December 10th, 1993 marks one of the single most important days in gaming history. An employee at iD software uploaded the file doom1_0.zip to a server at the University of Washington. And with a 2MB transfer of data, the world of gaming changed forever.
DOOM was quite literally a watershed moment. The impact that DOOM had was, and continues to be, unmeasurable. You need not look any further than your local game store right this minute and see all the shelves dedicated solely to the sale of games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Even though Wolfinstein predates DOOM by about a year, DOOM was the game to solidify and define the first-person shooter genre. It featured dynamic map layouts, revolutionary lighting effects, coined the concept of the "deathmatch", introduced online multiplayer, and they were the first to support and encourage fan-made mods to a comercial video game. Not only that, but DOOM only became popular through peer to peer downloading, making it a facinating case study on the real tangable long term effects of mass file sharing.
I do not know where gaming would be had DOOM not connected so deeply with the mainstream audience. It would certainly look much different. Would the first-person shooter have ever taken off had it not been for DOOM? Would it have inevitably connected with people regardless? It is very hard to say, though the mere fact that the first-person perspective and guns became intertwined so quickly is a serious topic worthy of its own discussion.
What I do know, is that the creators of DOOM have not let up their strive to create ground breaking paths for the gaming community. John Carmack for example, if you didn't know, left iD software this very year to become CTO of the Oculus VR.