Assault rifle (Doom)


 * This page is about a weapon from an alpha version of Doom. For the Doom II RPG weapon, see Assault rifle. For the Strife weapon, see Assault rifle (Strife).

The Assault rifle is a semi-automatic firearm that is unusable in the early Doom titles. It is wielded by zombified Marines, utilizing the same ammunition as the Pistol and Chaingun, while operating identically to the former. However, the weapon is inaccessible to the player since there are no pick-ups for this firearm anywhere in-game, it can't be spawned with conventional cheat codes, and Zombiemen don't drop them after dying.



Though the player couldn't use it in the final version, it was the player's default weapon in the alpha versions of the first Doom. In the final versions of all Doom games, it is still the only weapon shown being wielded by the player's third person sprite, no matter what weapon he is actually using.

Trivia

 * While the sprites for the final game's weapons were notoriously based on toys, such as the pistol, it is still unknown what the assault rifle's many variations were based on, if anything. This is the same case as with the alpha's Machine Gun sprites.
 * A version of the Assault Rifle was found in the files of Doom (2016), in the form of a fully-textured model never used in-game. The weapon was possibly meant to be an early version of the Heavy Assault Rifle, or just an unused remnant of the canceled "Doom 4" project that preceded it.
 * The later versions of the rifle were visually the closest weapon to the rifle held by the player and Former Human sprites.