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.
Doom (1993 video game)
With the release of "Doom", id Software, quickly found itself making $100,000 daily. Sandy Petersen later remarked that the game "sold a couple of hundred thousand copies during its first year or so", as piracy kept its initial sales from rising higher. Experts estimate that the game sold approximately 2-3 million physical copies from its release through 1999. According to PC Data, which tracked sales in the United States, the "Doom" shareware edition sold 1.15 million copies by September 1999. The "Ultimate Doom" SKU reached sales of 787,397 units by that date. At the time, PC Data ranked them as the country's eighth- and 20th-best-selling computer games since January 1993. In addition to its sales, the game's status as shareware dramatically increased its market penetration. "PC Zone"s David McCandless wrote that the game was played by "an estimated six million people across the globe", while other sources estimate that 10–20 million people played "Doom" within 24 months of its launch.