On December 10, 1993, Doom took the world by storm. The shareware model allowed its first episode to reach millions of computers for free—and many of those computers were connected to a network. Companies, schools, and entire universities turned into virtual battlefields. People stopped studying and working (id Software had warned about this), but Doom also put all those networks at risk, and some institutions were forced to set limits, or outright ban the game directly, as was the case with Intel…
The official press release for the original version of Doom dates back to January 1, 1993. In that text, id Software explains several of the game's virtues, including the possibility of combining up to four players on a local network, or two using a modem or serial cable. The announcement adds: “In 1993, we expect to be the number one cause of productivity loss around the world.” And they certainly were.
Doom, the Chaos of LAN Networks
The best source to explore these cases is the book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner. One of them comes from Carnegie-Mellon University: Just a few hours after the launch, the administrator posted an online notice asking users not to play Doom in network mode, since the sessions caused a massive performance drop, bringing the campus network to a total halt. If they didn't comply, they would be forced to disconnect any computer running Doom in network mode.
The Agricultural and Mechanical University of Texas (Texas A&M) had to delete Doom from its servers. At the University of Louisville, a supervisor tired of seeing people run to the computer lab to play ended up creating a program that automatically purged the game's files. Lotus Development had banned the installation of Doom on its systems (which was obviously ignored), but network sessions began after six in the evening.
Finally, Intel published in December 1993 an internal memo with company-wide scope, announcing the ban on Doom. This happened after several subnets collapsed during lunch hour, a period that employees took full advantage of to organize deathmatch sessions. Now, the problem was not just productivity, but also technical: The original version of Doom used broadcast packets that forced every system on the network to transfer the packet to its memory and analyze it before discarding its content. In other words, each computer had to process Doom's data even when it wasn't running the game. id Software fixed that detail with the patch for version 1.2, and the Doomguy continued to dominate LAN networks for a long time.
Sources: Doom Wiki, Computer Gaming World Museum
