It was a warm Saturday morning in the summer of 1994. I was working at Big Red Software, a video game developer then based in Southam, Warwickshire, just up the road from Codemasters. Naturally, we'd already played Doom, which had been released a few months before and was still the hottest game in the world. 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. 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. It allowed the game to go viral at a time when "going viral" still meant catching chicken pox at your mate's birthday party. 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. We were hooked.
But after a few weeks of play there was still one thing we hadn't tried - multiplayer. Doom launched with what would now be considered a very basic online mode. It supported peer-to-peer play via dial-up modems or you could link up to four players via a local area network. Being a game developer we had one of those. So that's what we did that Saturday morning. We went into work to connect our PCs across the office LAN and play against each other for the first time.
We got there at ten in the morning planning a couple of hours play. Although there was no matchmaking or lobby system back then, it wasn't that hard to set up. "We connected via IPX LAN," recalls Williams. "You just had to run its setup program, say you're doing an X player LAN game in its little DOS text-mode setup program, wait for everyone to do the same, and it auto-launched when there were that many players."