Last night, as I was thinking up topics for this week’s article, I began to reminisce about some of the first multiplayer network games I ever played.   I think my first was Doom.  Doom, as many of you know, was the most popular first person shooter to come out in the mid 1990’s, and a game that helped to define the genre.  The gameplay was simple and straight forward: kill everything in sight.

When Doom was released, I was working for a major utility company.  When lunch time would come around, we would all grab a sandwich and head down to the locked IT area.  We would sit in front of a workstation that we were “burning in” and set it up as the server.  We then would fire up Doom, connect to the server, and spend the remainder of our lunch hour shooting demonic creatures.  We did this while watching the door, just in case the boss came by.  Because of our activities and the activities of thousands more like us, companies would eventually create policies about game playing because games like Doom use broadcast packets that could bring a network to its knees.

Doom was ported to almost every platform available at the time, and the trend has continued to include modern platforms.  I have seen ports of the original Doom for Xbox, Linux, PC, Windows, DOS, Mac, PlayStation even some cell phones.  With a franchise this popular, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got in on the action.  The movie version of Doom, a loosely based adaptation of the videogame, was released in 2005.

Despite the popularity of Doom and its successor, its gameplay was eclipsed with the arrival of a new game in our office: Alien Versus Predator (AVP).  This game arrived in 1999 and was a great first person shooter that allowed the player to choose one of three different characters to play:  a human/marine which would give you your typical array of weapons; an Alien, in which you only had about three different attacks, no weapons but it was stealthy, fast and could lash its tail out from quite a distance; or a Predator.  The Predator was my favorite character because of the different vision modes you had (infra-red, electric, normal, etc.), and also because you had great weapons like the killer spear that you could throw for a country mile.  The Predator also had the smart disc: a trademark weapon which would return to the player to use again, much like a boomerang.

I always enjoyed playing as the Predator in stealth mode.  In stealth, you were invisible and you could follow your opponents around undetected.  I would turn invisible and follow my co-workers around the level waiting for one of them to hide in some out of the way place.  Once they were isolated, I would kill them with the Predator’s giant claw, a weapon that is projected from its wrist.

Our gameplay would sometime go on for much longer than our one hour lunch would allow.  We would get so immersed in the game that entire afternoons would vanish.  There were times that we would stop, go get a burger and a beer and go back to work and play until late in the night.  Imagine, trying to explain that one to your boss or significant other.

Hollywood, much as it did with Doom, got in on the AVP action as well.  They produced a film similar in theme to the game but with a completely different plot.  I really liked the movie as it seemed to incorporate the genre and the mythology of the games and the original movies.  Look for the sequel, Alien Versus Predator: Requiem, arriving in theaters on December 25th.

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