Masters of Doom by David Kushner

Author:David Kushner
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588362896
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2003-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

Two hundred feet under Waxahachie, Texas, inside the U.S. Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory, Bob Mustaine flew back in his chair. The government man was terrified. He wasn’t the only one. Across the room, his colleagues also twitched and screamed. This had become a daily occurrence at lunchtime. In all their days studying particle physics at the country’s most ambitious research facility, they had never seen anything quite as shocking as the fireballs erupting on their computer screens. Nothing—not even the multibillion-dollar subatomic shower of colliding protons—blew them away like Doom.

Several states away, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a crowd of students convulsed in the computer lab of Taylor University. Brian Eiserloh, a gifted math student who worked as the lab supervisor, had once again unlocked the doors earlier that night to let the mob of gamers in. The lab, like most around the country, sported the fastest computers available. As a result, he and the other computer enthusiasts had been skipping sleep, class, and food to sit in front of their PCs playing the game. As programmers, they were awed by the graphics, the speed, the three-dimensional views. And as regular dudes, they had never chased each other down with shotguns before. “Oh my God!” Brian exclaimed, checking the clock. “It’s seven a.m. again!” That semester, Brian, previously an A student, would get all F’s.

A few thousand miles away, Nine Inch Nails’ rock star Trent Reznor sauntered off a concert stage as the crowd roared. Security guards rushed to his side. Screaming groupies pushed backstage. Trent nodded and waved, heading back through the crowd. He didn’t have time for this. There were more important things waiting. He stepped onto his tour bus, forsaking the drugs, the beer, the women, for the computer awaiting him. It was time again for Doom.

Scenes like these had spread around the world since the game crashed the University of Wisconsin’s network on December 10. Without an ad campaign, without marketing or advance hype from the mainstream media, Doom became an overnight phenomenon in an online domain that, as fate would have it, was simultaneously beginning to explode.

Though a global network of computers had been around since the 1970s—when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, linked networks of computers (the DARPAnet and, later, the Internet) together around the world—it was just starting to seep into the mainstream. This evolution began in 1989, when a computer researcher in Europe named Tim Berners-Lee wrote a program that linked information on the Internet into what was called the World Wide Web. Four years later, in 1993, two University of Illinois hackers named Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created and released Mosaic: a free “browser” program that transformed the Web’s unseemly data into more easily digestible, magazinelike pages of graphics and text. With this new user friendliness online, commercial services such as CompuServe and America Online helped court the masses. Among the earliest pioneers, not surprisingly, were gamers—the same ones who had been on online discussion groups and bulletin board systems like Software Creations for years.

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