Newell's history of porting Doom to Windows to show it can be a gaming platform (opens in new tab)

The other interesting thing is that, as far as I know, until the late 90s the entire installed base of computers was bought practically every year. There'd be 10M computers one year and 10M bought the next. In that kind of fluid market a company can take over without winning converts (Joel Spolsky wrote about it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html).

Today, PC sales are steady or falling because everyone in the developed world has one already. Someone buying a second or third computer is getting a tablet.

> WAIT. Newell's Windows port (commonly referred to as DOOM95 http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom95) was never popular and very few DOOM players knew it even existed. It certainly didn't prove to the masses that Windows was a viable gaming platform.

Not sure where the original article ever makes those claims.

Quakeworld was my entry point into wanting to program. BSP, VIS, DISP, oh yeah. I remember trying to figure out the math for projectiles and the various splash damage routines.

I remember bunnyhopping and attempting to figure out the glitch to alter the effect even more on sharper turns.

So many 'wasted years' that resulted in a wonderful career and field of study. I emailed John a few times throughout the years. He was the most courteous and honest person I have ever met. One of the replies from Carmack went along the lines of, 'Yeah, those models are our IP. If your community is small and the growth is not going to explode, feel free to use them. Just do not brag about it on your website. Our lawyers are not hunting for people, unless they wish to be seen.'

Part of the reason Doom95 wasn't very popular was that came along so late. It didn't come out until 1996, which was 3 years after Doom originally came out for DOS and the same time Quake arrived.

I didn't have a Doom-capable computer until 1995, and it was hard to find people to play Doom/Heretic/Descent since everyone had moved on to Duke 3D and some game called Warcraft...

It was nice to not have to play Doom in DOS anymore, though.

very few Doom players knew it even existed? really? It was the version I had when I bought it back in the day. I assumed a lot of people bought it.

That wad looks familiar. I wonder if I ever played it.

When I used to work for Lotus we used to use their Unix box in the US to FTP onto one of the big CDROM sites that had loads of wads on and play different ones every week. Happy days.

But did you ever play SPISPOPD? :)

Came here to say this. Gabe is welcome to his version of events but like all humans is suffering from selective memory syndrome. Alex St. John is the one who "made it happen" in my recollection, and I was pretty close to the action.

Yeah, Gabe's role is massively overstated here, but it's important to remember how awful a development platform Windows was for games, that compared to DOS it was far, far worse than Linux is today.

In DOS mode you could easily get full-screen, high-frame rate game graphics. In Windows you'd be lucky if you could push more than one frame per second, the Windows GDI was absolutely brutal.

Linux is a lot further ahead, so SteamOS has a relative head start. If Windows can be made into a first-class gaming platform, so can Linux.

<digression> reading this took me down memory lane, I ended rediscovering windows midi songs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtoHxMWw354

I completely forgot about WinG. I think I remember a test it ran when installing to find the fastest way to blit bitmaps. A tiled curvy red line that would flip tile directions back and forth.

Gabe Newell worked for Microsoft at the time in question. He is saying that as a principal Microsoft employee he initiated the port of Doom because Microsoft saw the problem getting game authors to target Windows. Notable that Alex St. John then led the development team, for those who note his obvious importance in gaming on Windows.

Can you really blame them? It's our fault for using the word "Linux" all the time when sometimes it's too specific (we really mean all un*x) and sometimes too broad (we talk about a specific component such as the DE, Xorg or a specific distro).

You can't expect the average teenage gamer to understand what's the difference between a kernel and an operating system.

In the end, maybe rms was always right, we should use "GNU/Linux". Ten years ago it was humorous because the GNU userland was pretty much the only one available but now with Android, SteamOS and friends it's becoming really misleading.

Was this your first introduction to NeoGAF or other gaming boards? It's pretty depressing isn't it?

It's the primary reason I stopped frequenting video game communities.. Which is a shame because I've been a gamer all my life, and I wish there was a vibrant (and large) community for intelligent discussion like Hacker News but that was game focused.. I'm sure there is somewhere, but I haven't found it..

So true. So much FUD, even by so-called Linux advocates. Guess many haven't played AAA games on Linux (Oil Rush, X-Plane 10, Valve games for native titles, and many run great on Wine), or tried to develop games for Linux.

Fact is, performance on Linux is fantastic, graphics drivers are a non-issue unless you're on AMD graphics (Intel is decent, Nvidia is great), OpenGL is up to the latest version on Nvidia, 3.0 on Intel, and sound is the weak point, but still not that bad.

For developing, you have pretty good, easy tools like Maratis, Irrlicht, Panda3D, SDL, Blender, etc... Not to mention commercial engines like Unreal, Unigine, and others I'm sure...

Linux isn't perfect, but it is pretty good, and it can run AAA games just fine, right now.

i no rite, wen theez fagots gna lern?

This is an excellent book. It's not just about Carmack and Romero (although it focuses on them) but also about id Software as a company, from its inception through to a few months before Quake III came out, if I remember correctly. A very insightful read.

Loved this book. Bought a few copies for friends to hopefully inspire them about what a small, scrappy team of talented individuals can achieve (and the fun... and pitfalls along the way).

A bunch of titles are available for OS X thru Aspyr [1] with porting latency measured in months.

[1] http://www.aspyr.com/