Sunday Times: 40 Years of the Internet, and Doom Mentioned

This past weekend, there was a main feature in the Sunday Times magazine, claiming that sometime in 2009 is the fortieth anniversary of the world wide web, even though this is likely widely disputed, and events did happen before 1969 that led to this wonderful invention called the Internet coming into our homes. By the way, the writers mentioned, and I guess I should too even though I know this, that the World Wide Web and the Internet aren’t the same thing.

Anyway, I think there was one bit along the time-line of the internet, spanning from 1822 to the present, which featured about 19 main events, that caught my attention, and that was “Doom” at number 11.

The Sunday Times writes:

“Not only one of the greatest and scariest games ever made, Doom was arguably the internet’s first killer application. id Software’s bloody and brilliant (and hugely controversial) “first-person shooter” was released via shareware over the internet- meaning that the first seven of the game’s 28 levels could be downloaded free. It is estimated that those seven levels were installed on more than 10 million computers within two years. As well as being the first must-have game that could be downloaded from the internet, it was a fantastic advert for what networked gaming could be. It could be played by up to four people via a local area network or a modem, and introduced the tern “deathmatch” into the language.”

I thought there were more than 7 levels in the shareware episode of Doom (There are 9; 10 in the Xbox version. And there are 27 levels in the full version of Doom; 36 in Ultimate Doom), but anyway. What can you expect?

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http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29

Sunday Times: 40 Years of the Internet, and Doom Mentioned