Doom Turns Ten

[Bloodshedder]

Has it really been ten years? Yes. Today the original shareware version of Doom celebrates its tenth birthday. Approximately this exact time on Friday, December 10th, 1993, Jay Wilbur was in the process of uploading version 1.0 of shareware Doom to the University of Wisconsin Parkside's FTP server. In commemoration of this milestone we at Doomworld are proud to present our 10 Years of Doom celebration! We've chosen the 100 best (and 10 worst) WADs of all time, we have an article detailing the sordid history of Doom demo recording, and an article reviewing the also-sordid history of the Doom Source Port. Check it out!

Anyways, David Datta, an administrator at the university, volunteered to let id Software upload the shareware version of Doom to the university's FTP site. Jay Wilbur intended to begin uploading it at the stroke of midnight on December 10th.

The server was filled to its 125 user capacity. Jay wasn't able to connect to upload the file. As the clamoring gamers communicated with each other by uploading dummy files and renaming them, id was out of luck. An attempt to raise the limit on the number of users synchronized with Wilbur's attempt to connect failed. There was only one thing he could do.

Jay immediately joined the IRC channel where everyone was congregating. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry, but we have to kick you all off of the Wisconsin site because I can't get this uploaded. And your choices are either I kick you all off and I get this done. Or it doesn't get uploaded at all."

That was enough. Thirty minutes later, the last packet of data arrived at the Wisconsin FTP server. Thousands of gamers swamped the site, causing the server to crash. And thus was born the age of Doom and the launch of id Software into fame.

Information taken from David Kushner's book Masters of Doom.

[Scuba Steve]

fp on this much historic of occasions.

[nxn]

Great so what's there to celebrate the occasion with?

[sargebaldy]

Yay for Doom's 10th.. except it's Dec 9th here so I don't really care yet.

[Jippy]

nxn said:

Great so what's there to celebrate the occasion with?

Didn't you see the cake?

[DOOM Anomaly]

I'm gunna wear my Raggy T-shirt with "Happy 10th Birthday Doom!" on it to school tomarrow. :D (Still tuesday here)

( I won't be here at 12am so...)
Happy Birthday Doom! :D

[DooMBoy]

Happy Birthday Doom, you've been the cause of much sleeplessness over the past several years as I struggled to perfect my playing skills, the cause of fights between me and my brothers so I could get on this here computer and "play just one more game", the cause of little or no social interaction, and the reason my parents think I'm going to be a psychotic killer in the next three years.
And I know I'm not the only one. :)
Hard to believe it's been this long. 10 years, already? Doesn't seem like it...

[Kaiser]

wow, a decade and Doom is still played by many. This is something not many games can achieve..

Doom will always be one of the finest games ever played.

[5hfifty]

Do we even have anyone here who was there when it was uploaded? An "original" Doomer?

[Amaster]

Happy Birthday Doom!

[Sharessa]

I still have 46 minutes on my clock. :P But at the stroke of midnight, I'm going to start up Doom and play through Knee Deep in the Dead. Then tomorrow morning will be Shores of Hell, and Inferno and Thy Flesh Consumed later on. Maybe I'll even play through Doom2...hahaha...right.

[sargebaldy]

the_Danarchist said:

I still have 46 minutes on my clock. :P But at the stroke of midnight, I'm going to start up Doom and play through Knee Deep in the Dead. Then tomorrow morning will be Shores of Hell, and Inferno and Thy Flesh Consumed later on. Maybe I'll even play through Doom2...hahaha...right.

hahaha doom2, good one! Yeah I'm going to bust out the Doom shareware at midnight and play it keyboard style, with or without sound (silly XP).

[psykopatmullvad]

Happy DOOM to all the DOOMERS around the globe. Happy wishes from cold Sweden. Happy Birthday DOOM, you will live forever.

[zark]

Where's the imp jumping out of the cake? :((((((

omg birfday

[deathbringer]

Happy birthday DooM, you should last another 10 years

...though mordeth will probably still not be out

[Scuba Steve]

http://www.doomworld.com/gbd2/misc/lingbday.gif

I've been around here for too long, and probably known many of you longer than I should. Here's to a 26 year old reading doomworld in another 5 years :P

[Erik]

wohoo, happy birthday to doom! Time to play some of the classics and, uh, skip classes.

[Carnevil]

OMG BIRFDAY!

Happy birthday to Doom, the best FPS ever!

[Arno]

Happy birthday, Doom!

Nice articles. I didn't have an internet connection around 1993-1996 so it's nice to read up on all the wads I've missed.

[Karthik]

Happy Birthday to Doom!!

Wow, 10 years... id rules, Doom rules, all Doomers rule. I don't have to say more than that.

I am going to have to save lots of stuff using my college computers over the next 3-4 days, and transfer to my computer... starting off with Flashback demo and all of today's pages on the 10 Years of Doom site :)

[Shockwav3]

YAY
great articles.

[Vegeta]

Happy birthday DOOM.
You are the best game ever.

YOU ROCK MAN!!!

I salute all the doomers around the world. Keep dooming!

[Fletcher`]

yay hooray!

[Ichor]

And there was much rejoicing, yaaaaaaaayyyy

[Julian]

Happy birthday Doom and a special kudo to those who participated into bringing DW readers these great features! :)

[Jon]

Well done DW for pulling off a really good celebration. The articles up so far are in-depth and really top notch. Its stuff like this which keeps DW at the top of the doom news pile.

I notice gamespy's coverage is utterly introverted (I don't care what people who I don't know think about a game I've probably been playing longer than them) and newdoom haven't even officially announced it.

Edit: oh, apparently they have - what a fanfare :P

[Shaviro]

Jon said:

I notice gamespy's coverage is utterly introverted (I don't care what people who I don't know think about a game I've probably been playing longer than them)

heh yeah. I skipped through all those. Completely uninteresting.

[sgtcrispy]

Happy 10th Birthday Doom!
Great articles guys, excellent!

Now its time to reminice(?) and play some doom1. Heh, too bad I dont have my 20mhz 386sx 4mb ram system any more. That was back in 94-95 I belive, good times...
/get teary eyed

[Torn]

Happy birthday Doom. I will always love you as one of the first (if not the first) pc game I ever played.

[m0l0t0v]

Great articles; good work guys!

Happy Doomsday everyone!