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.
Development of Doom
The development team spent the next six months designing and building the game, with Hall designing levels based on real-world military bases, Romero building game features, and artists Adrian Carmack and Cloud creating textures and demons based on clay models they built. Hall's level designs, however, were deemed uninteresting by the team and Romero began designing his own levels; Hall, increasingly frustrated with his limited impact on the game, was fired in July. He was replaced by Petersen in September, and the team worked increasingly long hours until the game was completed in December 1993. "Doom" was self-published by id on December 10, 1993, and was immediately downloaded by thousands of players.