Video Games: The Age of Doom

In 1993 six geeks had a digital nightmare that changed the culture. It's about to get far creepier

It was the janitor who showed John Carmack that the world had changed. In 1993 Carmack was working on a new kind of video game for a tiny company called id Software. He had written games before, but nobody except computer geeks had cared much about them. "I remember showing some people games that I liked on the Apple II," Carmack remembers, "and just having them sit there, completely not comprehending what could be enjoyable about moving these little guys around. People just did not get it." But this game was different. "We noticed that the janitor coming in to empty...

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