Doom, released on Friday, December 10th, 1993 by Id Software, turns 30 years old today. It was uploaded at midnight to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's FTP server, a process that took half an hour and the webmaster kicking everyone else off for it to finish. The server subsequently crashed from thousands of eager gamers flocking to download the game. According to John Romero in his 2023 autobiography Doom Guy: Life in First Person, the release was after 30 continuous hours of playtesting. The game took up 2.39 MB of space - in 2023, most webpages are bigger than that, and 2020's Doom Eternal weighs about 90 gigabytes in comparison. The full version sold more in a single day than Wolfenstein 3D had in a month. This was only the beginning.
Much has been written about how Doom put first-person shooters on the map, how it was a seminal, sensational experience unlike anything that came before. It is probably the finest and most successful example of shareware in history, at one point boasting a larger install base than Microsoft Windows. The 1994 sequel Doom II: Hell on Earth would introduce the famed super shotgun, and several new monsters that would complete the Doom bestiary. With the 1996 release of the Final Doom community-made mapsets and Id hard at work on 3D shooter Quake, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Doom fad had passed by the late 1990s. Fortunately, that wouldn't be the case.
In addition to arguably creating the practice of videogame speedrunning with its lightweight shareable demo files, and proving the viability of online multiplayer gaming with its deathmatch mode, Doom has a thirty year-strong community to its name. Doom modders and map makers have been going strong since the mid-1990s, and the community is is bigger than ever as of 2023. Encouraged by the versatility of the game's .WAD files, people had been making maps since 1994, but it was the source code release under a non-commercial license in 1997 (followed by a free GNU General Public License release in 1999) that really opened the floodgates. TeamTNT's 1998 source port Boom would form a standard for the great majority of custom content due to its removal of game engine limitations, with many subsequent source ports building off it in some form. Porting Doom to all kinds of computers and devices, such as digital thermostats and a 2017 Porsche 911 Carrera, is now a community fixture in and of itself.
Doomworld's annual Cacowards provide a sort of community "best of the best" every December 10th, the awards themselves having grown to match community output. Talented people have taken Doom and ran with it in all sorts of new and surprising directions, to the point that sometimes it resembles a whole different game. The latest official re-releases of Doom and Doom II now allow players to download select custom mapsets to play. Even John Romero got in on the action with his unofficial fifth episode of Doom, Sigil, releasing in 2019. As of this posting, his sequel Sigil II is fresh off the presses, not even a day old.
1997's Doom 64, developed by Midway Studios San Diego, received comparatively little attention in its time, probably due to people dismissing it as just another port instead of the whole new entry in the series that it was. It would receive more attention in the 2010s, with a digital re-release in 2020 including a set of new levels. 2004's Doom 3 would prove to be something of a black sheep in the franchise with its survival horror style, though it did receive a re-release as 2012's Doom 3: BFG Edition. It wasn't until 2016's reboot Doom that the series would return to some measure of prominence, taking inspiration from the infamous 1996 Doom comic. After Doom Eternal, the most recent Doom game as of late 2023 is Mighty Doom, a top-down roguelite shooter developed by ZeniMax Halifax Ltd. (notably not Id Software) for mobile phones - imagine saying that in 1993. By most accounts, it's an alright game that unfortunately features microtransactions as a way to buy extra gear and avoid waiting between lives.
Will Doom last another thirty years? Given the size of the community at present, it probably will, and as a fan of the game I hope it does. It's speculated that Id is taking a break from Doom at the moment, with perhaps a new Quake to follow up on 2005's Quake 4 and 2017's Quake Champions, which was released out of early access in 2022. Whatever happens, the Doom community will almost certainly live on.