Have a Blast ⭐

I’ve been playing multiplayer first person shooters since the initial release of DOOM in 1993. This was such a long time ago that I had to download the shareware freebie episode, consisting of 8 or 9 levels, over multiple days using my dial-up connection. And then I had to send a check to Mesquite, Texas via snail mail so I could receive the full game in return several weeks later. On floppy disks.

This was also such a long time ago that I had to create a special stripped-down MS-DOS boot disk so I could play DOOM on my first PC, an AMD 386SX-based system I cobbled together by hand. I had a friend with an expensive Intel 80486-based PC, and I was jealous that he didn’t have to do that. (If memory serves, the most significant difference in this case was RAM: I believe my PC started out with 2 MB of RAM while his had 4 MB. I think.)

In those pre-Internet days, DOOM provided two multiplayer experiences, a two-player cooperative mode and a four-player deathmatch in which four human players would run around whatever level and shoot each other. This would eventually be transformative, but the DOOM networking code was written to work over Novell Netware (IPX/SPX), limiting its reach. Online services like DWANGO quickly appeared to deliver this experience over dial-up, and future games would simply embrace the TCP/IP-based networking protocol used by the Internet.

Fortunately for me, I worked in the computer labs at Scottsdale Community College (SCC) and was friends with some of the more technical people there. People who pointed out that we had a Novell Netware network at the school, had access to the labs and classrooms at all times, and could play DOOM together. And so we did, usually in one of the labs where we could hoot and holler as we chased each other around. But a few times, we used the projectors in individual classrooms to play DOOM against each other, with the game displayed on an entire wall. Glorious.

I’ve always loved videogames, and I am part of the first generation of people to have videogame machines at home. But multiplayer, the ability to compete against other people in real-time, was a literal game changer. It would be many years before I would mostly give up on single player games, but DOOM set the stage for that transition. It was so important to me that I bought Novell-compatible networking cards for my PCs later in the 1990s just so I could play certain games with others.

Things evolved in time and mostly got better. MS-DOS games persisted through the end of the 1990s, but we transitioned to Windows in time. PCs got faster and better. The Internet happened, and I was lucky enough to be in the first major city in the U.S., Phoenix, to be wired for broadband cable Internet access thanks to its flat geography.

But there were a few side-steps in those heady days, especially at Id Software, where the coding genius that made all this possible, John Carmack, would turn experiments into shipping products at a...