Doom launched with what would now be considered a very basic online mode. We were hooked.īut after a few weeks of play there was still one thing we hadn't tried - multiplayer. As there was no copy protection on the disc, almost as soon as Fred brought it to the office, it was on everyone's computers.
It allowed the game to go viral at a time when 'going viral' still meant catching chicken pox at your mate's birthday party. Indeed one of the cleverest business decisions John Romero made was allowing software companies with already established retail channels to box up and sell Shareware Doom at no charge from Id Software. Our programmer Fred Williams bought a copy of the shareware version in the Game store on Leamington high street - you could download it for free, but back then the internet was super slow and super expensive, unlike Game, which was convenient and super expensive. Naturally, we'd already played Doom, which had been released a few months before and was still the hottest game in the world. I was working at Big Red Software, a video game developer then based in Southam, Warwickshire, just up the road from Codemasters.
It was a warm Saturday morning in the summer of 1994.
