![]() The haunted house was to be designed and staged by Two Downtown of Seattle, Washington. Its unfinished, underground parking garages formed a "concrete labyrinth," complete with dirt walls, and were adjacent to a "cathedral-like" cafeteria building well-suited for the event. John was in need of an environment less sterile and uninspired than the main Microsoft campus to house the event, and found a perfect solution in the form of the "Red West" campus still being constructed for the Microsoft Home team. John, who had been facing constant battles with Microsoft's internal public relations teams and other opponents who insisted on attempting to micro-manage the event and tried to rein in the more ambitious elements of its planning. Inviting id Software to participate in the event, and making it "their" event, took a significant amount of pressure off St. John could not have called id at a better time since to Mike Wilson, "life was a party that never died." Wilson would create an enthusiastic press release for id Software, stating, "We are leading Microsoft down the highway to Hell." :160-161 Īccording to David Kushner in Masters of Doom, St. John already had with id Software's Jay Wilbur and John Carmack from negotiating on the development of WinDoom and Doom95, he was able to persuade them, along with new business assistant Mike Wilson, to combine the Judgment Day event with the final rounds of the already-ongoing Deathmatch '95 tournament, for which Microsoft would take over all expense. Īll festivities aside, the primary core of the event would be to serve as a launch party for the first generation of DirectX games on Windows 95, including Microsoft's own Doom95. The two settled on a haunted house theme for what would be a grand, carnival-like Halloween party, inspired by the infamous biennial events held by video game entrepreneur Richard Garriott at his mansion. :160 He undertook planning a major event to precede the important holiday shopping season with colleague Jason Robar. ![]() ![]() John's fears to the contrary, as he had almost been fired over his insertion of the phrase "Who do you want to execute today?" into the slideshow) led to continuing assignments to find new ways to promote the emerging DirectX technology as the future of gaming. John had been previously assigned to design a promotion for WinDoom at the Computer Game Developer Conference in 1994, :160 and the success of this event (despite St. I wanted the event to be a highly concentrated source of stories for the hundreds of press we would invite to attend consumer stories, business stories, Microsoft stories, human interest stories, gaming stories, as much buzz as I could generate in one evening.Īlex St. ![]()
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