Doom Turns 25: The FPS That Wowed Players, Gummed Up Servers, and Enraged Admins (theregister.co.uk)

On December 10, 1993, after a marathon 30-hour coding session, the developers at id Software uploaded the first finished copy of Doom for download, the game that was to redefine first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Hours later IT admins wanted id's guts for garters. The Register: Doom wasn't the first FPS game, but it was the iPhone of the field -- it took parts from various other products and packaged them together in a fearsomely addictive package. Admins loathed it because it hogged bandwidth for downloading and was designed to allow network deathmatches, so millions of users immediately took up valuable network resources for what seemed a frivolous pursuit to some curmudgeonly BOFHs.

The game was an instant hit -- so much so that within hours of its release admins were banning it from servers to try and cope with the effects of thousands, and then millions of people playing online. It spawned remakes and follow-up games, its own movie (don't bother) and even a glowing endorsement from Bill Gates.

Comments

IPX

[ledow]

Played it.

Over IPX.

With multiple players.

Over a parallel port cable.

I kid you not.

There was an old DOS TSR (that I have never been able to find since) that was a packet driver that operated over either a parallel port or serial port daisy-chain from one machine to the next. Wasn't fast, but it was fast enough. Better than serial alone as you could have several machines connected and it was faster. And everyone had parallel ports - I have no idea if EPP or whatever was an option that long ago, but it was faster than the available serial. And you had several of serial/parallel most likely so you had the ports to daisy-chain.

Back when nobody had network-cards in their machines and kid's budgets didn't run to even 10Base2 to play their games - Oh, but dad! - we improvised. I don't even remember how we found it (no Internet for us back then), or what it was called, but we used that little TSR for an awful lot of things that weren't otherwise possible without a proper network card.

The only bit we bought was an ever-increasing daisy-chain of serial and parallel cables using whatever people had discarded or we could find. To this day, I could literally make any combination of 9/25pin M/F to 9/25pin M/F cable for tens of meters of length just from those old cables in my bits box.

I remember it was a faff with whatever the packet driver was, and then having to load some (Novell?) TSR to allow IPX etc. all in a DOS boot config (we had DOS 5, I think, and 4DOS utilities and a bunch of PC Magazine freeware - AMENU - to make a menu just to load up that config and play networked).

Hell, I even remember playing Quake over the same link, but that was only temporarily as only our friend had another machine powerful enough to run that, and then we upgraded to 10Base2 and then 10BaseT not long after.

But I have gamed IPX over parallel port via DOS. People always thing I got it wrong whenever I say that.

Re:The Doom Technique

[Immerman]

You realize that strategy only actually works for solving traditional "one path" mazes, right? All you need is one cyclic path curving to the left with further spaces inside it, and you'll never reach those additional spaces. A lot of paths and architecture, (not to mention labyrinths, where maze paths might not have any dead ends), will keep many of its secrets against such a strategy.

Still, a not a bad starting point, so long as you're alert to its stark failings.

Quake Fulfilled Doom's Promise

[BrendaEM]

Quake had true 3D levels that can pass over one another. Quake had 3D adversaries. Quake had network gameplay with Quakeworld. Quake had OpenGL support with GLQuake that launched the GPU world, really starting with the Voodoo 1. Quake had translucent water, which was amazing the first time I ever saw it. And lastly, Quake is still the bar that any small platform must aspire to by answering the question, "Does it run Quake."

Broadcast packets - bad article or summary

[Mr307]

The reason the first versions of DOOM brought down networks was its use of broadcast packets, it was patched out in later versions.

Those packets would repeat across routers to other locations over wan links and more, total network mayhem back then. I dont recall the game using any special amount of bandwidth at all beyond the broadcast packet problem.

Once it was patched it was mostly benign on a local segment.

Re:*seemed* like a frivolous pursuit?

[apoc.famine]

One could say that it's only 99% frivolous.

And one would be wrong.

Hacking Doom, Quake, and UT taught me to code. I wouldn't have hacked on them if I wasn't playing them.

Building levels for them gave me a way to visualize 3D environments that I later found out not a lot of people have. Not sure if it's cause and effect, but it definitely helped strengthen that skill.

Working on larger levels and mods taught me how to be a program manager, a skill which is enormously useful the older I get. Hacking on these taught me the value of documentation and code comments, especially as I began working with other like-minded individuals.

Doing all this taught me about emergent behavior in a way I could never have learned otherwise. Now I really understand how a system design can reinforce or depress user behavior, and I consider that when designing systems.

All that because I played games so much I couldn't help tinkering with them. I'd never had the drive to do any of that in my teens and early 20s if I hadn't been obsessed with the games. Hell, I wouldn't even have known that such things were possible. I bet a solid 50% of my success in life came from those games.