Bethesda Announces Exclusive Doom Eternal Skins for Owners of Classic Doom Ports

Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal certainly know how to play up the core tenets the franchise, but there's one detail from id Software's early installment that they've held back on: muscles. In a bit of intra-series cross promotion from publisher Bethesda, anyone who owns a recent console port of Doom (1993), Doom 2, or Doom 3 with Slayers Club integration can link their Bethesda.net accounts to unlock retro-inspired skins for Doom Eternal. They're all variations on the classic Doom Marine, who rocks short-sleeved crop-top body armor to show off his righteous guns and abs.

There's something of a subtle Doom keycard color-scheme vibe going on with the classic skins: the first Doom gets a muted blue "Indigo" skin, Doom 2 gets a yellowy "Bronze," and Doom 3—which ditched the classic Doom Marine design, mind you—gets plain old "Red." Each game also unlocks a corresponding box-art nameplate in Doom Eternal.

The Doom Eternal skin announcement coincides with the release of a much-requested patch for the ports of Doom and Doom 2 that aims to fix a variety of issues, some of which stemmed from earlier porting work that carried over to these recent releases. Levels should be darker to match the games' MS-DOS releases and the music should also be a better recreation of the original MIDI renditions, down to the specific hardware it was recorded from.

Releasing these Doom Eternal skins as a Slayers Club benefit is maybe something of a mea culpa for how the ports launched. Players who bought the ports were annoyed to discover that the games required a Bethesda.net account to play. A subsequent update included an option to skip the requirement, and now you at least get something for the trouble of entering your credentials.

Doom and Doom 2 are available for $4.99 USD and on the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Doom 3 is a bit pricier on all three systems at $9.99 USD. The Switch will receive a port of Doom 64 on November 22, which is the same day that Doom Eternal launches for the PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.