EPT
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Today I have a story. A story of fantastic proportions, one of the soaring victories and tantalizing defeats. A story, much like my others, of something weird, amazing, and unique enough it would feel like a disservice not to share. You see, ESPORTS has not always existed in the depth and variety that we now enjoy. There was a day, once, before the internet, a bleak era when the only option to find tougher competition was over phone lines, through a maze of DOS prompts.
A time often lost to the depths of history, back when when playing a game with multiple players often meant gathering together to sit in the same room and play one another on the a single machine. This is a scene where John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall introduced oddities to the lexicon like “frag” and “gibs”.
And in that scene, in 1995, no event was greater than Judgment Day.
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Romero happily creating DooM, unaware of the tailspin his career would later perform.
John Romero likes to tell people he invented FPS network play. I've never believed that, and after some research it turns out that Maze War and Midi Maze beat him to the punch by several years. It's doubtful anyone at id owned an Atari ST or PSD-1 or whatever the hell a Xerox Star is, so his claim is probably partially right in that they had no knowledge of past projects. Regardless, it's difficult to argue that the day of true mano-a-mano competition was ushered in with anything besides the creation of computer-to-computer play in Doom, and the software that let people do it cross-country.
Online play in those days had yet to reach the convenience and ease of use we have today (feel free to imagine a Battlenet 2.0 joke here). Remember the days when all games had to use third party clients to connect to each other? MPlayer, Heat, WON, Kali, Microsoft Gaming Zone? To do that in Doom, the technology was even more obtuse and primordial. If you wanted to connect to other players, there was DWANGO, a DOS based client that could only be run outside the memory-filling confines of Windows.
DWANGO went on to support other games, seen here
In 1994, when Doom deathmatch was quickly gaining fame, the only way to play was with people on the same network, which typically meant being in the same house or office. Not satisfied with that, Bob Huntley created the Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation (DWANGO) which let you play against people by dialing into a central server in Houston (and later other cities) and setting up modem-to-modem play through phone lines. A service that charged between $8.95 a month, and had ten thousand monthly subscribers by the time 1995 was half over. Like when Twin Galaxies created their international scoreboard, it signified a fundamental shift in how players compared themselves to others. No longer was being the best on the block good enough, to call yourself good it had to be compared to a nearly limitless player pool from all across the city, state, or country. It signified a change in the community, an evolution to a much broader scope for competition and a huge increase in the amount of time needed to become the absolute greatest.
And in those conditions came Judgment Day '95. Sometimes referred to as Deathmatch '95, it was a uniquely modern event in an impressively early time. Announced in September 1995 through a surprisingly modest press release, DWANGO told players they had a very unique opportunity: to win a trip to the Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington. There they would play for a grand prize of a gaming rig (and a lifetime supply of id titles, though I've always wondered if this promise was kept).
The structure of the qualifiers share a strikingly similarity to early video game events, but were decidedly modern as all play was a 1v1 arena done through the magic of proto-internet play. Players would sign up via the DWANGO service, then receive their opponent's name and several days to complete each round. The matches themselves were a combination of three games: Doom 2, The Ultimate Doom, and Heretic, the total frag score at the end of a five-minute bout in each game determined the winner. The brackets were single elimination on each of the 22 servers, with the winners getting a free trip to Redmond to compete at the grand final event. They also flew in two European Champions, though I've yet to find someone who knows how they were selected.
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The Grand Finals were held on October 30, 1995, the night before Halloween. They were held at a party Microsoft was having to showcase Windows '95 and launch Microsoft Game Studios, which led to a pretty immense scene as you can guess. There was a Ferris wheel, a full-sized circus tent with food, and a three-story light-up volcano. Jay Leno was the host, and GWAR played on the main stage. Bill Gates touted Direct-X as a gaming platform in one of the most bizarre public relation videos ever recorded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN0K58EfJSg
Rumor has it this was never supposed to be seen again after the party.
Rumor has it this was never supposed to be seen again after the party.
Amidst all the commotion the competitors had their own stage, where they battled for a gaming machine supposedly worth $10,000. Having successfully unveiled WinDoom at the Game Developers Conference months earlier, Microsoft wanted to use this opportunity to show a newer game running on their software: Hexen, the Raven Software sequel to Heretic. I've never been able to find much about the actual format of this stage of the tournament, much less a full player list, but as near as I can tell it was a single elimination with each set being a ten minute deathmatch.
Going into the tournament Thresh, early deathmatch superstar, is largely remembered as being a favorite along with another North American named Merlock. I stole a quote from an old GotFrag article about how it went down.
By virtue of having already played most of the top players around the country and beaten them, I was considered one of the favorites to win the tournament. Another player who went by the handle "Merlock" was considered the other favorite. Due to a random draw, we ended up facing each other in the semi-finals. I ended up beating him something like 10-5. Merlock got so upset he slammed the keyboard and threw his chair off-stage. It was quite the scene, particularly since LAN tournaments weren't all that common back then.
Having powered through his toughest opponent, Thresh went on to kill in the finals a well. Even now I can't find the name of the opponent he faced in the finals, though I'm sure someone or somewhere out there has it. This is Thresh's take on the match some years later.
Although I didn't practice the game much, it was pretty evident that most players really favored the Cleric class as it was the easiest to learn and had a homing-type weapon that seemed more powerful than anything else in the game.
Since everyone expected the finals to be played Cleric vs. Cleric, I decided to go against the grain and learn the Mage class. Anyway, to make a long story short, I found a way to counter the Cleric super-weapon and ended up shutting out my opponent in the finals, beating him 8-0.
Since everyone expected the finals to be played Cleric vs. Cleric, I decided to go against the grain and learn the Mage class. Anyway, to make a long story short, I found a way to counter the Cleric super-weapon and ended up shutting out my opponent in the finals, beating him 8-0.
After winning the largest LAN of the time, Thresh went on to become the first star in an age where internet play was the norm. He was highly successful at the Quake series as well, gaining a lot of mainstream attention and fame for winning Carmack's Ferrari in 1997 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3iS3k-e-Pc］Red Annihilation[/url]. Eventually he retired, and moved on to entrepreneurial ventures, becoming most well known for creating Xfire and FiringSquad.
The entire story of this event is eerily similar to the foundations of our current scene. A few guys with a passion for games create a fun, addictive product. A second group of people find ways to nurture and develop that love, developing tools along the way to help support a small community. A corporation comes along, sees potential and gives their support with money and promoting tools. The end result is a product that is both strange and amazing, the kind of thing that happens only as a result of a lot of people working on the hobby they have grown to love.
A lot of information for this was taken from the books Masters of Doom and Dungeons and Dreamers, which are worth checking out if you're into general video game history. Special thanks to SirJolt for help with editing, and alteredclone for graphics.
