Dungeons & Dreamers: A story of how computer games created a global community by Brad King & John Borland

Author:Brad King & John Borland [King, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: virtual world, internet communities, computer, games, web culture
Publisher: ETC Press
Published: 2014-02-26T23:00:00+00:00

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As gaming moved online and farther into the mainstream, executives from other high-tech sectors sought to use the advances Carmack and others had made to boost their own profiles. Perhaps the most prominent company to reach out to the young communities Thresh and his brothers had adopted was Microsoft, which in 1995 was desperately trying to convince developers that its DirectX multimedia technology, a part of its new Windows 95 operating system, could be used to make good games.

At the time, the company didn’t have a great reputation for multimedia applications—those were still the domain of Apple Computer, although that company was losing ground fast—and most PC game companies still wrote directly for DOS instead of for the Windows operating system. In hopes of breaking through this skepticism, a talented Microsoft programmer named Alex St. John went to id’s John Carmack and asked if id Software could make a version of Doom running on DirectX.

Carmack agreed and gave St. John the Doom source code, and a team of programmers was hired by Microsoft to work on a version called WinDoom. With that in hand, Microsoft was able to convince other developers that its technology was strong and stable enough to support resource-intensive games. Other programmers started coming on board.

In large part to show off the new Windows 95 operating system’s ability to play games, Microsoft decided to host a huge Halloween party that year for its game developers. In conjunction with this, it arranged with DWANGO to sponsor a national Doom tournament, where people on each of the company’s regional servers would vie for a spot in a final-round tournament on the Microsoft campus, at the party. Deathmatch ’95 would be the first time that the best Doom players around the United States would be able to meet and play face-to-face.

Gehrke signed up and almost immediately lost in an early qualifying round. But the tournament was on his own employer’s campus, so he wasn’t about to miss any of it. Fong, of course, was one of the finalists.

Microsoft went all out for the party, spending close to $1 million on props (including a giant volcano), food, and other entertainment. The company dedicated one of its parking garages to the event, turning it into a giant haunted house. Early DirectX game developers were invited to create their own sections, and scores of journalists came for tours. Id showed up with a band called GWAR that was famous for dressing up in freakishly cartoonish horror costumes and spitting fake blood on its audiences. The band brought along its own props: an eight-foot-tall vagina with a few dozen little phallic sculptures, and a giant penis-shaped monster. Microsoft’s public relations staffers were horrified, but the id attendees loved it.

Even Microsoft’s CEO, Bill Gates, got into the Halloween mood. The company created a video that projected him into a Doom background, where he ran around for a few minutes blasting demons with a shotgun. Afterward, he stepped onto a stage to address the crowd. While

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