At the stroke of midnight on December 10, 20 years ago, a file was uploaded to an FTP site on the University of Washington's network.
It sparked a revolution and changed the face of the video game industry, which now rakes in $66 billion each year (to put that in perspective, Hollywood is expected to make $11 billion in 2013).
The file, titled 'doom1_0.zip', was a mere 2MB in size, and was capable of fitting onto a couple of floppy disks (remember those?), and the game, of course, was Doom.
It was immediately picked up by students and gamers who put copies on other locations of the fledgeling internet. It made its way into the computers of people around the world, and into best-of lists and magazine articles.
It probably pioneered the debate about violent videogames, given that the Columbine school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were avid Doom fans.
The men behind the game were a group of young 20-somethings - John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud and American McGee. They had already made Wolfenstein 3D, their first breakaway hit and one of the defining games of the FPS genre.
Doom's 20th anniversary has Time magazine's Jared Newman saying that "Doom is still unlike any shooter you can find today." At Paste Magazine, Patrick Lindsay looks back at the claustrophobia of the game.
"It uses its level design to make players feel unsettled more directly. Its levels are labyrinths of jagged angles, blackout lighting, secret passages and disorienting trips through teleporters. The bizarre alien architecture is meant to be unfamiliar and unwelcoming, a constant reminder of the danger around every sharp-angled corner."
And at Wired magazine, the two Johns behind the game, John Carmack and John Romero, discuss what made the game such a phenomenon and reminisce about the technological, marketing and distribution challenges that went into the making of a modern classic.
Source: paste.com, time.com, wired.com