Windows 95 was supposed to become the best gaming platform of its time. For this, Bill Gates had a team led by Gabe Newell develop a customized version of Doom for his operating system and even appeared in a commercial.
Bill Gates is best known for his unremarkable speeches about Microsoft products and the obsessive tendency to control his employees. However, with a commercial for Windows 95, the former Microsoft CEO created a completely different image.
With a shotgun in hand, Bill Gates stood in the setting of the first-person shooter Doom, talking about the new operating system as the perfect gaming platform. The technical implementation of the game on Windows 95 was then supervised by the later Valve boss Gabe Newell.
Bill Gates promoted Windows 95 with a shotgun
What kind of commercial was that? In a 3-minute commercial from 1995, Bill Gates talked about the advantages of his new operating system. He marketed Microsoft Windows 95 as the best gaming platform. By the way, in the same year he also told us what the internet is.
To particularly appeal to gamers in the presentation, Gates had himself inserted into the shooter Doom while armed with a shotgun. When he is interrupted by an enemy, he uses his weapon to dispose of the nuisance and says, “Don’t interrupt me!”
Why this effort? By the end of 1995, the sales figures of Windows 95 lagged behind expectations despite extensive marketing efforts. At that time, the operating system, whose graphical origins lay in a ‘betrayal’, was installed on fewer PCs than the popular shooter Doom.
Gates wanted to leverage the title’s popularity to make his new operating system appealing to gamers. It was decided to develop a modified version of Doom for Windows 95, since the shooter had until then only run on DOS systems and was not compatible with the new operating system.
What did Gabe Newell have to do with it? For the technical implementation of Doom, Microsoft created its own internal team. The founder of this team for the porting was none other than Gabe Newell, who has always been convinced of his products and their security.
In an interview with CVG Staff, Newell said the following about it:
I was the producer of the first three versions of Windows.
After the transition to Windows 95, it was suspected that it was not a good gaming platform.
Around the time the shareware for Doom was released, I installed it on a laptop, dragged all my coworkers into the office, and said, “Look what PC games can do! This is much better than your NES or Sega system.” And I decided to commission some developers to port Doom to Windows.
Gabe Newell to CVG Staff
Shortly thereafter, he left Microsoft after 13 long years to found his own gaming company, Valve. With the development of Half-Life and the later release of Steam as a gaming platform, this was not a bad decision.
Despite his great success with Valve and Steam as a distribution platform for games, Gabe Newell still takes care of the problems of individual Steam users: Player waits days for Steam support, writes directly to Gabe Newell, gets timely help
