Shotgun Guy

The shotgun guy is one of the foundational human-zombie enemies introduced in id Software’s original Doom. It is stronger than the zombieman but lacks the sustained firepower of the chaingunner introduced in Doom II. On Ultra-Violence and Nightmare!, the shotgun guy can appear as early as E1M1: Hangar.

Appearance and design

The shotgun guy is a former human soldier, now undead and serving the demonic invasion. Visually, the enemy is depicted as a reanimated corpse with red eyes, a bald head, and bloodstained slate-gray body armor and clothing.

The shotgun guy resembles the zombieman but carries a shotgun instead of a rifle. In Doom 64, the two enemies use the same basic sprite with different color palettes, making them difficult to distinguish in darker areas.

Combat behavior and attack logic

The shotgun guy attacks using the A_SPosAttack code pointer, which implements its shotgun firing logic. Unlike the player’s shotgun, which uses A_FireShotgun and fires seven pellets, the shotgun guy fires only three pellets per attack. Each pellet inflicts between 3 and 15 damage, giving the attack a maximum combined damage of 45 if all three pellets hit.

Its attack is a multi-pellet hitscan — meaning the damage is calculated immediately upon firing rather than using a projectile that travels through space. Each pellet has an independently calculated angular spread, with a standard deviation of approximately 9 degrees and a maximum deviation of about 22 degrees in either direction. At closer ranges, more pellets are likely to connect, while at longer distances the spread reduces its effective damage output. Multiple pellets can still hit a target at long range.

Before firing, the shotgun guy aims at its target for approximately three-tenths of a second. After firing one round, it resumes movement rather than maintaining a continuous stream of gunfire.

The enemy enters alert state when it hears player gunfire or sees the player directly, after which it will pursue and attack. On Nightmare! or when the -fast command-line parameter is enabled, the shotgun guy attacks much more frequently. This makes encounters involving several shotgun guys particularly dangerous in areas where the player has limited room to retreat.

Tactics: how to defeat the shotgun guy

• Use solid walls and corners to interrupt the shotgun guy’s line of sight. Its hitscan pellets can damage the player immediately when fired, so breaking line of sight prevents the attack from reaching its target through solid geometry. This is especially useful against shotgun guys positioned around corners or on elevated ledges.
• Use the shotgun to eliminate individual shotgun guys at medium and long range. With only 30 hit points, the enemy can be killed by a well-placed shotgun blast. At close range, a single shot can occasionally kill multiple shotgun guys when they are grouped together.
• Avoid using the fist or chainsaw against a shotgun guy unless the situation favors close combat. These weapons require the player to approach within short range, where multiple shotgun pellets are more likely to hit. The risk is particularly high without armor.
• Use the shotgun against distant shotgun guys positioned on ledges or in alcoves. Its relatively narrow spread makes it useful for eliminating these enemies at range, particularly when the alternatives are weapons whose effective damage falls off more sharply with distance.
• Exploit infighting when several shotgun guys or other monsters are clustered together. Their pellets can strike unintended targets and provoke retaliation. Large groups of shotgun guys may inflict substantial damage on one another because each attack fires multiple pellets.
• Eliminate exposed shotgun guys quickly on Nightmare! or with -fast enabled. Their increased attack frequency makes prolonged exposure especially dangerous. The starting walkways of E1M3: Toxin Refinery and the central hub of E1M9: Military Base are particularly difficult encounters under these conditions.

Appearances across the series

The shotgun guy made its debut in the original Doom (1993) and continued as a staple enemy through Doom II: Hell on Earth. It also appears in The Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, and Doom 64.

Its first appearance depends on the skill level. In Doom’s first episode, Knee-Deep in the Dead, shotgun guys appear in E1M1: Hangar on Ultra-Violence and Nightmare!, but do not appear until E1M3: Toxin Refinery on the lower skill levels.

The first episode contains 40 shotgun guys on the two lowest skill levels, compared with 280 on Ultra-Violence and Nightmare!. Their dropped shotguns greatly increase the number of shells available to the player.

Across the original single-player IWADs, the shotgun guy appears in substantial numbers, including 656 in The Ultimate Doom, 483 in Doom II, and 1,041 in TNT: Evilution on Ultra-Violence and Nightmare!.

One unusual occurrence involves a sleeping shotgun guy in MAP02: Underhalls of Doom II. This enemy may fail to detect the player visually because of an engine bug in the P_DivlineSide() function, which incorrectly compares coordinates during line-of-sight calculations. The shotgun guy can still awaken in response to sound, so gunfire elsewhere in the room usually triggers its normal behavior.

Relationship to the heavy weapon dude

The shotgun guy has a clear thematic and functional counterpart in the heavy weapon dude (also known as the chaingunner), introduced in Doom II. Where the shotgun guy fires a single spread of pellets before moving again, the heavy weapon dude sustains a continuous stream of hitscan bullets using a chaingun, making it substantially more lethal in open engagements. Both enemies share the zombie-soldier aesthetic — the heavy weapon dude is described on the Doom Wiki as a robust, red-eyed bald man in bloodstained red body armor — but the chaingunner’s sustained fire rate makes it a step up in threat level.

For more information about these enemies and the equipment used against them, explore our Doom enemies and Doom weapons databases.

Source port representation

In ZDoom-family source ports such as GZDoom, the shotgun guy is implemented under the class identifier ShotgunGuy, as documented on the ZDoom wiki’s Classes page. Its default actor definition reproduces the familiar shotgun attack and dropped weapon. Modders and mappers targeting ZDoom-family ports can reference or extend this class using ZScript or DECORATE to alter the enemy’s stats, behavior, or appearance.

In the original Doom engine, the monster uses the internal type MT_SHOTGUY and the sprite prefix SPOS. Despite being called a sergeant in the manuals, the identifiers MT_SERGEANT and SARG belong to the demon. This naming difference likely originated from the demon’s earlier name, “demon sergeant,” in the Doom Bible.

Source ports such as PrBoom+, DSDA-Doom, and Crispy Doom can reproduce the shotgun guy’s original behavior when running compatible classic Doom content with appropriate compatibility settings. Crispy Doom is a limit-removing fork of Chocolate Doom rather than a Boom-compatible port.

Community and cultural presence

The enemy’s shotgun drop — a guaranteed weapon pickup when the monster is killed — also makes shotgun guys a practical resource in many map designs, giving players a means to resupply on ammunition through normal gameplay rather than relying solely on static pickups.

The shotgun guy can also be used in community-made WADs, including maps designed for vanilla-compatible, limit-removing, and advanced source ports.