90s (the OG “Deathmatch”), you were very familiar with Doomguy(s):
Not to mention the iconic box art:
That’s a good point. I mean Doomguy WAS very clearly visible on the box art wearing a green outfit and a gray helmet, but the outfit appears to be made of cloth rather than steel, and he looks more like a football player than anything.
His modern appearance in full power armor was indeed only introduced with the 2016 reboot.
Halo 1 was released in 2001, doom 3 was 2004 current doom was 2015.
One argument that hasn’t been discussed here is the fact that Bethesda has been owned by Microsoft since 2021. It’s likely that Microsoft had been planning to acquire the company for several years prior to the official purchase too.
Possible, but in that case it might have actually helped them to first tie them up in a difficult and potentially expensive lawsuit in order to lower the purchase price. Sounds like something Microsoft would do…
Early video game copyright history was also a lot more loosy goosie. Bethesda cut its teeth on Terminator licensed games, because no one really cared about video games and corporations would give away licensing rights for a song.
If you look at early gaming history, there’s a lot of stuff that wouldn’t fly today copyright wise. (Iirc Nethack has enemies from Tron, folks very happily made and distributed Star Trek fan games - heck, in the early 00’s you could buy unofficial mod packs for video games in stores.)
LOAD “TREK64”,8
RUN
Marathon’s Security Officer already had the green armor and shiny mask.
I’m not sure but I’m sharing this for interest sake
Fighter’s History vs. Street Fighter II Character Comparison - Lawsuit Exhibit
Fascinating. Thanks for the link.
The first dude seems like a blatant copy of Guile to me, so I had to look up what the court thought:
In spite of the intentional similarities between the two games, the court concluded that Data East did not infringe upon Capcom’s copyright, as most of these similarities were not protected under copyright.
So 100% guilty of being a blatant copy, but not illegal.
This is not Guile… Cut to throwing sonic boom
Games workshop would then have to use both of them. Space marines pre-date both of them.
I mean, can you really put a patent on the idea of an astronaut suit for space soldiers? That seems way too generic.
But they generally have blue and gold armor, no?
The “poster boys” are the Ultramarines, who rock the blue and gold, but there are a tonne of different chapters with individual colour schemes.
In saying that I don’t there are really any super popular ones rocking green at the time (probably were, but I don’t recall any)
