At the stroke of midnight on December 10, 20 years ago, a file was uploaded to an FTP site on the University of Washington's network.
It sparked a revolution and changed the face of the video game industry, which now rakes in $66 billion each year (to put that in perspective, Hollywood is expected to make $11 billion in 2013).
The file, titled 'doom1_0.zip', was a mere 2MB in size, and was capable of fitting onto a couple of floppy disks (remember those?), and the game, of course, was Doom.
It was immediately picked up by students and gamers who put copies on other locations of the fledgeling internet. It made its way into the computers of people around the world, and into best-of lists and magazine articles.
It probably pioneered the debate about violent videogames, given that the Columbine school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were avid Doom fans.
It sparked a revolution and changed the face of the video game industry, which now rakes in $66 billion each year (to put that in perspective, Hollywood is expected to make $11 billion in 2013).
The file, titled 'doom1_0.zip', was a mere 2MB in size, and was capable of fitting onto a couple of floppy disks (remember those?), and the game, of course, was Doom.
It was immediately picked up by students and gamers who put copies on other locations of the fledgeling internet. It made its way into the computers of people around the world, and into best-of lists and magazine articles.
It probably pioneered the debate about violent videogames, given that the Columbine school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were avid Doom fans.
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