Doom (1993 video game)
Because id planned to self-publish the game, as the game neared completion they had to set up the systems to sell the game. Jay Wilbur, who had been brought on as CEO and sole member of the business team, planned the marketing and distribution of "Doom". He felt that the mainstream press was uninterested in the game, and as id would make the most money off of copies they sold directly to customers—up to 85 percent of the planned US$40 price—he decided to leverage the shareware market as much as possible, buying only a single ad in any gaming magazine. Instead, he reached out directly to software retailers, offering them copies of the first "Doom" episode for free, allowing them to charge any price for it, in order to spur customer interest in buying the full game directly from id.
Doom (1993 video game)
The "Doom" franchise was later continued with the follow-up "" (1994) and numerous expansion packs, including "Master Levels for Doom II" (1995), and "Final Doom" (1996). Originally released for MS-DOS, the games have been ported to numerous other platforms. Once the game's source code was released in 1997, it spawned even more adaptations, as fans further ported the code to countless devices, even on machines that were not designed to run games. The series started to lose mainstream appeal as the technology of the "Doom" game engine was surpassed in the mid-1990s, although fans have continued making WADs, speedruns, and modifications to the original. The franchise again received popular attention in 2004 with the release of "Doom 3", a retelling of the original game using id Tech 4, with an associated 2005 "Doom" motion picture. A reboot of the series, simply titled "Doom" and powered by id Tech 6, was released in 2016 and focused on returning to the fast paced action of the first two games.