We all know Doom was so popular, so monumental, that it changed videogames forever. As a society, we’re still obsessed with installing Doom on increasingly improbable devices, from pregnancy tests to vapes. But sometimes I run into an old factoid about Doom, some detail from its heyday that I’d forgotten, that still puts it in perspective.
Like this one: back in 1995, Doom was installed on more PCs than Windows.
I was reminded of this bit of trivia by re-reading an old PC Gamer magazine interview with John Carmack, published in November 2008, where the id Software programmer was reflecting on the benefits of open source and shareware. “We look back at the early days when the original Doom was shareware, and Microsoft did a study at the time that said there were more copies of Doom installed on computers than there were Windows 3.1. It’s hard to characterise what exact value that is, to have people aware of your game but not paying you, but I certainly don’t think it’s been bad. Maybe we could have monetised it better than we would have thought of as a young company.”
More users than Windows sounds like it should be a gargantuan number, but you have to remember this anecdote predated the launch of Windows 95, in August 95, which is when the operating system truly took off. Personal computers weren’t rare in the early ’90s, but according to articles about the history of Windows, Microsoft sold only about 10 million copies of Windows 3.0 between 1990 and 1992, and an additional three million of Windows 3.1 within its first three months.
In a 1996 interview, id Software president Jay Wilbur said that the shareware version of Doom had been downloaded 20 million times. That seems like an easy slam dunk comparison—Doom, which ran on DOS, was way bigger than Windows!
In the early ’90s, being installed on more computers than the most popular operating system of the day was unheard of. As Carmack alluded to, those installs didn’t all mean sales, though—Doom’s first episode was free, thanks to the very successful shareware model id used. But clearly it was a detail that stuck with people in the tech industry at the time.
People like Valve founder Gabe Newell, who offered more details on the Doom/Windows ratio in a 2013 interview than Carmack did in 2008. Newell said that in the early 1990s, Microsoft (where he worked at the time) had very little insight into how many people were actually using Windows or its other software or what they thought of it, so it commissioned “a really large study” rather than relying on retail reseller data to guess.
“They’d actually go out into the real world and see what people were actually doing. This was the first time Microsoft had done it, to look at 10,000 people’s machines and figure out what they were actually using PCs for. Well, it turns out they were actually using them for porn and videogames, and that part of the study was immediately ignored. But the good news was that if you extrapolated those numbers, Windows was actually being used in 30 million people’s PCs in the United States.
“But the thing that was really striking to me, at the time, was that Windows was the number two product. Most of you probably know what the number one product was. Yeah, it was Doom.”
The rest of Newell’s talk is interesting if you’re into the sales machinations of the early software industry, and how that ultimately informed the “direct to consumer” model of Steam that we now take for granted. But the bit that sticks out to me is that, at least according to his memory of the study, Doom was installed on more than 30 million PCs. He doesn’t cite the year, but he references the “early 1990s,” which suggests to me the study was conducted before the release of Windows 95.
30 million is a significantly bigger number than the 20 million number Wilbur cited in 1996. And that’s from after the launch of Windows 95! It seems there’s no doubt that Doom exceeded Windows’ popularity. But by how much?
Could boxed retail sales and people passing around copies of the game on floppy disks or across office and college LANs have made up for another 10 million that id Software couldn’t account for? How many times was Doom pirated?
Newell also specifically referenced 30 million Windows users in the United States, while another popularly quoted figure about Doom’s success, this one from a September 1995 interview with Wilbur, highlighted the game being on “at least 15 million computers worldwide.”
Those numbers from Wilbur are the ones you’ll see on Wikipedia, which suggests to me we really don’t know how many people installed, much less played, the shareware version of Doom. The anecdote that it was more popular than Windows 3.1 has been passed around in articles for years, but seemingly without anyone focusing on the significance of Newell’s reference to 30 million Windows users. Was his memory of the study way off, or were we undercounting Doom’s popularity all these years?
I’ve reached out to Newell and id co-founder John Romero to see if either of them remember the survey’s findings in more detail, because it sure seems like we’ve got an unaccounted-for 10 million players or so.
No wonder Bill Gates was so excited about the Windows 95 port of Doom he cut a promo with a trench coat and shotgun.
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