Doom in workplaces

In a press release dated January 1, 1993, id Software had written that they expected Doom to be "the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world". Doom indeed became a significant problem in many workplaces, both occupying the time of employees and clogging computer networks with traffic caused by deathmatches and downloads.

One common problem was that the first version of Doom used broadcast packets, degrading the performance of networks on which multiplayer Doom was being played.

Microsoft
"Microsoft's employees worshipped the game, not only for its addictive qualities but for its enviable technical feats." Alex St. John has equated the game with a "religious phenomenon" at the Microsoft campus. (Masters of Doom, page 197)

Intel
Intel "banned the game after it found its systems swamped." (Masters of Doom, page 160)

Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University "erased it from its computer server." (Masters of Doom, page 160)

Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University put up the following notice hours after Doom was released:
 * Since today's release of Doom, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt.... Computing Services asks that all Doom players please do not play Doom in network-mode. Use of Doom in network-mode causes serious degradation of performance for the player's network and during this time of finals, network use is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who are playing the game in network-mode. Again, please do not play Doom in network-mode.

(Masters of Doom, page 160)

University of Louisville
At the University of Louisville, "people [sprinted into the computer lab] falling all over each other to play the game". A lab supervisor created a program that would go through the system and delete Doom. (Masters of Doom, page 160)

Lotus Software
Christopher Boote writes (personal communication with Fredrik, December 2005):


 * I worked for Lotus Development from [February 1994 to September 1995], providing telephone and email support to users of Lotus products (primarily 123 and Notes). During that time Doom hit the world in its inimitable way.


 * Lotus Development policy on Doom was a tad schizophrenic. Officially, it was not permitted to install Doom on any Lotus PC, in practice, this was ignored, but network games were banned until 6pm. (There was a very fiercely fought Lotus League of Doom and then Doom 2 players (which I won one year and came second one year), as well as a very active MODding community.)


 * However, in Support, we quickly started to use the 'Doom standard' when checking users' problems. If their PC had problems running Doom, we could pretty well eliminate many of our 'cold' questions, and get straight down to memory configuration problem analysis. If their PC could run Doom without any issues, then we had to follow a much longer route to solving their problem.