What on Earth is Doom Remake 4, and why did Bethesda issue a cease-and-desist?

Doom Remake 4 can be found here on ModDB. It had three-dimensional models, high-resolution textures, physical based rendering, and you could blast the corpses into pieces, as enemies are no longer sprites like they were two and a half decades ago. However, the maps and the weapons were taken from the original game. You can somewhat guess what it is (or was).

„I announce our shutdown of the page. It’s with a great sadness that I’m posting today; I recently received a letter from ZeniMax Media Inc to end production on Doom Remake 4. After a few days, I’ve exhausted my options to keep it afloat; we knew this day was a possibility. I’ve talked to legal counsel, and they stated that there would be a high chance of us winning the argument since this is a mod, but the legal fight would take most likely a year(s) and cost around 100k dollars,” modder vasyan777 wrote on June 8.

Then, he decided that he’d update the mod and re-release it. „The legal problem with the previous build was that it was distributed as a stand-alone release which was using Doom IP. The new build recuires an actual original game which you will have to purchase from GOG or Steam. Unfortunately, I had to remove all downloads due to legal issues not being sorted. I thought ZeniMax would approve the new build because this time it was distributed as a mod, but it seems the problem was a ‘third-party game engine’ which they said is illegal to use with Doom IP (this is very weird since Doom Remake 4 was bundled with GZDoom which is just a Doom source port forked from original Doom engine which is GPL),” he added.

Vasyan777 has until June 20 to delete all ZeniMax Media (parent company of Bethesda) properties from the internet, halt all development of Doom Remake 4, destroy all code and materials related to it (how can they even check that?), and promise to never do it again.

What a shame.

Source: PCGamer