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.
Speedrun
This site was, however, quickly followed up by the "DOOM Honorific Titles" (also known as the "DHT"), launched in May 1994 by Frank Stajano, which introduced the first serious competition between players. This site, designed around a notion of earning titles by successfully recording a particular type of demo on one of the predetermined maps in the "IWADs", would create the basis for all "Doom" demo sites that would follow. These so-called "exams" became very popular as the player had to earn each title by submitting a demo of the feat to one of the site's judges to justify his application. "Doom II: Hell on Earth" was released in October 1994, and the DHT conformed to the new additions as well as the new "Doom" version releases. At the height of its popularity, the DHT had many different categories and playing styles. For example, playing with only the in-game fists and pistol, while killing all monsters on a map, became known as "Tyson" mode, named after the heavyweight boxer and former champion Mike Tyson. "Pacifist mode" was playing without intentionally harming any monsters. Each category had "easy", "medium", and "hard" difficulty maps for players to get randomly chosen for. As an authentication method to prevent players from submitting demos made by other people, it was required that they performed a distinct "dance" during their demo (often at the very beginning). With such varied categories, the DHT was appealing to a diverse group of players. However, the DHT had trouble retaining a permanent Internet location. This, combined with the constantly changing rules and the diminished importance of most of the titles, caused public interest to wane as the years went by.