Doom II on Wednesday on Xbox Live Arcade

Doom II, one of the most important titles in first person-shooter history, is going to be launched on Xbox Live Marketplace tomorrow. No price has been announced as of yet for North America or Europe, but the Japanese version, which has already been live for one day, is available for 800 Microsoft Points, the equivalent of ten dollars.

Doom II was a revolutionary title created by id Software back in 1994 both in multiplayer and in single player. The non-linear levels filled with monsters and the atmospheric graphics, for that time, made it a very engaging horror shooter. The multiplayer functionality was state of the art at that moment, with out-of-the-box support for dial-up modems and LAN play.

id Software is currently hard at work on two big projects. Doom 4 is in the making, but not many details about it are known. Todd Hollenshead, id's CEO, said in an interview with Gamespot that it was neither a sequel, nor a reboot, but something else. What is known is that it will use id Tech 5, the new graphics engine developed in-house by the company and that will be multi-platform.

The other big release that is to come from id is Rage. Another first-person shooter, this time with racing elements, it is set in a post-apocalyptic world, akin to that in the Mad Max films and Fallout series. The game world will consist of several mission hubs through which the players will progress in a linear fashion. Missions could be the traditional run-and-gun fare, but also races with fully upgradeable vehicles.

A rather unusual decision for id is the removal of dedicated servers from the PC version's multiplayer component, replacing it with a matchmaking system similar to Modern Warfare 2’s. This will also be a multi-platform release, as the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the PC are targeted for a 2011 launch.