Doom (1993 video game)
"Doom"s original release date was the third quarter of 1993, which the team did not meet. By December 1993, the team was working non-stop on the game, with several employees sleeping at the office; programmer Dave Taylor claimed that working on the game gave him such a rush that he would pass out from the intensity. Id began receiving calls from people interested in the game or angry that it had missed its planned release date, as hype for the game had been building online. At midnight on December 10, 1993, after working for 30 straight hours, the development team at id uploaded the first episode of the game to the internet, letting interested players distribute it for them. So many users were connected to the first network that they planned to upload the game to—the University of Wisconsin–Parkside FTP network—that even after the network administrator increased the number of connections while on the phone with Wilbur, id was unable to connect, forcing them to kick all other users off to allow id to upload the game. When the upload finished thirty minutes later, 10,000 people attempted to download the game at once, crashing the university's network.
Linux gaming
The beginning of Linux as a gaming platform for commercial video games is widely credited to have begun in 1994 when Dave D. Taylor ported the game "Doom" to Linux, as well as many other systems, during his spare time. From there he would also help found the development studio "Crack dot Com", which released the video game" Abuse", with the game's Linux port even being published by Linux vendor Red Hat. id Software, the original developers of "Doom", also continued to release their products for Linux. Their game "Quake" was ported to Linux in 1996, once again by Dave D. Taylor working in his free time. Later id products continued to be ported by David Kirsch and Timothee Besset, a practice that continued until the studio's acquisition by ZeniMax Media in 2009. In 1991 DUX Software contracted Don Hopkins to port "SimCity" to Unix, which he later ported to Linux and eventually released as open source for the OLPC XO Laptop. Other early commercial Linux games included "Hopkins FBI", an adventure game released in 1998 by MP Entertainment, and "Inner Worlds" in 1996, which was released for and developed on Linux. In 1998, two programmers from Origin ported "Ultima Online" to Linux. A website called The Linux Game Tome began to catalog games created for or ported to Linux in 1995.