Doom turns 30 today

[Redaktion]

Labeled by PC Gamer in 1998 as "probably the most imitated game of all time," id Software's Doom celebrates today its 30th anniversary. Released for MS-DOS, it has sold an estimated 3.5 million copies by 1999. This game marked the birth of a franchise consisting of multiple video games, two movies, tabletop games, a novel series, and more.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Doom-turns-30-today.781308.0.html

[George]

Gosh does this bring back memories!!!

Back in the day our Corporate IT manager was having FITS trying to figure out what was causing a LARGE SPIKE in LAN traffic after work hours (when they were wishing to schedule maintence).

Sadly to say that shortly after he/they finally discovered the handful/dozen of us were playing Doom on our work computers there came an 'acceptable use of company assets' policy published.

Ahh... those were the days...

[NikoB]

In fact, it wasn't Doom that revolutionized the action game industry, but Wolfenstein 3D, which came out 1 year earlier. Doom added three-dimensionality, but it was no longer such a shock for players as Wolfenstein 3D.. I remember well at that time (most of the young readers under 40 age were not yet born or were still peeing in diapers) how everyone played it. Doom no longer made such a splash despite the radical improvement - the game actually played in three-dimensional space.

[Codrut Nistor]

Indeed, Wolfenstein 3D revolutionized the industry but had no multiplayer. The fun thing is how these games actually made it into the former Eastern European bloc. In the early 1990s virtually nobody had home computers, but I went in weekend to my father's factory computing lab (he worked as tool design, later quality assurance engineer in a factory producing screws and various other small metallic parts) and played Wolfenstein 3D. Back then, they were still using a computer with punch cards, but we obviously didn't play Wolfenstein 3D on that one... :)

[Hotz]

Doom never got me. Maybe because it was not a horror game. I found Blood1 much more intense. I found Doom 3 ok however.

[Codrut Nistor]

Doom 3 is definitely horror, especially when compared to the first one...

[NikoB]

but had no multiplayer

No one needed this then - the mass Internet essentially did not exist until the end of the 90s, as well as serious local networks.

Multiplayer only became relevant in the second half of the 90s, and then everyone played Doom over a local network, because... it was unrealistic to play it via modem, and 99.99% of the population simply had no other options at that time.

Oh those were the times. And now young people are corrupted by abundance and pampered and cannot imagine another world, as well as the base on which everything rests. They believe that buns grow right in stores on the shelves and the whole world is "digital". Soon they will all be terribly disappointed...

[Codrut Nistor]

True, but you must admit that, from the multiplayer point of view, Doom was ahead of its time. Now... we can just go and play it in a browser window.