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.
Gravity gun
Although "Half-Life 2" and "TimeSplitters: Future Perfect" were the first games released to feature a gravity gun (the former released on November 16, 2004 and the latter released on March 21, 2005), id Software had previously conceived a similar idea during the development of the earlier title "Doom 3". id Software designer Matt Hooper noted that "we actually used it as a tool throughout development where we'd grab physics objects and place them around the world". The tool was used to create "damaged" rooms in "Doom 3"; instead of constructing a ruined room, the designers would code a pristine room and use the device to "damage" it realistically. Although used to assist the development of "Doom 3", the gravity gun was not implemented in the final game. Hooper explained that "we talked about that quite a few times, but we had such a big arsenal of weapons, and so many other cool things going on, that it was just one of those things that never made it in". However, Nerve Software revived the code for the weapon five months after the release of "Half-Life 2" in "Doom 3"s expansion pack, "Resurrection of Evil".