Bill Gates once starred in a Doom promo — and the video has finally surfaced
A recently resurfaced video from 1995 shows Bill Gates dressed in a black leather jacket and wielding a shotgun inside a Doom-themed set — and it's every bit as awkward and fascinating as it sounds. The clip was filmed at Microsoft's internal "Judgment Day" event on October 30, 1995, on the Redmond campus, and was designed to sell developers on Windows 95 as a serious gaming platform. It survived only because a DirectX employee smuggled a copy out of Microsoft's archives after the company's PR team ordered a single showing.
Behind the stunt
The event was directed by Alex St. John, the evangelist behind DirectX, Microsoft's new API meant to replace the patchwork of DOS-based tools that PC game developers were using at the time. Gates showed up with about 20 minutes to spare, recorded the whole thing in a single take with no prompter, and — mid-address — shoots a demon that interrupts him. PR was not pleased. The video was never meant to be seen again.
The stakes were real. DirectX 1.0 had launched on September 30, 1995, to a cold reception. id Software's John Carmack openly dismissed it as adding overhead without benefit. More tellingly, Doom had been installed on more PCs than Windows 95 itself — Microsoft needed gaming, not the other way around. To win Carmack over, Microsoft ported Doom to Windows 95 for free, with id retaining all rights. The result, Doom95, shipped in August 1996 and became the first major DirectX game.
When Microsoft wanted people to take Windows 95 seriously for gaming, they used DOOM.
— Lost Internet (@LostMemeArchive) May 26, 2026
They made a promo where Bill Gates appeared in a trench coat inside the game world.
Microsoft basically used hell demons to sell Windows. pic.twitter.com/lb1ST6peqY
Why it matters now
Gates's Doom appearance is documented in David Kushner's book Masters of Doom, but until now it existed only in text and eyewitness accounts. The video quality is rough — two minutes of compressed, era-appropriate degradation — but the content is genuine. It captures the moment Microsoft decided PC gaming was worth betting on, an API nobody wanted became the foundation of modern Windows gaming, and a software billionaire cosplayed as a demon slayer to prove a point.
DirectX went on to underpin 30 years of Windows gaming, from Doom95 through to ray tracing in today's titles. The Judgment Day footage is a strange artifact of that pivot — equal parts corporate desperation and accidental charm.