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)
The "Doom" franchise was later continued with the follow-up "" (1994) and numerous expansion packs, including "Master Levels for Doom II" (1995), and "Final Doom" (1996). Originally released for MS-DOS, the games have been ported to numerous other platforms. Once the game's source code was released in 1997, it spawned even more adaptations, as fans further ported the code to countless devices, even on machines that were not designed to run games. The series started to lose mainstream appeal as the technology of the "Doom" game engine was surpassed in the mid-1990s, although fans have continued making WADs, speedruns, and modifications to the original. The franchise again received popular attention in 2004 with the release of "Doom 3", a retelling of the original game using id Tech 4, with an associated 2005 "Doom" motion picture. A reboot of the series, simply titled "Doom" and powered by id Tech 6, was released in 2016 and focused on returning to the fast paced action of the first two games.