While Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, and I might seem like quite different people — he leads one of the world’s most valuable companies and is a hugely influential tech figure, while I’m a long-haired hardware writer who recently had beans on toast for lunch — it seems we share more common ground than initially thought, especially when it comes to our opinions on games.
In a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast, Huang was asked about what he considered the greatest or most influential game ever made. His response was immediate and unequivocal: “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.”
He elaborated on Doom’s unique impact: “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 also gave a nod to Virtua Fighter from a game technology perspective, mentioning a friendly relationship with the developers of both titles.
While many might argue that other games paved the way earlier, Doom’s iconic status in gaming culture is so profoundly established that even your grandparents might have heard of it. Indeed, given the relentless march of time, many of them probably played it too.
It’s genuinely satisfying to see Huang’s instant recognition of Doom as an incredibly influential game, whose profound impact extends far beyond just gaming, reaching deep into our shared cultural consciousness. I fondly recall an anecdote involving a former boss who used to scoff at the idea of me playing ‘those video games’ in my spare time. Imagine my surprise when I later discovered a copy of Doom installed on his aging laptop. “I thought you didn’t like games,” I remembered saying to him. His reply? “Oh, Doom? Yeah, that one’s really good.”
Yes, it was. It is. And it always will be. We all have something in common, at the very least. Who knew?
