ABSTRACT
There is a person moving quickly through a dark and futuristic corridor, wielding a shotgun and casually blowing away zombies and imps that pass in front of his weapon’s crosshairs. Following the rampage, the single-barrel shotgun disappears from the screen and the flesh-and-blood protagonist appears wearing a black trench coat with the shotgun in hand. In this uncanny meeting of the virtual and the real, Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, appears as himself inside the environment of the popular first-person shooter (FPS) game Doom (1993). This video, shown on October 30, 1995, as part of a Microsoft Halloween party for the gaming industry’s top designers, exemplifies a strange moment of cultural remaking (Kushner, 2004, pp. 201-2). Gates, still holding the emblematic shotgun from the game, gives a speech about Windows 95 and its ability to run any video game, adding, “These games are getting really realistic.”1 While he is delivering additional technical testimonial for his product, a zombie appears from off screen, which Gates then summarily dismisses with one shot from his shotgun, admonishing, “Don’t interrupt me.” In this interesting virtual remake of himself, the Microsoft CEO injects his likeness into the world of Doom, and, though largely tongue-in-cheek, his remediated self uses the Doom shotgun to stitch together the two narrativesthe virtual one of the classic video game and the real one of his Windows 95 sales pitch.
