In an interesting little nugget of computing and gaming history, it turns out that none other than Gabe Newell — then a bigwig member of Microsoft’s Windows team — was one of the reasons that Windows became a viable gaming platform, and probably why Windows went on to completely monopolize the consumer computing market for almost two decades.

For 13 years through to the mid-’90s, Gabe Newell was “producer on the first three releases of Windows” at Microsoft. At the time, according to Newell, “it was common wisdom that it wasn’t possible to write a good game in Windows because of, well, unnamed technical reasons.” In 1993 Doom was released, and according to Newell it became the number one most-used program in the entire US, ahead of Windows. When you consider that Id Software was a company of just 12 people, and Microsoft already had hundreds of developers working on Windows, this was quite an achievement.

A young and handsome Gabe Newell, probably from around the mid-'90sNewell was disappointed that this game ran in MS-DOS, rather than Windows, and thus tasked some of his engineers to create a Windows port. According to an interview back in 2007, he then apparently called John Carmack at Id Software to say that Microsoft would do the port for free, and thus the port was eventually released as Doom 95. It is possible that the success of Doom, and Doom 95, showed developers that it was indeed possible to write top-notch games on Windows. It’s also worth noting that WinG, the precursor to DirectX, was maturing at the same time — perhaps it was a combination of factors that finally made Windows the de facto gaming platform.