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.
John Romero
Romero worked at id Software from its inception in 1991 until 1996. He was involved in the creation of several milestone games, including "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", "" and "Quake". He served as executive producer (and game designer) on "Heretic" and "". He designed most of the first episode of "Doom", a fourth of the levels in "Quake", and half the levels in the "Commander Keen" and "Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny". He wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd (level editor), QuakeEd (level editor), DM (for deathmatch launching), DWANGO client (to connect the game to DWANGO's servers), TED5 (level editor for the "Commander Keen" series, "Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny"), IGRAB (for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files), the installers for all the games up to and including "Quake", the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others. In his keynote speech at WeAreDevelopers Conference 2017, Romero named this period Turbo Mode, in which he emphasizes having created 28 games, in 5.5 years with a team consisting of fewer than 10 developers.