I get the sense that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and I are quite different people. He’s the head of the world’s most valuable company, and a massively influential tech figure. I’m a long-haired hardware writer that had beans on toast for lunch. That sort of thing.
However, when it comes to our opinions on games, I think we might have more in common than first thought. Appearing on the Lex Fridman podcast, Huang was asked what he thought was the greatest or most influential game ever made, and he responded without hesitation:
“Doom. I would say Doom, from the intersection of the cultural implication, as well as the industry turning a PC into a gaming device. That was a very important moment.”
“Now of course, flight simulation companies were before it, but they didn’t have the popularity that Doom did to have made the industry turn the PC from an office automation tool into a personal computer for families and gamers and things like that,” Huang continues.
“And so Doom was really impactful there. From an actual game technology perspective, I would say Virtua Fighter. And so we were great friends with both of [the developers], you know”.
(Image credit: Lex Fridman)
While many would argue that other games paved the way first, Doom’s place in gaming culture is so cemented at this point, even your grandparents have heard of it. Actually, given the endless march of time, many of your grandparents probably played it, too.
So it’s nice to see Huang’s instantaneous recognition of Doom as an incredibly influential game, the tendrils of which run deep within not just gaming, but our shared culture overall.
I fondly remember an ex-boss of mine scoffing at the idea that I played “those video games” in my spare time, and the moment I discovered a copy of Doom installed on his ageing laptop.
“I thought you didn’t like games,” I remember saying to him. “Oh, Doom?” He responded. “Yeah, that one’s really good.”
Yes it was. Is. Shall always be. We’ve all got something in common, at the very least. Who knew?
