Welcome to Old School Games!

On this day — February 1, 1991 — a pivotal moment in PC gaming history quietly occurred: the programmers John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack formally founded id Software, the company that would go on to define a generation of MS-DOS games with titles like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom.

Before id Software became a worldwide influence, its core team cut their teeth in Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge series — including the MS-DOS shooter Slordax: The Unknown Enemy, completed in late 1990 — but February 1, 1991 marked the day they struck out on their own, establishing a development house that would radically reshape the first-person shooter genre and PC gaming culture throughout the 1990s.

At the time, MS-DOS was the dominant platform for PC games, and id Software’s innovations in smooth scrolling, VGA graphics, and shareware distribution helped push the IBM-compatible PC from an also-ran platform into a leading home gaming machine. Celebrating this anniversary gives retro gamers reason to revisit the Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D shareware episodes, the latter of which helped codify the FPS template on MS-DOS systems.

On this day 32 years ago, id Software quietly but decisively changed PC gaming: at (just after) midnight on December 10, 1993, the studio released the first episode of DOOM as shareware for MS-DOS — an upload that immediately spread across BBSes, FTP sites and early internet nodes and helped establish the modern first-person shooter. The team published the first episode freely while selling the full game, a distribution strategy that fuelled DOOM’s rapid, word-of-mouth growth.

The launch was notable not only for timing but for scale: demand was so high that the planned FTP upload overwhelmed the university server id intended to use, forcing administrators to increase connections and clear existing users before the file went live — a small but vivid moment illustrating how quickly DOOM spread. Technically, DOOM introduced a powerful engine and mod-friendly WAD file format that invited user maps and mods, seeding a vibrant community that extended the game’s lifespan and influence.

Play here -> Doom