Doom is 25 years old
On December 10, 1993, Doom, the shooter from id Software, introduced entire tribes to the first person shooter phenomenon and to playing against others over a network. Both have since become established values within the game world.
Doom was not the first first person shooter to hit the market. Doom developer id Software alone had four to his name. Doom was also not the first game to be played in multiplayer over a network. Still, the impact of Doom cannot be underestimated, because when the game hit the market on December 10, 1993, it created a hype that would have a significant impact, especially on large companies and universities. Within hours of the game being available, the network crashed at some American universities due to massive Doom being played. The same happened at many companies. Wherever computers were networked, Doom was played, provided those computers were equipped with MS-DOS, the operating system the game ran on. Where players did not have access to a company network, they dragged computers to each other’s house to build a network there. For millions of gamers, Doom was the first introduction to both the genre and the way of playing.
Another aspect that not only made Doom popular, but would keep it popular for a very long time, was the option to create mods for the game yourself. Dozens of player-created maps quickly appeared for the game, supplemented by other mods, some of which added completely new modes of play to the game. The game made use of wad files, in which graphic files, audio and also the map of the levels were stored. The advantage was that those files remained separate from the engine, and could therefore be adapted without having to tinker with the code of the engine. As a result, id Software was able to easily make the game’s engine available to other developers, a practice that has since become popular and would lead to modern engines such as the Unreal Engine, CryEngine and Frostbite Engine.
Doom would lead to a slew of imitators, soon referred to as Doom clones. It would popularize the fps genre and make the 3D game world standard. Until then, two-dimensional sidescrollers dominated. In addition, Doom first used the term deathmatch, coined by John Romero, the game’s main level designer.
Doom would remain popular for a long time to come. In late 1995, after Windows 95 had been on the market for several months, it was estimated that Doom was still installed on more computers than the new operating system. Reason for Bill Gates to want to port the game to the new OS. The team within Microsoft responsible for the conversion from MS-DOS to Windows was led by Gabe Newell, who would leave Microsoft a few years later to start Valve.
The rights to Doom still lie with id Software, which delivered a successor of the same name in 2016. The studio has been owned by Bethesda since 2009. None of the key players in Doom’s development work at id Software anymore. Programmer John Carmack works at Oculus on VR glasses. John Romero has his own studio and says he will announce a new game on December 10, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Doom. Artist Adrian Carmack, not related to John, works at Romero’s game company. Game designer Tom Hall works at developer PlayFirst and Jay Wilbur, the business man at id Software, now fills that role at competitor Epic Games.