What happened?
Doom came out about 2 years after the extremely popular shooter 007 Goldeneye came out on the N64. After Goldeneye came out, a disturbing series of murders began. These were made all the more terrifying by the fact that they were all committed by teenagers. These included a teenager killing his mother with a butcher knife and baseball bat, a shooting at a group prayer, and one incident where a 13 and 12 year-old rang their school's fire alarm and shoot the students and teachers from the forest around the school as they evacuated. Yet no one thought video games had anything to do with it, mostly because at the time 007 Goldeneye was the only violent game. Video games were still thought to be friendly and for children. Then on April 20, 1999, 18 and 17 year-old Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold went into their high school with high-powered guns and home-made explosives. They opened fire and killed 12 students and 1 teacher before they committed suicide. The nation was appalled at what happened, and as they tried to find the cause, they discovered several videos the students had filmed of themselves. Eric and Dylan had apparently been obsessed with Doom. They played it non-stop and eventually made a map on the game which was a model of their school. They undoubtly spent hours upon hours on that map killing pixels on the screen before deciding to try it out in real life. In the videos they made of themselves, they often talk about planning the massacre, saying phrases such as they hope to "Kill 250 of you", and "It's going to be like Doom". After the authorities found this, it caused a national outrage. Parents were determined to ban the game and for kids everywhere it was the coolest rule to break. There was a court case about the incident, with several people determined to regulate video games and treat them as weapons, but at the end it was decided that Eric and Dylan were mentally unhealthy, and it probably caused the violence, but Doom was one of the things that urged them to commit the act, so a new rating system was put into place, the ESRB ratings. The ESRB rating included E for everyone, E10+ for everyone over 10, T for teens, and M for mature.