The Doom Video Game Franchise Started In This Louisiana City

The Shreveport-Bossier area has a lot of historical relevance to America pop culture. Elvis getting his start and "leaving the building", multiple movies being filmed locally, the birthplace of one of America's most notorious serial killers, the basis for Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come", home to Academy Award winner Bill Joyce, multiple world-class athletes call Shreveport home, and Shreveport is even the birthplace to one of America's most successful video game franchises of all time.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a group of developers working for a company in Shreveport called Softdisk wanted to change the video game world. They were developing computer games for their company, but were limited by what could be done on computers at the time, especially compared to video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Those Softdisk employees were John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack (not related to John Carmack), and Tom Hall. These men would start working on a project, on their own time at home, that would forever change video games.

The team would work inside a house on Cross Lake during the night and over weekends. They were attempting to find a way to do what the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) when it came to "side scrolling". That's where your character, for example Mario, was able to run left and right on your screen, and the environment would move with the character...scrolling to the side. Most computer games at the time were locked into one static screen with little movement.

During these long work sessions on Cross Lake in Shreveport, this team was able to forever change American history. They were able to break the mold of computer gaming at the time, and build a "side scrolling" computer game...just like a Nintendo.

The group formed some separate companies, including one called Ideas From The Deep, and most notably id Software. Both were formed and established in Shreveport, Louisiana. After a few months, id Software moved to Texas, where they would launch their gaming empire.

After the move to Texas, id released Wolfenstein 3D in May of 1992. Then in December of 1993, they changed pop culture forever when they released Doom. That may sound like an overstatement, but its not. The Doom franchise is the most important first-person shooter game of all time. Which is a large portion of a multi-billion industry today. It has been ranked as the #1 game of all time by some industry experts, and is regularly in the Top 10 in any "all time" video game list.

All of that, and it was built off from work in Shreveport.

The book Masters of Doom explores some of these early days. Fans of the book, and the source material, have even gone out of their way to explore parts of the book that focus on Shreveport. Including exploring parts of Shreveport covered in the book on Google Maps.