Development of Doom
"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. Within hours, other university networks were banning "Doom" multiplayer games, as a rush of players overwhelmed their systems.
Doom 64
"Doom 64" was developed by Midway Games at its San Diego studio. id Software, the primary developer of the "Doom" franchise, supervised the project. Development began in late 1994. Midway's original title of the game was "The Absolution", however the name was changed to "Doom 64" for brand recognition ("The Absolution" was reused as the name of the last level in the game). Midway wanted to include every demon from the original games, as well as a few extra levels, into the final product, but deadlines and memory constraints of the small capacity of the N64 cartridges made them scrap the levels and leave a few demons out of the game. Midway stated that a multiplayer mode was not included because Nintendo did not provide the necessary resources for multiplayer programming. The developer justified the decision based on alleged slowdown during split-screen multiplayer in other games on the console and the competitive nature of the mode. "Everyone knows that the best part of playing multiplayer is not knowing where your opponent is," stated a Midway representative, "and with a four-player split-screen, everyone can easily see where their opponents are."