What was the Doom community like back in the 90s?

[BrassKnight]

I've always wondered what the community back when the original Doom games were still big but I couldn't find any threads about it at all. Since a lot of the guys here are old I might as well ask, what was the community like back in the 90s and what notable stuff happened during that time?

[lubba127]

everybody was playing sigil ;)

[P41R47]

Well, it was a time of changes, and the commuity wasn't that large as, much like Doom itself, it was still on diapers.
@Linguica, @Mordeth, @Cyb and a few more are since the beggining, when it was something like a mailing list if i'm not wrong, probably are, that worked on compuserver. Some pages are still viewable thanks to archive.org and have a link on the wiki, like this one
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304235714/http://www.teamtnt.com/

 

 @Romero was kinda in contact with the community, too.

Quality wads spreaded from mouth to mouth, so it was a neat time of discovering for some.
I didn't have internet backthen, but there was a lot of CD-R collections with a lot of wads circulating everywhere, so i was able to play a lot of good wads.
Later on, when i was in highschool, a friend gifted me 14 floppy disk with Doom 2, so i started wading through all the CDs i had and played most of the great megawads of the time as most were for Doom 2.

I don't recall any other Doom player near me.
They played it, but most to none knew how to load new mapsets and usig dehacked.

There are a few threads like this one, check them if you want as there are good info if you lurk enough in this forums.
Just don't ask anybody how to get to Post Hell.
Thats forbidden!

[BlueThunder]

In the 90's I would download random levels from Aol. Most of them were no good.

 

[DoomGater]

- For me it was mainly Compuserve's "GO ACTION" - section.

- Not so many idiots

- Not so many pissing contests

- Of course, Doom wasn't  so damn mainstream

- DEUS & DEUTEX were pure magic

- I had not so much sleep as today

 

(..and please, spare me any ok, boomer comments)

 

[Faceman2000]

20 hours ago, DoomGater said:

- For me it was mainly Compuserve's "GO ACTION" - section.

- Not so many idiots

- Not so many pissing contests

- Of course, Doom wasn't  so damn mainstream

- DEUS & DEUTEX were pure magic

- I had not so much sleep as today

 

(..and please, spare me any ok, boomer comments)

 

Okay doomer.

[ukiro]

Initially a lot of the Doom hype was happening on usenet. Later it migrated to IRC channels, but there were also mailing lists specific to various projects. Web forums weren't really a thing until Doomworld, IIRC, but there were a lot of independent Doom sites for reviews, news, etc.

[Roebloz]

I can't speak for myself because I wasn't born then, but if you have seen my previous threads you may recall I found my dad's old 1994 WAD on an old floppy. Apparently he and his friends shared WADs with floppies so yeah. Don't forget the floppy discs.

[joepallai]

For me, until late '97, it was looking through the shovel-ware disks for any wads of 150k size or greater as those tended to have more effort put into them; I'd then load it into the editor to look at the layout and see if it looked interesting enough to play.   This method saved me from a lot of crap, though it wasn't foolproof; eventually I had a list of authors I'd look for in the text files before downloading.   Megawads were great for expanding my list of authors as I figured if you're good enough to get into a project then your earlier stuff is going to be interesting.

 

Once I had internet, I lurked a lot and just downloaded everything that was new to me (stuff like the newly released Inferno by Christopher Lutz--boy did that one humble my assessment of my Doom editing skills...).   Community projects and interactions were mostly through email or IIRC for me until I decided to finally create an account here on Doomworld.   

[Azuris]

On 1/12/2021 at 5:21 PM, BrassKnight said:

I've always wondered what the community back when the original Doom games were still big but I couldn't find any threads about it at all. Since a lot of the guys here are old I might as well ask, what was the community like back in the 90s and what notable stuff happened during that time?

 

I have to associate partly it from similiare Experience with other Games here in Germany.

The Internet wasn't as common as it is today, so the "Community" was often more regional than nowadays.

You had Friends that had the Game and/or Mods/Wads or Friends with a Friend that had a Uncle in a University with a Friend with a Source.

So the sharing about the Stuff and the Information from whom you can get it was a big Part of the Experience (at least in my Region).

Sometimes People came up to your Home you only knew barely from seeing, to ask you if they can have a certain Thing from you.

Also because the Internet was much slower, you planed with Friends who should download what and later share it on Floppy.

 

As english was not soo common for us younglings, there were some that gatekeeped their "special Stuff", asked for Favors only to let you play it a bit haha.

And there were People literally begging for it on their Knees...
(I knew such Person, that got lucky because he got a bunch of Stuff from a Sale on the Video Libary. As you couldn't search it up easily, there was no other Source).

 

I've got a Copy of Doom 1&2 from my Uncle, inclusive the Simpsons Mod.

 

 

[DoomGater]

27 minutes ago, Azuris said:

The Internet wasn't as common as it is today, so the "Community" was often more regional than nowadays.

 

Yup. In those days the term mailbox had a different meaning :-)
Does anyone remenber QMODEM, WILDCAT or FALKEN?

 

[RottingZombie]

In the 90's I played Doom SNES online (via XBAND) with one other guy from my area (to avoid long distance charges). I'll never forget, it was so fun. His username was Anakin. Always wondered who it was. I imagine there was a community of XBAND players that played in other areas, or long distance.

 

There was a lot of people copying and sharing floppies.

[Maximum Matt]

We all had horrific haircuts.

[riderr3]

A huge load of DWANGO wads all over the place!

[DoomGater]

...and -of course- TEAM TNT was the leader of the pack