It was a sad day at the UCHG when we learned of the recent death of one Don Ivan Punchatz. Why? Because he made this:

That’s right — the unfor­get­table clas­sic Doom box-art. Punchatz was a sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy artist who had illus­trated in mag­a­zines includ­ing Heavy Metal, National Geographic, Playboy and Time; but it was his work for id Software that made his name, cre­at­ing the Doom game pack­age art and logo, includ­ing the name­less Doom marine.

Sadly, in 2009 Don Ivan Punchatz suf­fered a car­diac arrest — and died in hos­pi­tal on the 22nd October, aged 73.

This news led us to reflect on the series as a whole, and what is pos­si­bly the best game ever made — Doom. Our very own Steve is an expert on the game, being the biggest Doom fan ever. In fact it’s rumoured that this is the only series he plays in his spare time, buy­ing other games only as cover.

First released in 1993, Doom found its way onto nearly every sys­tem around at the time — we own the Jaguar, Gameboy Advance and PC ver­sions. The num­ber of copies sold of the orig­i­nal game is unknown; but within two years of release, it was esti­mated that it had already been played by over 10 mil­lion peo­ple — and that’s the equiv­a­lent of the whole of Belgium; or two Denmarks.

Focussing on the exploits of an unnamed space marine, each game in the series saw you fight­ing through hordes of demons and the undead to stay alive. There’s always some form of plot appar­ently, but really it’s always all about blast­ing them back to hell!

Doom brought with it so many inno­va­tions to gam­ing and the first-person-shooter — with only Wolfenstein com­ing before it — that it is to this day widely con­sid­ered as one of the most pio­neer­ing series in the video game indus­try. Indeed it was so rev­o­lu­tion­ary that games from the mid-1990s boom of first-person shoot­ers are often known sim­ply as “Doom clones”.

If you’ve never played it, well, we think you’d bet­ter give it a go — for­get your multi-core proces­sors, pixel-shaders, and high-definition; and get back the roots of what real qual­ity gam­ing is.

You can play an online ver­sion here; but we rec­om­mend you get on ebay and grab an orig­i­nal — after all, that’s what the UCHG is all about.

For more info, here’s a full arti­cle on Don Ivan Punchatz.

• Ross’s recent trib­ute to the Playstation Doom box art