What was the origin of the name 'Doomsday'?

Vermil

A thread on Doomworld about the origins of various port names got me thinking. http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread. ... tid=129453

The J* names were, obviously, inspired by their creator's name; Jaakko Keränen (I assume I can state Skyjakes name on the forum, as it's written on the main website and elsewhere: http://www.dengine.net/engine, for instance). As was also guessed in the above mentioned thread.

But, what was the thinking (if any ) behind the name 'Doomsday', almost 15 years ago? Just something cool sounding, that had 'Doom' in it's name?

skyjake

I went digging into my archives. The first public mention of Doomsday was on the JHexen site on December 18, 1999:

Dan Olson suggested a while ago that the game could be split into two parts just like Quake2: the engine and a game DLL. After doing some research (the Quake2 game source) I decided to try this out and so far the results have been good. I squeezed all the generic Doom engine stuff into a new executable and named it The Doomsday Engine.

Unfortunately I didn't present any further reasoning behind the name. I continued digging and found my original development journal from 1999. Turns out, my initial naming choice was "Marine Engine":

December 8, 1999
The Marine Engine. That will be the name of the core Doom/Heretic/Hexen engine, the Executable. The games themselves -- JDoom, JHeretic and JHexen -- will be only game DLLs for the Executable to use. Very nice. I'm going to start The Marine Project in a few moments. Let's see just how fast I'm able to pull this off...

However, that didn't stick for long:

December 9, 1999
I think Doomsday Engine would be a better name for this project. The Doomsday Project. I like it. No more mister/Mr.

I have no recollection what exactly I was referring to with the "mister/Mr.", however I am guessing I didn't fancy the abbreviation of "Marine" to "Mr".

Vermil wrote:

something cool sounding, that had 'Doom' in it's name

So essentially yes, having "Doom" in the name surely must have made the difference. Also, I've always liked to connotation of the doomsday device/machine.

Vermil

Thanks for taking the time to give an answer and for the information. I don't mean it to sound rude, but there isn't really much more I feel I can add, that wouldn't just repeat that.

Though saying that, somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind, 'Marine Engine' doesn't seem completely alien to me. I have no idea why though (maybe I heard it in reference to Doomsday at some point in its history, but since completely forgot about it).

So we have Doomsday and Skyjake, which may or may not be a subtle reference to Skynet; well it's my understanding that Skyjake is a mixture of your name and because you created the method modern GL Doom ports use to render the sky. But if my computer suddenly sprouts legs, I'll know who to blame.