Yesterday marked the 15th anniversary of the seminal PC title, Doom. If you don’t know Doom then you probably don’t play games at all. Doom was one of the most significant and influential games ever released (and probably the most influential PC game ever). Doom influenced games in profound ways, from cementing the FPS as a major genre to introducing the vast public to deathmatch to popularizing modding of games through WADs.
The history of Doom is a pretty fascinating one and I highly recommend the book Masters of Doom to anyone who’s interested in the history of the game and id software. Doom pretty much cemented the reputation for the top two people at id, John Romero as the design genius (who would use that fame and rep to bankroll most of Ion Storm) and John Carmack as the programming genius (who still remains highly regarded). It made id one of the premiere game dev studios in the industry also with their game and engine, leading the way for companies like Epic who would adopt the engine-game model pioneered by id software.
Doom’s popularity is still enormous in this day and age of modern FPS games and 3D graphics. Doom has been ported to pretty much every viable platform that exists. The extensive list can be read on Wikipedia, but everything from every modern flavor of Windows, just about every console minus the retro ones, even mobile phones have all gotten a little taste of Doom. Aided by the GPL release of the source code, Doom has been and in all likelihood will continue its legacy far into the future.
The legacy of Doom is enormous. Even things we take for granted now, like playing as the silent space marine were first done in Doom. So on its 15th anniversary its worthwhile to step back and give our gratitude to Doom. Still imminently playable, still a fun twitch-action shooter, still important to this day.
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