The BFG9000 is a weapon found in the computer games Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3 (although the BFG 9000 found in Doom
3 shares only the name.) The BFG9000 appears as a large, solid metal gun that fires big balls of green plasma. The most powerful in the game, it is capable of destroying nearly any player or enemy with a single
hit. Most subsequent first-person shooters implemented
similar weapons, but few of them were quite as notorious as the BFG9000.
When firing the BFG9000, there is a pause of exactly 6/7 of a second (about 857 milliseconds) before a green plasma ball is
ejected. If the plasma ball hits a solid object, it explodes and causes between 100 and 800 points of damage on that object.
After a further pause of exactly 16/35 of a second (about 457 milliseconds), blast damage is calculated: 40 invisible rays are
emitted by the player in a cone-shaped area (about 45° half-angle) in the direction the plasma ball was fired (if the player has
turned around, the direction of the blast damage rays don't change - they are still traced in the direction of firing of the
original plasma ball; if he has moved around, their origin changes). Each ray causes 49 to 87 damage points if it hits a solid
object. Therefore the minimal damage of the weapon is 49 points of damage (if an object is hit by one ray and not the plasma
ball) and hypothetical maximal damage of the weapon is 800 + (40 × 87) = 4280 points of damage (if the plasma ball hits an object
for full damage and all 40 rays also hit the object for full damage). Although that much damage can never actually be inflicted
due to the periodicity of the simplistic pseudorandom number generator used by the Doom engine, damage in the 3000+ hit points range is common enough for the weapon to be used to kill a Spider Mastermind in one shot
during assorted speedruns.
The abbreviation BFG stands for "Big Fucking Gun", as explained in Tom
Hall's original Doom design document (Section 14). Other explanations of the name that circulated before the document
was made public include "Big Fragging Gun" and "Big Fun Gun". In the paperback novelization of Doom
published in 1995, the characters refer to the BFG as a "big freaking gun". Another name,
according to the motion picture, is "Bio-Force Gun" (The Rock, as a member of the cast, gave this information on The Daily Show).
Fiction that references or parodies the BFG include:
Roald Dahl's novel The
BFG, which predates Doom by over a decade, is completely unrelated.
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