"It was a very long overdue reboot that was accompanied by internal team management changes," the source said. "Morale got a lot better during this short time as people were encouraged to participate and there were cool ideas floating around.

At one point, a source told me, the Doom 4 team had a big meeting in which company leaders talked about what Doom meant to them. John Carmack got up in front of everyone and said something like, "Doom means two things: demons and shotguns."

Meanwhile, the Rage's team had already started planning out Rage 2, a source said. But when the first game was released to tepid critical and commercial response, executives at ZeniMax decided to start getting more involved with Id’s development process. Over the next couple of months, ZeniMax met with Id’s leadership, cancelled Rage 2, and downsized plans for Rage's DLC, the source said.

The new plan, as of January 2012: refocus the studio, postpone or cancel all other projects, and get everyone on the fourth Doom game.

Rage came out, and it wasn't the splash success that everyone hoped it would be," one source said. "Eventually what kind of came down was, ZeniMax said, Okay, look, we gave you guys a bunch of chances and you guys are having a lot of trouble managing multiple projects, so you guys are gonna have one project: Just do Doom 4."

"There was not only effectively another creative reboot, but a tech reboot," said another source. Although this wasn't officially a reboot of the game, there was a new team and new code, so for some staff it felt like one.

"[Id] started from the Rage code base, and took some big leaps back in certain areas of tech. [Id] spent a lot of time merging Doom features to Rage."

One source described a meeting in which ZeniMax executives told Id leads that "Doom 4 can and should be as big as Skyrim," as far as both sales and cultural impact. (Skyrim, Bethesda's massive role-playing game, shipped 7 million copies during its first week on shelves in November of 2011. And everyone had heard about it - not just hardcore gamers.)