Doom just turned 30.
Dec. 10, 2023, marked three decades since the launch of the blockbuster demon-annihilating PC game—and its surprising impact on the IT world.
Today, Doom can be run on anything from an ATM to a toaster. But in a livestream commemorating the anniversary, id Software co-founders John Carmack and John Romero discussed how the game helped popularize the then-young internet.
Doom was one of the first software titles to receive a major release via the public web—id Software put up the first of the game’s three episodes, “Knee-Deep in the Dead,” as shareware via an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thousands of people attempted to download the game on release day, promptly crashing the university’s network. Romero reminisced to viewers on the livestream how novel releasing the shareware version of Doom via the internet was in 1993, saying, “We had people calling the office randomly asking when it was gonna go up.”
Moreover, Doom was the first massively popular multiplayer game on PC, in no small part thanks to Carmack’s introduction of then-innovative multiplayer via local area network (LAN) gameplay. Romero recalled during the livestream that many players had to adopt new hardware and networking skills to join the game’s deathmatches.
“I’ve heard that so many times, people saying, ‘I got a job because of Doom,’” Romero said. “With Doom supporting IPX on a local area network, that made a lot of people learn a lot of stuff pretty quickly.”
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Carmack noted that Doom came out at a time when internet access was still a cutting-edge technology, and many businesses were skeptical of the cost and expertise needed to get hooked up.
“We had only had a couple years of going through from the earliest, super-janky networks. We had like, parallel-port network adapter things,” Carmack said. “A lot of people did wind up in sort of network administration posts and wiring up, became the network guy in their office, and many offices wound up having a suspect business case put forward for why they all needed network shortly after Doom came out.”
Carmack speculated that while id Software’s later game, Quake, which was designed to be mod-friendly, may have sparked significant interest in software development, “Doom launched a lot of IT professional careers.”
“The ’90s really was an era of technical scaling issues yet to be addressed, where everything was very ad hoc,” Carmack said. “You really can’t break YouTube or Facebook today, but a lot of these things were a specific machine sitting in a specific office with a specific network connection.”
Now “you can just drop worldwide releases that literally a billion people can get,” he continued. “But there was a lot of learning along the way.”