Windows 95 was supposed to be the best gaming platform of its time. To achieve this, Bill Gates had a team led by Gabe Newell develop a customized version of Doom for his operating system and even acted in a commercial.
Bill Gates is best known for his unspectacular speeches about Microsoft products and his obsessive tendency to control his employees. However, the former Microsoft CEO once created a very different image with an advertisement for Windows 95.
With a shotgun in his hand, Bill Gates stood in the setting of the first-person shooter Doom and spoke about the new operating system as the perfect gaming platform. The technical implementation of the game on Windows 95 was overseen by the later Valve boss Gabe Newell.
The Doom commercial with Bill Gates on YouTube
Bill Gates promoted Windows 95 with a shotgun
What kind of advertisement was that? In a 3-minute commercial from 1995, Bill Gates talked about the benefits of his new operating system. He promoted Microsoft Windows 95 as the best gaming platform. In the same year, he also explained to us what the Internet is.
In order to appeal primarily to gamers with the presentation, Gates appeared in the shooter Doom armed with a shotgun. When he is interrupted by an opponent, he uses his weapon to get rid of the troublemaker and says: “Don’t interrupt me!”
Why all this effort? At the end of 1995, despite extensive advertising, Windows 95 sales were below expectations. At that time, the operating system, whose graphic origins lie in a “betrayal”, was installed on fewer PCs than the popular shooter Doom.
Gates wanted to use the title’s popularity to make his new operating system more attractive to gamers. It was decided to develop an adapted version of Doom for Windows 95, as the shooter had previously only run on DOS systems and was not Windows compatible.
What did Gabe Newell have to do with it? Microsoft created its own internal team to handle the technical implementation of Doom. The founder of this porting team was none other than Gabe Newell, who is always confident in his products and their security.
In an interview with CVG Staff, Newell said:
I was the producer of the first three versions of Windows.
After switching to Windows 95, it was suspected that it was not a good gaming platform.
Around the time the shareware for Doom came out, I installed it on a laptop, dragged all my colleagues 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 at CVG Staff
Shortly after, he left Microsoft after 13 long years to start 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 continues to take care of the problems of individual Steam users: players wait for days for Steam support, write directly to Gabe Newell, get help promptly