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.
Official versions of Doom
The SNES version of "Doom" features all five of the PC version levels that were missing from the Atari Jaguar version, but is missing a different set of five levels instead, and, like the Sega 32X version, does not have any console exclusive levels. The levels included resemble the PC levels more so than other ports. This was also the only home console port of "Doom" released in the 1990s to feature all three of the original secret levels and boss levels from the PC version. Like the Sega 32X version, the player's heads-up display does not utilize the whole screen, and enemies are only animated from the front, which means that they always face the player. This renders monster infighting impossible, although it is possible for monsters of the same type to damage each other with projectiles. The floors and ceilings are not texture mapped, and this version of the game also lacks both battery back-up saves and a password system, meaning that each episode must be finished from the beginning. Multiplayer was only available if an XBAND modem was used, which included support for two player deathmatch. This version lacks the Spectre enemy (replaced with regular Demon monsters), though it does feature the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind boss monsters that the Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, and 3DO versions lack. In the North American and PAL versions, episode two cannot be played on the "I'm Too Young to Die" and "Hey, Not Too Rough" difficulties, and episode three can only be played on "Ultra-Violence" and "Nightmare" difficulties if one is selected from the game's episode select menu, though it is possible to play episode three on the "Hurt Me Plenty" difficulty if the player beats episode two on that difficulty setting. In the Japanese version, however, all three episodes can be played on any difficulty level.