On December 10, 1993, id Software uploaded the first publicly available version of Doom to a crowded BBS and FTP server, unleashing on the world the most influential game this side of Super Mario Bros. There were first-person shooters before Doom, notably id's own Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Still, Doom added fiercer weapons and enemies, angled walls, and the illusion of height to really complete the faux 3D effect. Whatever came before it, Doom was the shooter that went on to become a cultural phenomenon that helped make the genre the market-leading force it is today.

To celebrate the important anniversary in gaming history, we went around the Ars Orbital HQ offices and asked the editors what they remembered about first being exposed to Doom two decades ago. Here's what sprang to mind.

Kyle Orland, Gaming Editor

Back in late 1993, my family didn't have a computer capable of running Doom, but my school had a whole lab full of them. This fact was pretty useless to me for gaming purposes, though: the most game-like thing we students were allowed to do with those educational machines was play around with Hypercard stacks.

The teachers, however, were not bound by such rules... at least not after hours. I distinctly remember being quickly shooed out of HTML club (where I learned my first tags) some time in early 1994 as a group of a half-dozen or so teachers filed in the door past me. It seems our computer teacher had found a cool new game and was eager to show it off to his colleagues. Of course, we kids begged and pleaded to be let in on the fun when we caught wind of this, but the best he could do was leave the door open so we could watch the first LAN party we had ever seen.

I had played Wolfenstein 3D a bit at this point, so I wasn't wowed by the smooth 3D world so much as the ability for multiple players to shoot at each other from different computers. The idea of each player needing a machine worth thousands of dollars to play multiplayer seemed so extravagant but also so enticing: no more tiny split screens on the living room TV, no more worrying that the other player could see my display for vital gameplay information ("No fair, you shouldn't have seen that red shell coming!").

It wasn't until years later that a decent PC and modem setup in my house made multi-computer gaming an actual thing for me, but I held the promise of that vicarious LAN party through those years and on to this day.

Jon Brodkin, Senior IT Reporter

Doom was the first game I played that showed video games could be fun and look amazing. By today's standards the graphics are weak, of course, but at the time it seemed like a revelation. Wolfenstein 3D had been my introduction to first-person shooters, and while I had a blast, it became repetitive and nausea-inducing within a few minutes of each session. FPS games have always made me a little dizzy, and walking through Wolfenstein 3D's narrow hallways and rooms that all pretty much looked the same heightened that negative effect.

Doom presented a more open and varied world, as well as the most tense gameplay I had ever experienced. Best of all you could kill enemies with a chainsaw. Guns were always fun, but for me nothing beat chainsawing a zombie to death and seeing its pixellated blood squirt all over the screen. Twenty years ago, video games just didn't get any more satisfying than that.

Lee Hutchinson, Senior Reviews Editor

It sounds cliché, but people who didn't play games 20 years ago don't realize what a big deal Doom was, or how incredible it looked running full screen in high-resolution mode—if you had a 486 or a just-released Pentium, that is. My 386-DX/25 couldn't handle it at a decent frame rate, but every so often while playing I'd hit the button to switch from low to high-res mode, just to marvel at what I was missing.

There was no mouselook. Hell, you couldn't even look up or down. You moved with the arrow keys and slid left and right with < and >—WASD as an input convention wouldn't become a thing until a few years later when Quake and GLQuake took over the scene. Hardware acceleration wasn't a thing and wouldn't be until 3Dfx Voodoo cards exploded in popularity in 1997 (with GLQuake leading the way as the thing all the cool kids played). Just you and mode 13h VGA graphics—256 colors, 320x200 pixels.

Still, it looked amazing. Hell, it sounded amazing, too, if you were lucky enough to have a Soundblaster or a Gravis Ultrasound and could hear the digital audio (which, even by 1994, wasn't a certainty). I'll remember the gurgling and howling of Doom's pixellated demons forever.

The first of my friends to get a Pentium was my buddy Matt, whose parents bought a new, power-hungry, 60MHz, FDIV-bug-infected Pentium for Christmas of 1993. The very first game we played on it was, of course, Doom—probably eighteen crazy, yelling hours in one mad Coca-Cola-fueled stretch. I'm sure his parents hated us, but we didn't care. Hell had been loosed on the Earth, and it had never looked so amazing.

Peter Bright, Microsoft Editor

As a schoolkid with no meaningful income, I never bought Doom; I just played the shareware episode on our home 386. And I played it a lot. I didn't go in for the Nightmare speed runs that are now fashionable; it always annoyed me that the respawning enemies meant you couldn't finish levels with a 100 percent completion rating. But I had Ultra Violence difficulty down pat. I'd race through the game, getting 100 percent kills and 100 percent secrets over and over again. I knew every monster closet, every little health pot, every little armor helmet.

I'd played Wolfenstein 3D, but it had never really appealed to me. The maps were so dull, the limited textures and right-angled design made everything look so samey, and there were no landmarks to distinguish the levels from each other. Doom, by contrast, was eye-opening. Even though it, too, wasn't "real" 3D (the maps are effectively all flat, despite the illusions of altitude), it felt like the real thing in a way Wolfenstein 3D never did.

The graphics were mind-blowing. They transported me to this universe where I was a gun-toting hard-ass, blasting demons left and right. I hadn't seen or played anything like it. Though I came to know the maps by heart, with a momentary lapse in concentration, it could still provide shocks, as a stray imp closed on me in the dark and started making that weird crunchy noise as it attacked.

It was an incredible game, but it's hard to call it that any longer. I played it recently, and it's striking how much the experience is changed. The game that once seemed so advanced, so cutting edge, now seems so rudimentary. The level design is architecturally nonsensical, and the graphics astonishingly crude. I only hope that 20 years from now, the current generation of first person shooters looks as crude to us as Doom does today.

Sean Gallagher, IT Editor

In December of 1993, I had just finished building out a test lab for Government Computer News in what had been a storage room stacked up high with dead and dying office equipment. It was my own private playground—I had even strung CAT 5 Ethernet through the overheads to put a drop in to my desk, so I could take advantage of our most prized piece of hardware, a Rockwell 14.4kbps dialup router. Off the corporate LAN, the lab was the perfect setup for a Doom LAN party.

I had played Wolfenstein 3D until my eyes felt like they were ready to fall out. With a three-year-old in the house and another kid on the way, I could not justify the indulgence of a game console, but I could beat on the keyboard of my Gateway 386 SX without any guilt—as long as it didn't wake anyone up.

I had never really had the experience of head-to-head or social gaming on a console outside of an arcade. Doom changed that. Later, Quake would change it even more. And in the many hours I would spend during conference calls a decade later playing Halo on a PC online, I would often think back to that first Doom LAN party experience... as I was repeatedly fragged by others.

Cyrus Farivar, Senior Business Editor

As a kid, my gaming tastes were mostly the same as they are today: casual. I'll play a random game once in a while, or I might even get hooked on a particularly addictive title and binge on it for a while. Doom was one of those gaming obsessions for me in high school, not through any of the standard PC or console editions, but through the unofficial Doom port for the TI-85 calculator.

In the early and mid-1990s, I was introduced to the Expander SF project, run by Mel Tsai, then a student at Michigan State University. He had, in effect, built a one megabyte drive for the TI-85 to jack into. It could load all of the several levels of Doom onto my calculator in sequence—with the caveat that each Doom level took up all of the device's 128 kilobyte capacity. It was worth the hassle to shoot-em-up while ignoring pre-calculus.

There was a time in high school when I became absolutely obsessed with that game. I marveled at the fact that it was possible to have a cheap, handheld gaming device running on the same hardware that I needed to do my math homework. Looking back on it now (through, say, this YouTube video) it comes off as downright cute, even compared to what's available on my iPhone. I usually find modern-day shooters on proper consoles or PCs pretty disturbing, given the graphic violence that they depict with such clarity, intensity, and realism.

I'm sure it won't be long before we're playing Doom variants on our wearable devices.