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 (1993 video game)
In May 1992, id Software released "Wolfenstein 3D", later called the "grandfather of 3D shooters", specifically first-person shooters, because it established the fast-paced action and technical prowess commonly expected in the genre and greatly increased the genre's popularity. Immediately following its release most of the id Software team began work on a set of episodes for the game, titled "Spear of Destiny", while id co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack instead focused on technology research for the company's next game. Following the release of "Spear of Destiny" in September 1992, the team began to plan their next title. They wanted to create another 3D game using a new engine Carmack was developing, but were largely tired of "Wolfenstein". They initially considered making another game in the "Commander Keen" series, as proposed by co-founder and lead designer Tom Hall, but decided that the platforming gameplay of the series was a poor fit for Carmack's fast-paced 3D engines. Additionally, the other two co-founders of id, designer John Romero and lead artist Adrian Carmack, wanted to create something in a darker style than the "Keen" games. John Carmack then came up with his own concept: a game about using technology to fight demons, inspired by the "Dungeons & Dragons" campaigns the team played, combining the styles of "Evil Dead II" and "Aliens". The concept originally had a working title of "Green and Pissed", but Carmack soon named the proposed game after a line in the film "The Color of Money": "'What's in the case?' / 'In here? Doom.'"