Twenty five years ago, on December 10, 1993, one of the most influential games in computing history was released for MS-DOS and Macintosh by John Carmack and the team at id Software. Doom defined an entire category of video games.

Doom is considered to be one of the pioneering first-person shooter games, introducing to IBM-compatible computers features such as 3D graphics, third-dimension spatiality, networked multiplayer gameplay, and support for player-created modifications with the Doom WAD format. Since the release of Doom in 1993, the series has spawned numerous sequels, expansion packs, and a film.

Since its debut, over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold.

The Doom game engine has been ported to many platforms since including some based on modern microcontrollers. The source code to the Linux version of Doom was released to the public under a license that granted rights to non-commercial use on December 23, 1997. The source code was later re-released under the GNU General Public License on October 3, 1999. The dozens of unofficial Doom source ports that have been created since then allow Doom to run on previously unsupported operating systems and sometimes radically expand the engine’s functionality with new features.

Shout out to @aallan who posted about this this morning.