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DOOM: Sharing the Horror
id's savvy adoption of shareware distribution changed the industry.
By Benjamin Turner | Dec. 8, 2003

DOOM was the ultimate outsider, appearing from practically nowhere and revolutionizing the entire PC gaming industry. It's not hard to see why: It had great graphics. It had great sound. It had superb gameplay. But the one thing it didn't have, at least not yet, was a fancy box to sit on retail store shelves to compete with other game boxes. That's because in its early days, DOOM was sold almost entirely through mail order. It might seem hard to believe that even the greatest of games could sell enough copies without a retail presence, but that's exactly what DOOM did, thanks to smart implementation of a little concept called "shareware."

Cutting the Middleman

Early shareware was no fun.

The idea of shareware was first invented by an application programmer in 1980. Rather than sell his software in stores, he offered it for free, with the stipulation that users should send him some small amount of cash if they liked it and wanted to continue to use it. This non-traditional business model turned out to work surprisingly well, enough so that other people started using it, letting the idea flourish in the computer software underground. However, it was mainly used for application software like word processors and spreadsheets -- rarely for games.

Enter Scott Miller. The founder of Apogee Software, Miller decided to try his luck at selling his own game, Kingdom of Kroz, through the shareware business model. He hit on a killer idea. Instead of releasing the full game as shareware, he made the first episode (segment) of Kroz available through electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes) across the country. Users could download and play that first episode all they wanted, but it offered only a taste of the rest of the game. Customers would have to send payment to Miller to get episodes two and three, and thus have a complete game.

The advantages to this approach were several. First, it avoided the serious problem of freeloaders who'd download a full product and never get around to paying. Having a playable sample floating around was also a cheap and effective way to get the word out on a new game. If the player liked a game they could go right back on the BBS they got it from to talk about it, effectively spreading the word. Cutting out conventional publishers, retailers, and manufacturing costs funneled more money to the creator, and also cut down on the costs to manufacture and send out discs, letting Miller offer his wares for prices well below those of "conventional" computer games. Finally, players liked the "try before you buy" concept, and electronic downloads that let them do that were very convenient.

Who Needs Retail?

The first episode of Commander Keen was shareware.

id Software bought into the shareware idea in 1990, when it let Miller's Apogee publish its first game, Commander Keen. Similar success followed with the ground-breaking first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, which was eventually split into no less than six episodes. id enjoyed the benefits of shareware, and found it to be a good way to get its product into peoples' hands. Even if only a small percentage paid for the full version, the profit margins were so overwhelmingly high that there was little reason to complain. Following Wolf's shareware success, id also released a retail semi-sequel called Spear of Destiny, which curiously underperformed.

Given Wolfenstein's runaway shareware success, it was a no-brainer to design DOOM as a three episode package. Not seeing the need for a middleman, id decided to break with Apogee and self-publish DOOM as shareware. Episode one ("Knee Deep in the Dead"), contained nine full levels of carnage, and was released as a 2.3 megabyte download on December 10, 1993.

Next: Changing the Industry »
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King of Shareware?

Though he was no longer affiliated with id by the time DOOM was released, Scott Miller deserves credit for originally turning id on to the virtues of the shareware concept. Without his influence, it's possible that DOOM's first episode wouldn't have been released for free, which would have resulted in much less exposure than the game received as shareware.

Which Wins?