I stood by myself in a darkened hallway.

The walls looked like a cross between a jail cell and a slime pit. Everything was arranged in perfectly perpendicular angles, and there was one soldier frozen in the center of the room, never flinching. I walked around, stunned a bit by the silence and the lack of motion. It was 1993, and I was playing an early demo version of the first-person shooter Doom. The gameplay was not quite ready. There were no animations yet, and I was moving around as a lifeless void controlling a camera.

I’ll never forget the experience. I was hooked. And, I stayed hooked all through my young adult years as the PC slowly matured and developed. I was working as a graphics design manager back then, but over lunch, I became a bloodthirsty, gun-toting super-soldier hunting down aliens in a dark and danky gameworld.

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