doom

Chris Knight's avatar

For some time now there has been one ultimate benchmark for whether or not something has a truly computerized central component: Does it play Doom?  More than thirty years after iD Software released their 3D first-person shooter, it has been ported to seemingly everything from refrigerators to tractors to home pregnancy tests.  And more often than not, they do indeed run Doom.

A few years ago an outfit in Australia called Cortical Labs, working with lab-grown human neural cells, coaxed a Petri dish of neurons into playing Pong.  Which is about as rudimentary a video game as there can get.  Almost immediately the company started getting asked the same question: Could their “brains on a chip” play Doom?  Something that would require substantially more sensory input and calculation than simply moving a virtual paddle up and down.  The real matter was, people didn’t want to know if the neurons
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Chris Knight's avatar

Doom, arguably the most installed piece of software in the history of anything, today celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of its release.

It was at 12:01 AM on the morning of December 10th, 1993 that the team at id Software uploaded the first one-third of the game – the shareware version – to an FTP server at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.  Within minutes wanna-be players crashed the school’s system as everyone and their brother (and a few sisters) tried to get Doom.  Hours later and campuses around the world were banning the game’s network play capability, it was such a resource hog.

By the end of that first day it was very obviously clear: the world was Doomed.  It wasn’t long afterward that the id Software staff started getting sales of the full game to the tune of a hundred THOUSAND dollars a day.

And it wasn’t ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I couldn’t help myself. You might say the “id” within me was irresistible.

You know that photo the White House released of President Obama “skeet-shooting” at Camp David? Yeah: the one the White House also warned us peons against “manipulating” a’la Photoshop.

It was begging to be done though. Here is Barack Obama fighting off the legions of Hell…

“Gun-free zones” are no deterrence to Imps, Cacodemons and Former Human Sergeants.

And in place of Doom-guy’s face I put Dianne Feinstein. Hey, she has to have her gun too, right?...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Fifteen years ago this morning, on December 10th, 1993, id Software uploaded a zipped-up file to a bulletin board system and an FTP archive on the Internet. The file contained the setup, executable and WAD for the shareware version of the first official release of a new computer game called Doom.

And video games haven’t been the same since.

Yeah, Wolfenstein 3D (also an id Software product) is generally considered to have been the original first-person shooter. But Doom was the one that really made everybody stand up and take notice. Being thrown into the part of a Space Marine on a Martian moonbase who must fend off hordes of demons from Hell itself was wildly addictive fun. Some estimate that the original free shareware episode of Doom, “Knee Deep in the Dead”, is the most installed piece of entertainment software in history. That the game was so ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Last week, a committee that had been working on it for some time announced ten of the most culturally significant video games of all time. It’s similar to the National Film Registry that’s run by the Library of Congress. On the list of games deemed to have historical value: Tetris, Zork, Super Mario Bros. 3, SimCity, the Warcraft series, and… get this… Doom! Yes, Doom is among the first video games to be listed as having made an impact on culture and history. But as a longtime Doom-er, I knew that already. As is often said among Doom-aholics: “Doom will never die… only it’s players will”.

It’s a good list. But if it ever gets expanded upon I think that we should see The Legend of Zelda (the original NES game), Pitfall II and Wing Commander added to it. Heh-heh, Wing Commander: now there is a game franchise that ...

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