Doom, the original and best first-person shooter, is 20 years old today

20 years ago today, at the stroke of midnight on December 10, 1993, Id Software uploaded a two-megabyte file that would change the history of gaming forever: doom1_0.zip. Doom, which was released as shareware, quickly spread across FTP servers and bulletin board systems, becoming the first PC gaming phenomenon and popularizing the FPS genre, and pioneering 3D game worlds and networked multiplayer.

At the time, of course, no one had any idea that Doom would be such a huge success. Id had previously done very well with Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, but Doom was something else entirely. It is hard to understate the importance and significant of Doom — it created the 3D FPS (first-person shooter) genre, which, since its inception, has dominated the gaming scene. Love them or hate them, it’s hard to argue with the success of the Call of Duty, Halo, and Battlefield franchises.

Doom was originally created by a small team of developers, over a period of around nine months, led by Id Software’s lead programmer and co-founder, John Carmack. If you’ve never played it before, here’s a basic synopsis: You play a space marine (retroactively called Doomguy) who shoots and carves his way through swathes of demons, first on a moon of Mars and then in hell. There were a few puzzles to solve, and a large variety of weapons. The game was very, very hard, as most games were back then. As a child, I couldn’t get much farther than the first few levels before resorting to cheat codes (IDDQD and IDKFA originate from Doom, if you weren’t aware).

By far the most important or defining feature of Doom was its 3D graphics engine, which supported lighting, full texture mapping, and other features that really hadn’t been seen before in PC gaming. It was thanks to its 3D graphics and first-person perspective that Doom was incredibly visceral. If you ask someone who played Doom when it first came out, they will almost universally comment on just how graphic, gory, and exciting it was to play Doom. In 1993, there really was nothing else like it. Since then, of course, it has spawned an entire genre — and numerous sequels, too. (True story: The first couple of hours of Doom 3 terrified me so much that I actually stopped playing FPSes for a few months…and never completed Doom 3).

Doom would go on to be played by an estimated 10 million people within two years of its release, and was reportedly installed on more computers than Windows 95 (thus prompting Gabe Newell, then working at Microsoft, to develop a Windows port of Doom). John Carmack recently left Id Software to be the full-time CTO at Oculus VR, the creator of the virtual reality Oculus Rift headset. After a few mediocre and unnotable years at Id, he’s probably hoping that a shift in perspective and workplace will eventually result in a new technology that enables the creation of the spiritual successor to Doom, whatever that might be.

You can still download the original doom1_0.zip file, incidentally — and if you have a 32-bit version of Windows to hand, or an emulator, it should run without a hitch.

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