It is the first installment in the Doom franchise. It is an early example of 3D graphics in video games, and has enemies and objects as 2D images, a technique sometimes referred to as 2.5D graphics.

The Story Behind Doom

As id would make the most money from copies they sold directly to customers—up to 85% of the planned price—he decided to leverage the shareware market as much as possible. He believed that the mainstream press was uninterested in the game and bought only a single ad in any gaming magazine. At midnight on December 10, 1993, after working for 30 straight hours testing, the development team at id uploaded the first episode to the internet, letting interested players distribute it for them.

The team planned to release Doom in the third quarter of 1993 but ultimately needed more time. The morning after release, John Carmack quickly released a patch in response to complaints of network congestion from administrators, who still needed to implement Doom-specific rules to keep their networks from crashing from the load. The network administrator was forced to first increase the number of connections, and then kick off all users to make room.

How Doom Plays

While traversing the levels, the player must fight a variety of enemies, including demons and possessed undead humans. To finish a level, the player must traverse through labyrinthine areas to reach a marked exit room. In the single-player campaign mode, the player controls an unnamed space marine—later unofficially termed "Doomguy"—through military bases on the moons of Mars and in hell.

Two multiplayer modes are playable over a network: cooperative, in which two to four players team up to complete the main campaign, and deathmatch, in which two to four players compete to kill the other players' characters as many times as possible. Levels are grouped into named episodes, with the final level of each focusing on a boss fight. The player also encounters pits of toxic waste, ceilings that lower and crush objects, and locked doors requiring a collectable keycard or a remote switch.

Why Players Still Load It Up

The multiplayer gameplay garnered praise: Computer Gaming World called it "the most intense gaming experience available", and Dragon called it "the biggest adrenaline rush available on computers". Edge praised the graphics and levels but criticized the straightforward shooting gameplay. In their book Dungeons & Dreamers: A Story of how Computer Games Created a Global Community in 2014, Brad King and John Borland claimed that Doom was one of the first widespread instances of an "online collective virtual reality", and did more than any other game to create a modern world of "networked games and gamers".

In 1995, Next Generation said it was "the most talked about PC game ever". PC Gamer proclaimed Doom the most influential game of all time in 2004, and in 2023 said its development was one of the most well-documented in the history of video games. Computer Gaming World also praised the music, as did The Mercury News, which called it as "ominous as the scenario".

Doom — Frequently Asked Questions