Wirehead Studios

While perusing some Doom forums I've encountered discussions regarding the gender of cacodemons.  Most of that seems to be derived from the rear facing sprites and the holes being interpreted as female mammalian genitalia.  Anyone that's played Doom has certainly seen a cacodemon from the back and wondered why those holes are present, especially if no other naughty bits are visible on, say, imps or barons of hell or pinky demons.  I believe I have an explanation.  It has been noted that the caco sprite is based heavily on the head portion of an Advance Dungeons and Dragons creature known as an Astral Dreadnought.  The image first appeared on the 1987 cover of the "Manual of the Planes" book, and you can't mistake the similarity.  Since the cacodemon resembles the head, it appears more that these holes would correspond to an esophagus and trachea if one severed the head from an Astral Dreadnought in order to create the cacodemon.  That would mean there's no naughty bits visible in Doom at all, and some users have been misinterpreting the sprites.  Pictures are below for reference.  Thoughts on this?

I mean it seems like one of the versions of Doom (probably 64) had Imp anuses.

The original imp sprite has a giant black hole where the pole used to stand it up was.

Are you referring to the dead imp sprite frame?  I always figured that was just supposed to be a bit of shadow but the location was kind of conspicuous.  I do find the concept of every single character sprite in Doom having been impaled on a spike during production rather fitting.