What were the first three PWADs you downloaded?

[Grazza]

First two pwads I played were Raven and ASD2. Both solid efforts, with the former better known, and the latter more interesting.

 

But I didn't download them, as it was before I got my first modem, and they were given to me on a disk.

 

First pwads I downloaded.. hard to say for sure. Maybe Surreal2, Theatre and beyond that I don't know. Probably some DM wad where I thought "WTF there are no monsters". Or maybe a Beavis and Butthead sound wad, beavis.zip, which I used a lot. In fact, for years it was a wad I loaded by default with everything, and I forgot what the original sounds even were. Seriously, watch a 30nm run using it, and you'll see how well it fits.

[Spectre01]

Not sure about the third, but the first two were Plutonia 2 and Scythe 1. Plutonia 2 because I wanted a sequel after playing Plutonia and Scythe 1 since I saw BigMacDavis making videos for it.

[smolVenom]

I think the first one was Japanese Community Project, which isn't the most difficult thing in the world, but it was really fun and was my earliest exposure to this whole Doom thing.

 

After that was Toilet of the Gods. Don't remember where I had heard about it, but I thought I'd take a look and well it didn't really turn out well. I just resorted to every cheat that GZDoom had to offer after failing to get passed the hell knights at the very beginning. Just for reference, I only played Doom 2 before I jumped into all the PWAD shenanigans, so I definitely wasn't ready for the more difficult offerings. I still really enjoyed it regardless, even if I haven't even finished it legit to this day. I'm not the best Doom player, but I'm definitely way better than I was in 2016, so maybe I should go back to it sometime.

 

Third one would probably be Newgothic Movement 1, which I was also woefully unprepared for. I think around that time I had just heard about the Metroid Dreadnaught mod and I wanted some stuff to check that out with, so I downloaded whatever I could find. Somehow it ended up being Newgothic Movement 1 and I was still struggling despite the mod. I didn't like it as much as the previous two and I decided to just not touch it again. I did check it out again when I was messing around with GZDoom after dropping it for PrBoom+, and there are some really cool levels in there. I wish I could've appreciated them more all those years ago, but oh well, can't change all that, but I do realize now that it's actually really cool.

 

If there's one thing I've learned about myself from this it's that I just get too ahead of myself sometimes. Even when I was getting more into classic Doom in 2019, I started with Hell Revealed II, so clearly I just like making things hard on myself. Still though, I think these were really cool WADs to start out with as JPCP showed me how whimsical and special community-made offerings can get, while the other two served to show my long road to being alright at the game. It's not like I can beat either of them yet, but I'm getting there!

[out_of_service]

The Apocalypse Project was definitely one of the first three.

[SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd]

Super Mario Doom was the first ever PWAD i have ever downloaded. Don't remember the other 2 though.

[Jacek Bourne]

Scythe. Hell Revealed. Alien Vendetta 

[Pixel Fiend]

Freedoom 2

Sunlust

Sigil

 

I had those three (later also Ancient Aliens) and played them on Brutal Doom / Project Brutality. I was stupid, for a good few months I thought that's the best way to experience Doom because it had more monsters, atmosphere, intensity, whatever. In reality, those mods actually ruin Doom and the levels weren't even beatable with that. I didn't stop to think that the gameplay wasn't enjoyable because the sourceport and those mods were turning it into trash. Still a lot of good impressions from that first, if tainted, contact with Doom and those masterpiece mapsets. 

[ax34]

FreeDoom, Dump 1 and... i can't remember

[Toad]

Alien Vendetta, Scythe 1 and Eviternity

[Teo Slayer]

1. Scythe

2. Plutonia 2

3. Japanese Community Project

[Martin Howe]

There was no cheap Internet in the UK in 1995 when I had just bought DooM, so I bough a ton of shovelware CDs instead; I idly played several PWADs, most were crap or course and utterly forgettable. The two I remember that stood out were Galaxia (with the smoking skull cursor) and EVIL_E (with arguably the first 'boat in water' structure). Happy days :)

[Nikku4211]

I think DWForums.wad was the first I've downloaded, back in my older Windows Vista computer around 2012 or so.

I remember being amazed by the polyobjects, which I've never seen in Doom before. I never got any of the jokes because I wasn't a DoomWorld member at the time, and the WAD was from the early 2000s anyway, so it was kind of meh.

 

As for the other 2, it's kind of hard to remember, much more than 2 pop up in my head. Maybe Cacodemon Squad is among them? When I played that in ZDoom back then, I had no idea multiple source ports had incompatibilities with each other, so I was confused when I saw warning sign sprites all around the WAD, which was actually made for EDGE(now Hyper3DGE). Playing it later in EDGE, it was also pretty meh. There was this weird imp sprite replacement(which I later found out was taken from one of the Sailor Moon Doom WADs), and there were what I later found out to be HECU soldiers. The sound at the end was pretty funny, though.

 

I don't remember if Chosen by Lil' White Mouse was the 3rd I've played or not, my memories of preteen me are blurry. I'm sure everyone here's familiar with it. I remember being amazed at how different it was from the Doom 2 IWAD it uses. So many of its textures I would later found out were taken from PowerSlave on DOS. The gameplay itself was okay, I think most of my enjoyment was from the wow factor. I also remember trying to scan the enemies using LineTarget, and not knowing why they had the names of original Doom enemies. Of course, now I know it was DeHackEd.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Nikku4211

[Dusty_Rhodes]

On 8/24/2021 at 10:35 AM, Jacek Bourne said:

Scythe. Hell Revealed. Alien Vendetta 

Good stuff right there.

[BaileyTW]

My first was Sigil since I wanted to get into fan made wads but didn't know any others at the time, before I came to this place. Then once I knew more I downloaded Scythe since I found a list of wads ordered by difficulty and that was just above Plutonia, which is right if you ignore map 30 which I didn't. I did download Valiant after that but didn't play that as my third pwad, that would be Rush.

[princetontiger]

Alien Vendetta, Scythe, and Hell Revealed

[Jacek Bourne]

6 hours ago, Dusty_Rhodes said:

Good stuff right there.

 

Indeed. Although Hell Revealed was quite inconsistent in quality. 

[RichardDS90]

2004 was the first time I downloaded a WAD but honestly, they were random crap. I started my WAD collection in 2005, one of them was UAC Base, which is pretty good. Another was some UAC base styled map, but the standout of my first 3...UAC_Dead. Loved it then, still love it now. 

[head_cannon]

- Sigil
- Doom 2 The Way id Did
- Plutonia Revisited Community Project

 

I do have memories of my college friends and I playing Slaughter Until Death and the Serenity trilogy on Doom95 back in the day, but for the most part I just replayed Doom 1 & 2 every couple of years and that was it. That changed in 2019. Sigil got my attention, it motivated me to learn how the command line parameters worked, and as soon as it was completed, I was eager to queue up another mapset and keep trying new levels.

 

I sought out tribute projects to the IWADs I had most treasured, figuring that I'd start with the most relatable vanilla-compatible stuff and expand outwards from there to get familiar with all the extended Boom actions. I'm glad I decided to ease in gradually - there is some deep water in the PWAD canon that you can drown in if you're not careful, and besides that, it was fun to play "spot the reference" on my journey through the tribute projects since the Doom 2 & Plutonia campaigns were still so fresh in my mind. I've stuck around and played much more since those first steps into the Doom-mapping scene, but the positive experiences I had with the battles I picked early on have motivated me to seek out mischief-makers who can deliver scares, tricks, & traps, finding that sweet spot where you make the player go "holy shit!" without making them immediately reload their savegame.

[Thelokk]

Sunder, then Sunlust.

Hadn't played doom in 20+ years. Went exactly like you imagined, was this close to say "f**k this, I'm out".

Downloaded the Japanese Community Project, stuck around. 

[Nefelibeta]

1.Lunatic

2.Valiant

3.Abandon

[RHhe82]

Well, there isn't an easy answer.

 

Back in the 90s I probably downloaded some wads that would now be considered shovelware at best. Can't remember. Also back in the day local gaming magazines came with diskettes or CD-ROMs packed with wads, do they count as "downloads"?

 

When I was playing Unity Port on Xbox, there wasn't much choice. Excluding Sigil and NRFTL, it has to be Back to Saturn X ep. 1, Deathless and Double Impact.

 

When I finally moved onto PC Dooming after 20+ year hiatus, according to DoomLauncher download date info, first wads were Going Down, Moonblood and Sunlust. (Going Down was something I was just aching to play after seeing it on some Youtube channel, probably Dwars? Decino wasn't playing it back in September yet?).

[smeghammer]

Do PC magazine coverdisks count? Fairly sure I played some very early WADs (really shit ones!) that were shoved onto coverdisks. Take your pick from any of maps on the shovelware ISOs you can find...

 

In terms of ones I can recall specifically playing (probably via finding them amongst the aforementioned dross...) are the early Doom 1 episodes set (1994) of Serenity/Eternity/Infinity, and Strain (Doom 2, 1997 - which is really good BTW) and a few years later, The Corrupt Priest (2001, D2 single level).

 

These may not have been the actual first three, but are some of my more memorable ones.

[smeghammer]

20 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

day local gaming magazines came with diskettes or CD-ROMs packed with wads, do they count as "downloads"

:-)

Indeed...

We crossed.

Edited March 27, 2022 by smeghammer

[Doomlover77]

To start my wad playing way back in August 1995 my first three wads i played were Gladiatr, Malice & Maze from PC Attack 5 cover disc. They were excellent. I started collecting wads In September 1995 on shovelware collections and PC Gamer cover disks. My three faves were Myhouse.wad, Subway.wad and Surreal2.wad at the time. 
 

Also My first three downloads were back in 1998. I downloaded Dwango5, Dwango6 & Dwango7. It was on dial-up! @Doomlover77.  

Edited March 27, 2022 by Doomlover77

[Doom64hunter]

Not exactly downloaded.

 

When I played with Doom95 back in the very early 2000s, it must have been some shovelware CD wads that were just on the system. Same with Duke3D maps.

 

After that, some of the earliest wads I actually downloaded were Xaser's dehacked weapon mods from the idgames archive.

[Fluuschoen]

I think it was Plutonia 2, Scythe and Valiant, but I'm not sure.

[CittyKat112]

Plutonia 2, Valiant, Hell Revealed. I deleted Hell Revealed because I only beat like 2 or 3 maps and they were pretty boring.

[CoolerDoomeR]

My first three PWADS are Plutonia Experiment, Eviternity and Lost Civilization.

Also my first three gameplay mods that i downloaded is High noon drifter, Hideous Destructor and Wolf En Doom.

[blackthorn]

In terms of downloads I’m not sure, but the earliest PWADs I can remember playing were from the “Deathday” CD-ROM put out by Microforum, which I got from a rack of games in a branch of Staples (right next to the “Titanium Seal” shareware disks 🤘). This was several years before we had an internet connection at home.

 

I spent hours trawling through the contents of that CD. At the time I only owned Doom 1.666. The main PWADs I can remember playing were classics like UAC_DEAD, Cleimos, Galaxia, the Trinity College map, and a something called “Yak World” which had some ridiculous custom sounds that were amazing to my 10-year-old self.

[pcorf]

First PWAD I Played.

REoLwolf.wad (2fiffy1.zip)

 

First 3 I downloaded.

Squadron 417

Memento Mori 2

Icarus Alien Vanguard

Edited March 27, 2022 by pcorf