The $1billion video game empire inspired by Tom Cruise: “The carnage”
In another timeline, one much more wondrous than this dumpster fire we live in, fans of Mission: Impossible and Top Gun have been happily playing video games based on those movies for years.
Now, it goes without saying that you may question the priorities of a man who often ponders the hypothetical existence of spinoff games based on Tom Cruise blockbusters. You may even call that man a ‘loser’. However, if Cruise would allow his likeness to be used for merchandising purposes, we wouldn’t have this problem, and I could jump off buildings as Ethan Hunt or fly fighter jets as Maverick to my heart’s content! Ahem.
Sadly, this utopian vision will likely never come to pass because Cruise is fastidious about his likeness never appearing anywhere except on the silver screen. It’s not known exactly what his aversion is to such things, as tons of actors out there make extra scratch by allowing their faces to be used in games. It’s unlikely that Cruise hates video games as a rule, either, because it’s long been claimed that he once phoned a game developer’s head office to complain that he was stuck on a level. Yes, I’m being serious.
Matt Soell, writer on Bungie’s Marathon, a first-person shooter game in which the player must stop an alien invasion on board an intergalactic starship, claimed he fielded a call in 1995 from Cruise’s assistant. He soon referred to the “lackey”, as he eloquently put it, to one of his colleagues, Doug Zartman.
Maybe he didn’t believe the guy really worked for Cruise, but Zartman soon found himself on the horn with the star, who was shooting the first Mission: Impossible in London at the time. Cruise was stuck on Marathon’s Infinity level, and once Zartman had explained what he needed to do, he “jokingly asked Mr Cruise if he wanted to do an ad for the game,” to which “the lackey shouted ‘NO ENDORSEMENTS!’”
Should that bizarrely amusing tale be the God’s honest truth, we can infer from it that Cruise is a gamer – or, at the very least, there was a time in his life when he dabbled. This is why it may charm him to know that the title of another game from that early ‘90s era was directly inspired by an iconic line delivery from one of his movies.
In 1993, id Software, the developer behind the successful Wolfenstein and Commander Keen games, began working on a new property. Lead programmer John Carmack would lead games of Dungeons & Dragons at the office in between fierce programming sessions, and one day, a game designer made a wrong roll of the dice, which caused the fictional game world to be overrun by demons.
Carmack suddenly realised this should be the concept for their new game, with players fighting the demonic monstrosities that emerge from a portal to Hell itself that opens on a Martian space base. He envisioned the most fun, most violent, and most thrilling first-person shooter ever created up to that point, and the team effectively pitched the game as Aliens meets Evil Dead II.
When it came time to name the game, though, Carmack’s inspiration came from a much more left-field place: Cruise’s 1986 pool drama, The Colour of Money. That sequel to The Hustler cast him as a young upstart trying to prove himself to Paul Newman’s ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson, and in one memorable scene, he rocks up to the pool hall with a custom cue in a long, black bag. “What do you have in there?” one of the other players asks, only for Cruise to flash that trademark shit-eating grin and reply, “Doom.” Carmack smiled, “That, and the resulting carnage, was how I viewed us springing the game on the industry.”
Doom, of course, went on to become a video game behemoth that is still going strong today, with over $1billion in sales revenue from all its incarnations. The less said about Dwayne Johnson’s 2005 movie adaptation, though, the better.
