Computing in the Era of Doom: What Were PCs Like in 1993?

Game Engine Black Book: Doom. By Fabien Sanglard. 429 pages. Doom. The game that popularized the term “deathmatch”. The game that made modding accessible to millions of players. The game that killed productivity across thousands of offices around the world. It wasn’t the first first-person shooter (for example, Doom’s developer id Software had released Wolfenstein 3D just a year prior) but it was the game that put the genre on the map. Fabien Sanglard’s excellent book dives completely into the internals of the game, detailing the compromises made to render a 3D world on consumer hardware of the era. The result is not just a technical reference but a memory capsule of what it was like to develop and play games on a PC in 1993, when every byte of memory mattered and every CPU cycle had to be fought for. Playing Doom in 1993 required an expensive machine, even at sub-20 Frames Per Second (FPS). How much would such a machine cost? What was the state of the art in features back then and…