Doom (1993 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Doom, released on the 10th of December 1993, crashed a university's network before most people had even heard of it. At midnight, after thirty straight hours of testing, the five-person team at id Software uploaded the first episode to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So many people were already connected and waiting that the network administrator had to kick off all existing users just to make room for the upload. When it finished thirty minutes later, ten thousand people tried to download the game at once. By morning, university networks across the country were banning it. Not because it was dangerous. Because it was too popular. How did a small studio in Texas, working out of a building they called Suite 666, create a game that would be installed on more computers worldwide than Windows 95 within two years? What happened to the designer whose story was thrown out before the game was finished? And why, more than thirty years later, is Doom still being ported to smart thermostats and pianos?

• 2. The Team Behind the Demon Fight

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  John Carmack's appetite for the next technical frontier is what set Doom in motion. After Wolfenstein 3D shipped in May 1992, most of the studio turned to expansion episodes while Carmack started researching a new engine entirely. The working concept arrived through an unexpected channel: a Dungeons and Dragons campaign the team was playing together. Carmack described a game about using technology to fight demons, and the idea took hold. The working title was Green and Pissed. Carmack renamed it Doom, drawn from a line in the 1986 film The Color of Money: "What you got in there? In here? Doom."

  Five people started development in November 1992: Carmack and John Romero as programmers, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud as artists, and Tom Hall as designer. They moved into a dark office building and named their workspace Suite 666. They drew inspiration from the sounds coming through the wall from a neighboring dental practice. They also cut ties with Apogee Software, their previous publisher, deciding to self-publish because they believed they could keep more of the revenue. Jay Wilbur was brought in as CEO and sole member of the business team, and he confirmed the math: selling directly to customers could yield up to 85% of the planned price per copy.

• 3. The Doom Bible and Its Demise

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  Tom Hall delivered his design document in November 1992. He called it the Doom Bible. It described a science fiction horror concept in which scientists on the Moon open a portal to an alien invasion, with the player gradually discovering that the aliens are demons while hell steadily infects the level design. Hall believed the game needed a story. Carmack did not. Carmack's view was blunt: "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but it's not that important." He wanted technological innovation, a fast continuous world, and no story at all.

  Hall reworked the document twice. First to align with Carmack's vision of a seamless world, then again when the team realized that seamless world was impossible given the hardware limitations of the time. Id put out a press release at the start of 1993, touting Hall's phrase about fighting demons while "knee-deep in the dead", announcing multiplayer features that had not even been designed yet. Early versions retained the scoring system from Wolfenstein and included lives, an inventory, a secondary shield, and a complex interface. All of it was removed. Romero wanted something "more brutal and fast" than Wolfenstein, and Hall's character-driven design did not fit that vision. The rest of the team felt Hall was out of sync. In July 1993, the other founders fired him. He went to work for Apogee. Sandy Petersen replaced him in September, ten weeks before the game shipped.

• 4. Building the Engine and the Art

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  Carmack wrote Doom largely in the C programming language, with some elements in assembly language. The team used NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. Level and graphical data lived in separate WAD files, short for "Where's All the Data?", independent from the engine code. This separation was deliberate: Carmack designed it so that fans could modify the game easily, having been impressed by the modifications fans had made to Wolfenstein 3D.

  The engine did something Wolfenstein could not. Where Wolfenstein confined walls to right angles on a flat plane, the Doom engine allowed walls and floors at any angle or height. The lighting system worked not by tracing rays from light sources but by calculating a "light level" for each small area based on predetermined brightness, then adjusting the color palette of that section's textures accordingly. Romero built on this by programming strobe lights, movable stairs and platforms, and switches. When Romero's complex level designs strained the engine, Carmack added binary space partitioning to calculate only the visible portion of a level at any given moment.

  Adrian Carmack was the lead artist, with Kevin Cloud alongside him. They approached the monsters using mixed media: sculpting physical models, photographing them in stop motion from five to eight angles, digitizing the images, and converting them to 2D sprites. Adrian made clay models for some demons; sculptor Gregor Punchatz built latex and metal sculptures of the others. The weapons were assembled from children's toy parts. Cloud's arm became the marine's gun arm. Adrian's snakeskin boots and his wounded knee became in-game textures. The cover art came from Don Ivan Punchatz, Gregor's father, who worked from a short description and used Romero's body as the model after Romero demonstrated the pose during a photoshoot.

• 5. Music, Sound, and the Metal Connection

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  Bobby Prince composed the music and sound effects, as he had for Wolfenstein 3D. Romero directed him toward techno and metal styles. Many tracks drew direct inspiration from songs by Alice in Chains and Pantera. Prince believed ambient music would serve the game better and produced tracks in both styles, hoping to persuade the team. Romero incorporated both approaches.

  Prince did not write music for specific levels because the levels were not finished when the music was composed. Instead, Romero assigned each track to each level late in development. The sound effects followed their own method: Prince worked from short descriptions or concept art of a monster or weapon, then adjusted the sounds once the animations were complete. Monster sounds came from animal noises. Prince designed every sound to be distinct on the limited audio hardware of the era, so that multiple sounds playing simultaneously would remain identifiable. He also engineered the effects to occupy different frequencies from the MIDI music, ensuring they cut through without being buried. Decades later, in 2026, the Library of Congress selected Doom's soundtrack for preservation in the National Recording Registry, citing its "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation's recorded sound heritage".

• 6. Release, Sales, and Cultural Earthquake

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  Id only granted a single press preview before release, to Computer Gaming World in June 1993, which responded with praise. The team had otherwise communicated continuously with the public through the nascent internet, releasing development updates throughout the year. By December, several employees were sleeping at the office. Programmer Dave Taylor said the intensity of the final push was so extreme that it would cause him to pass out.

  The commercial results were immediate. The game turned a profit within a single day of release. Wilbur reported in May 1994 that the full game had sold over 65,000 copies, with the shareware version distributed more than one million times. He estimated first-year sales at 140,000 by 1995. Sandy Petersen later recalled that figure reaching around 200,000 for the first year. By late 1995 Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Windows 95 itself. According to Wilbur, the shareware version had been downloaded 20 million times by June 1996. The Ultimate Doom sold over 780,000 units by September 1999, and all versions combined reached 3.5 million copies by the end of that year.

  In April 1994, PC Gamer UK declared Doom the third-best computer game ever made, writing that it had "done more to establish the PC's arcade clout than any other title in gaming history." PC Gamer US named it the best computer game of all time that August. One reviewer from White Wolf admitted to missing sleep and appointments to keep playing. The Edge review attracted a different kind of attention: the critic ended by wondering what it would be like if you could talk to the creatures and form alliances. The line "If only you could talk to these creatures" became a running joke in video game culture. In 2007 Doom was among the first ten games selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in its "game canon". In 2015 the World Video Game Hall of Fame inducted it as part of its inaugural class.

• 7. Controversy and the Columbine Connection

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  Doom's graphic violence and satanic imagery generated controversy from a broad range of groups from the moment of release. In Germany, shortly after publication, Doom was classified as "harmful to minors" by the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons. It could not be sold to children or displayed where they could see it. That classification was only rescinded in 2011. Doom for the 32X was among the first games to receive a Mature 17+ rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board; Doom II was the first.

  The controversy sharpened after the 20th of April 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out the Columbine High School massacre. Both had been avid Doom players. Harris wrote in his journal that the killing would be "like playing Doom." A widely circulated rumor claimed that Harris had designed a custom Doom level modeled on the high school, populated with representations of his classmates and teachers, to practice for the shooting. Harris did design several custom levels, later known as the Harris levels, but none were based on the school. Critic and Killology Research Group founder David Grossman dubbed Doom a "mass murder simulator."

  One earlier piece of controversy was quieter but telling. The first episode's level E1M4: Command Control contained a swastika-shaped structure, placed as a nod to Wolfenstein 3D. Romero said the swastika was removed in later versions out of respect for a military veteran's request.

• 8. Mods, Speedrunning, and Thirty Years of Community

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  On the 26th of January 1994, university student Brendon Wyber led a group to create the first full level editor for Doom, the Doom Editor Utility. The first custom level followed in March, built by Jeff Bird. Within weeks of the game's release, players had already modified leaked alpha versions to build their own tools. Id had provided no instructions for how the WAD file system worked, but the file structure was open enough that the community needed none.

  Id CEO Wilbur posted legal terms that allowed mod creators to charge money for their work without paying any fees to id. At least one modder, Tim Willits, was later hired by id Software. More than 3,000 user-created levels for Doom and Doom II were eventually included in the official retail release Master Levels for Doom II in 1995. The community award structure, the Cacowards, continues to name the best mods each year. In 2018, for the game's 25th anniversary, Romero announced Sigil, an unofficial fifth episode of nine levels. It was released on the 22nd of May 2019 with a soundtrack by Buckethead, then again for free on the 31st of May with a soundtrack by James Paddock. A sixth episode, Sigil II, followed on the 30th anniversary, the 10th of December 2023, with a soundtrack by Valient Thorr.

  Doom also gave birth to speedrunning as an organized community. The game included a feature allowing players to record and replay gameplay as lightweight demo files, easily shared over internet bulletin boards at a time when video files were impractical to distribute. The speedrunning community built around Doom has never stopped. As recently as 2019, runners were breaking records that had originally been set in 1998.