Somewhere in Tom Hall's possession sits a chainsaw that changed gaming history. Not a replica, not a collector's piece bought at auction. The actual, physical Eager Beaver chainsaw that the id Software team scanned to build one of the most recognisable weapons in FPS history.
The saw that shipped with Doom
A Bluesky post this week confirmed what Doom fans had long suspected: the chainsaw in Doom was not a product of pure imagination. "The chainsaw in DOOM was modelled off of Tom Hall's Eager Beaver chainsaw," the post reads. "It leaked oil, and so was kept in a bowl in the id offices. Tom still has it!"
The post came with a photo of John Romero posing alongside the chainsaw, grinning like someone who knows exactly what that piece of hardware means to gaming history.
Here's the thing, the story goes back a bit further. A 2020 Instagram post from Romero added one more layer: Hall's then-girlfriend owned the Eager Beaver at the time, and "she let us scan it for DOOM." Whoever technically owns it now, the chainsaw has clearly found a permanent home with Hall.
Oil leaks and gaming artifacts
The image Romero shared years ago of the chainsaw sitting in its little plastic bowl is something else. The oil stain around it tells the full story of a working tool that spent time on a developer's desk being immortalised in pixels rather than cutting wood.
What most players miss when they think about Doom's weapon design is how grounded it was in physical reality. The team at id weren't just inventing nightmare machinery from scratch. They were looking at real objects, scanning them, and translating that weight and texture into something players could feel through a monitor.
The Eager Beaver is a consumer-grade chainsaw brand, not some industrial horror prop. That's almost funnier. The weapon that became shorthand for over-the-top video game carnage started life as an ordinary piece of garden equipment sitting in an oil-stained bowl in a Texas office.
Tom Hall's place in Doom history
Tom Hall's contributions to the original Doom are complicated. He and John Romero would go on to found Ion Storm in the 1990s, a studio that produced the notoriously troubled Daikatana alongside the beloved Deus Ex series. Hall's fingerprints are on a significant stretch of early FPS history, even if the credits didn't always reflect that.
The chainsaw itself became one of Doom's defining symbols. The shotgun might be the practical workhorse, the BFG 9000 might be the power fantasy, but the chainsaw is pure id Software attitude. It's in the logo. It's on the merchandise. Doom: The Dark Ages, the latest entry in the franchise, carries that same weapon DNA forward decades later. For more on the games that built the FPS genre, check out our latest gaming news covering everything from retro deep dives to modern releases.
A relic that still leaks
The fact that Hall still has the chainsaw is the kind of detail that makes gaming history feel tangible in a way that a design document or a screenshot never quite can. This is a physical object that sat in a room where Doom was being made, that developers looked at and thought about while building something that would define a genre.
The Bluesky post is casual about the whole thing, framed as a fun trivia drop rather than a major revelation. But for anyone who has spent time with Doom, knowing that the chainsaw has a real-world origin, complete with an oil leak and a plastic bowl, adds something to every playthrough. Here's hoping the leak has been addressed since the id Software days. That saw has earned a proper display case. Browse our latest reviews for more coverage of the Doom franchise and the FPS games it inspired.
