Modder adds the vicious Shield Saw to the original Doom

Bethesda announced Doom: The Dark Ages at the Xbox Games Showcase over the weekend, and easily the most exciting addition to the franchise featured in the trailer is the Shield Saw. As the name suggests it’s a shield. Which is also a chainsaw. Naturally, modders have already programmed the weapon into the original Doom.

Modder Craneo shared a clip on X yesterday showing how they were able to bring the Shield Saw featured in the trailer for the upcoming Doom sequel into the retro computer game. They converted the old-fashioned chainsaw into an innovative weapon that both protects you from enemy damage and rips opponents to shreds, thereby providing the wielder with a brilliant balance of defense and offense. The video makes it seem you can also toss the Shield Saw, something that was surely a pain to program.

Craneo also brought another Dark Ages weapon to Doom overnight called the Skullcrusher, or Skul-Gun, as Andy Chalk of PC Gamer called it. As the name suggests, the Skul-Gun uses skulls as ammo and fires them out like oversized bullets. That mod remains incomplete however, because, as Craneo notes, the gameplay mechanics for its next-gen counterpart haven’t been shown yet. If you want to try these out, Craneo helpfully provided links to grab the mods for both the Skul-Gun and Shield Saw.

The Doom modding community is well renowned for their creativity in adding features that make Doom more fun to play. They made Doom playable within Doom 2, ported the 2005 Doom mobile game to Windows, modded the horror game MyHouse.wad into Doom 2, and programmed the Indiana Jones-inspired mod Venturous to the Doom engine, among other things. Of course, modders have also tried to get Doom to run on every piece of hardware known to man, from a lawnmower to a Roomba vacuum cleaner. The latter device was dubbed the Doomba because game developer Rich Whitehouse programmed it to translate the floor maps into Doom maps.