Where can I Download Doom?

When Doom came out, complaints soon started from internet node managers about excess load on their servers caused by Doom inter-player communication packages, and to some server managers' antivirus software was added an "Antidoom" package that blocked Doom-related packages and sent a Doom "end this game" code to any Doom players detected. Doom has appeared in several forms in addition to video games, including a Doom comic book, four novels by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver (loosely based on events and locations in the games), a Doom board game and a live-action film starring Karl Urban and The Rock released in 2005. The game's development and impact on popular culture is also the subject of the book Masters of Doom by David Kushner.

The Doom series remained dormant between 1996 and 2000, when Doom 3 was announced. A retelling of the original Doom using entirely new graphics technology, Doom 3 was hyped to provide as large a leap in realism and interactivity as the original game and helped renew interest in the franchise when it was released in 2004. As of 2013, Doom 4 is still in development.

The game engine was licensed to several other companies as well, who released their own games based on it, including Heretic, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, Strife and HacX. A Doom-based game called Chex Quest was released in 1996 by Ralston Foods as a promotion to increase cereal sales,35 and the United States Marine Corps released Marine Doom. Dozens of new first-person shooter titles appeared following Doom's release, and they were often referred to as Doom "clones" rather than "first-person shooters".

Some of these were certainly "clones"—hastily assembled and quickly forgotten—others explored new grounds of the genre and were highly acclaimed. Many of the games closely imitated features in Doom such as the selection of weapons and cheat codes. Doom's principal rivals were Apogee's Rise of the Triad and Looking Glass Studios' System Shock.

The popularity of Star Wars-themed WADs is rumored to have been the factor that prompted LucasArts to create their first-person shooter Dark Forces. 36 When, three years later, 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D, a tongue-in-cheek science fiction shooter based on Ken Silverman's technologically similar Build engine, id Software had nearly finished Quake, its next-generation game, which mirrored Doom's success for the remainder of the 1990s and significantly reduced interest in its predecessor. In addition to the thrilling nature of the single-player game, the deathmatch mode was an important factor in the game's popularity.

Doom was not the first first-person shooter with a deathmatch mode—Maze War was a multiplayer FPS in 1973, and by 1977 was running over ethernet on Xerox computers. However, the widespread distribution of PC systems and the violence and gore of Doom made deathmatching particularly attractive. Two-player multiplayer was also possible over a phone line by using a modem, or by linking two PCs with a null-modem cable.

Due to its widespread distribution, Doom hence became the game that introduced deathmatching to a large audience (and was also the first game to use the term "deathmatch"). Although the popularity of the Doom games dropped with the release of more modern first-person shooters, the game had still retained a strong fan base that continues to this day by playing competitively and creating WADs, and Doom-related news is still tracked at multiple websites such as Doomworld. Interest in Doom was renewed in 1997, when the source code for the Doom engine was released (it was also placed under the GNU General Public License in 1999).

Fans then began porting the game to various operating systems, even to previously unsupported platforms such as the Dreamcast. As for the PC, over 50 different Doom source ports have been developed. New features such as OpenGL rendering and scripting allow WADs to alter the gameplay more radically.

Devoted players have spent years creating speedruns for Doom, competing for the quickest completion times and sharing knowledge about routes through the levels and how to exploit bugs in the Doom engine for shortcuts. Achievements include the completion of both Doom and Doom II on the difficulty setting "Ultra-Violence" in less than 30 minutes each. In addition, a few players have also managed to complete Doom II in a single run on the difficulty setting "Nightmare!", on which monsters are more aggressive, launch faster projectiles (or, in the case of the Pinky Demon, simply move faster), and respawn roughly 30 seconds after they have been killed (level designer John Romero characterized the idea of such a run as "just having to be impossible").

37 Movies of most of these runs are available from the COMPET-N website. As of 2008, online co-op and deathmatch play still continued on servers listed through services such as Odamex,39 Skulltag,40 ZDaemon41 and Doom Connector. 42 Some of the source ports used for online play (for example Skulltag) also support additional game modes such as "last man standing", "survival" (co-op) and "invasion" modes.

There is also a roguelike game based on Doom, DoomRL. Leukart, Hank (1994). "The "Official" Doom FAQ".