TITLE
How To Get Away With Making An Ultraviolent Video Game
AUTHOR
Trevor Strunk
PUBLICATION
Defector
YEAR
2021
ARTICLE TYPE
Book Excerpt
FROM THE ARTICLE
It’s difficult to find reviews of DOOM that aren’t retrospectives. The game was as much a flashpoint for modern gaming when it was released in 1993 as any other game in history, and it arguably influenced the medium for American gamers more than any other. As a result, there is a preponderance of retrospectives on DOOM, but not many contemporary reviews that are available without a robust archival search.Still, for DOOM this is fitting. This was a game that spread via nonconventional means, from newsgroup posts to shareware kiosks in the local Staples in my case, along with many other cash-poor eight- to ten-year-olds. The way shareware worked—for those readers not currently knocking at the grim reaper’s dusty door—is that you would buy an inexpensive floppy disc or, later, CD-ROM that contained a piece of a game on it. It was a bit like a demo disc before mass distribution and fast internet speeds made demos more plausible for modern releases. Shareware’s origin in the early 1980s is generally linked to three men: Andrew Fluegelman, Jim Knopf, and Bob Wallace created software (inter-PC communication, database management, and word processing, respectively) that they wanted to market in new ways. Vacillating among “freeware,” “user supported,” and “shareware,” the three men basically created the strange interstitial marketplace of free-but-not-without-strings software that we now know well as we search for, say, a flashlight or white noise app on our phones. Such a breakthrough in the market was fairly staggering for 1982, and Wallace noted on an episode of the television show Horizon2 that he came up with the idea through the influence of psychedelics (an early forbear of infamous drug-software conflationist and current quantum suicide victim John McAfee, perhaps).
But fantastic origin stories aside, it’s fair to describe the impact of shareware on the marketplace of early computer gaming as epochal: it leveled the playing field for distribution in a marketplace that, due to relatively less complex developmental tools than we have today, was already surprisingly level.
GAMES MENTIONED
America’s Army
Battlefield 1942
Doom (1993)
Doom (2016)
Duke Nukem 3D
Medal of Honor (1999)
Medal of Honor (2010)
TOPICS MENTIONED
Violence
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive
EXCERPTED FROM
Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture