Ah, the good old Doom. A game that was created by a twelve-man team from Texas. A game from an unknown (at that time) company that was meant to change FPS games forever. We are pretty sure that most of you already know how legendary this game is but did you know that it was the highest usage application in the US when its shareware version was released? Oh yeah, iD’s little gem was installed – and played – to more PC systems and managed to surpass even Microsoft’s OS, Windows.
That was revealed in Bloomberg‘s interview with Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell. Back in those golden days, Newell was working in Microsoft and they made a survey about the installed software of their customers:
“So said well, let’s go look at what our customers have on their PCs. We weren’t going to just ask them. It was a really expensive thing to do. The good news that came out of that was that I think at the time, 20 million people in the U.S. were using Windows.”
Pretty good numbers, right? However, Microsoft’s OS was topped by a shareware version of an indie game that was distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-Internet mechanisms. Doom was the highest usage application in the US, and it deserved it as – for its time – it was bloody amazing, unique and beyond anything we had ever seen.
As Gabe said:
“But what was so shocking to me was that Windows was the second highest usage application in the U.S. The number one application was Doom, a shareware program that hadn’t been created by any of the powerhouse software companies.”
Doom still remains as one of the best FPS titles. Sure it may be old but thanks to all third-party programs/ports/engines (such as ZDoom and Doomsday), players can force billinear filtering and modern-day techniques to improve its visuals. Not only that, but there are mods that bring some truly unique features to it and one of them is the Brutal Mod. Quite frankly, this is among the best Doom mods and we highly recommend it to everyone who wants to replay iD’s gem.
The team behind is currently working on version 0.16 that will be released on May 4th and you can view below its latest footage, as well as some fatality scenes from it. Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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