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)
"Doom" was influential and dozens of new first-person shooter titles appeared following "Doom" release, and they were often referred to as ""Doom" clones" rather than "first-person shooters". The term ""Doom" clone" was used to describe the style of gameplay in "Doom"-like games. While the term was initially popular, it was, after 1996, gradually replaced by "first-person shooter", and the phrase "first-person shooter" had firmly superseded ""Doom" clone" around 1998. Some of these were certainly "clones", hastily assembled and quickly forgotten, while others explored new grounds of the genre and were highly acclaimed. Many of the games closely imitated features in "Doom" such as the selection of weapons and cheat codes. "Doom" principal rivals were Apogee's "Rise of the Triad" and Looking Glass Studios' "System Shock". The popularity of "Star Wars"-themed WADs is rumored to have been the factor that prompted LucasArts to create their first-person shooter "Dark Forces".