30 years ago, Doom was released | Hacker News Reader

30 years ago, Doom was released

en.wikipedia.org

64 pointsllamaInSouth36 comments

If you are even slightly interested in its history, I recommend the book Masters of Doom. Easy read, full of little anecdotes.

the audiobook is fantastic and narrated by Wil Wheaton!

This reminded me that the Ready Player One audiobook is wonderfully narrated by Wil Wheaton and has Wil Wheaton mentioned in passing as a character about halfway through…

I really wish the reading by Wheaton wasn't so childishly animated. Had to stop listening. Same thing happened with Project Hail Mary & Ben Franklin bio by Isaacson audiobooks.

I remember the pearl-clutching satanic panic-esque concern trolling a lot of politicians and advocacy groups extolled when Doom was at its peak popularity. 30 years later and evidence to the contrary, the same types of people are doing the same thing with modern games like GTA6. It's kind of wild to watch.

I think the cherry on top is that if a teenager’s interested in the 1993 release of DOOM today, we’d probably be encourage them to be curious from an art history angle.

I remember the event well, because the download became available the day before finals.

Things did not end well.

On bbs?

On the FTP server of the University of Wisconsin. Romero tells this story where people are hanging around in the upload directory, waiting for the Doom shareware release to drop, creating text files expressing their impatience.

Ah hmm, I don’t recall the Internet being generally available until 1994/1995 (that’s when we got dialup services in my area). It must have been a bunch of university students

Related,

Carmack and Romero reunited to talk DOOM for it's 30-year

https://www.pcgamer.com/for-dooms-30th-anniversary-the-johns...

YouTube archive:

https://youtu.be/QvAkaJsvAXs

Besides the legendary Masters of Doom book, Romero released his autobiography this year:

The birth of id software – Excerpt from John Romero's autobiography

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808939

Doom used to be more popular than all of Microsoft.

What do you mean by, "used to be"? ; - )

Doom is a great example of the absolutely disgusting rate hardware advanced at in the 90s. Feels like we got much farther in the ten years between Doom 1 (1993) and Doom 3 (2003), than in the twenty between Doom 3 and 2023.

While Warhammer 40k darktide looks pretty similar in graphics to Doom(2016) I am pretty impressed by how seamless the multiplayer experience is. You got all those mobs running towards your 4 player party and it all works seamlessly. Multiplayer experience evolved a lot from where it was 10 years ago.

There's a WH40k DOOM-like game that came out recently BTW. It's called BOLTGUN. I haven't played it yet but it looks super fun

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2005010/Warhammer_40000_B...

Feels alright to play. Just very repetitive

Faster connections, shorter pings.

> twenty between Doom 3 and 2023

> twenty

> Doom 3

WTF. Doom 3 is twenty years old?!

2004. Very close to it, now!

I remember playing it (poorly) on a GeForce MX440.

We’re closer to 2100 than to the start of world war 2.

I had the exact same reaction. There's a sheen of new-ness attached to Doom 3 in my mind that I don't think can be removed now.

That first taste of Doom 2 multiplayer is what set me on my life's course.

- a reformed, once-degenerate, FPS gamer.

Wow I can’t believe it was only a ten year gap. Feels so much longer.

Like the two gaps between the star wars trilogies.

1977-1983:Child

16 year gap

1999-2005: (immature) Adult

10 year gap

2015-2019: world weary (immature) Adult

The 10 year gap felt like 5 minutes, whilst the 16 year gap was almost infinite.

I always think how DOOM was released in the heyday of the Super Nintendo, which had a 65816 CPU (effectively a 6502 upgraded to 16-bit and clocked at 3.58 MHz).

There was such a vast gulf between PCs and console hardware back then, with games like Doom using the beefy 32-bit 50+ MHz CPU to do everything in software, and consoles relying almost entirely on dedicated graphics hardware.

For non native English speakers, believe it or not, disgusting is a compliment here

The original 60mhz Pentium is also 30 years old, released on March 22, 1993.

Don't think anybody was playing doom on a Pentium early on....alot of 486s

Yeah, Pentium was for Quake.

Agree

God, I feel old.

This is exactly what i felt when i saw the date and remembered doom turned 30

30 years of DOOM: new code, new bugs - https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/1087/

They've missed a few platforms https://gamerant.com/doom-commercial-kitchen-hardware-runnin...

Wolfenstein 3D was released on May 5, 1992

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com