How'd you get into Doom, anyway?

[Kor]

I can't get back to sleep so I thought I'd ask. 

 

My story starts in spring of 95 when I was a seventh-grader (I was 12).  I was visiting my friend's house on a day off.  His family had an old 486 computer and had shareware Doom for it.  After seeing the game I was impressed so I borrowed his copy and tried to install it on my family's computer, an even older 386.  

 

It didn't work and I was thoroughly disapointed.  When Thanksgiving came around my parents got the family a new computer as an early Christmas gift; a Pentium.  I borrowed Doom again and installed it and it worked beautifully.  A few weeks later my brother purchased the Ultimate Doom at the local Hastings.  My friend then came over and him, my brother and I sat around the computer as one of us played Doom.  My friend said "I want to get that CD that allows you to make your own levels."  I objected to the idea, thinking making levels for a computer game would be quite hard.

 

About a week later I got a version of D!Zone (had 700 new levels) and my brother and I played around with the editors that came on it; mainly WadEd and DoomEd.  My brother and I started out with WadEd, and we experimented with it.  First we tried to change the shape of the hallway that leads to E1M1's secret courtyard.  But we didn't fully understand what we were doing and it was all screwed up with HOMs.  So we just had fun placing new enemies in the original levels.  Then we started up DoomEd, and started building levels.  Mine never worked out, and would ALWAYS get to the point where I could no longer run them in the game.  That particular version of DoomEd didn't like what I was doing, though I didn't know what it was.  A few months later my brother got the book Tricks of the Doom Gurus, which came with a new version of DoomEd.  And with that I was able to make a complete level without problems, and I really got into it.  As for my friend, he never got into making Doom levels, ironically.  

Edited April 4, 2022 by Kor

[Biodegradable]

I believe Doom may have very well been one of, if not, THE first video game I ever played at the tender age of 6. My old man had the shareware version back in the late 90s and bought heaps of random floppy disks at a cheap computer shop where you could buy a pack of them for just a few bucks and would spend hours faffing about with MS-DOS trying to see which games he could manage to install and which ones he'd take back and trade with the store for more. So as a result, I grew up playing a lot of DOS trash among a few classics including our beloved Doom. Later in the early 2000s, Dad got a copy of Doom 2 on CD-ROM which I wish I still had but I played it a fair amount, though I fucked around a lot with cheat codes and never finished it properly. Mind you, I played a lot more of Duke3D and Quake 2 during those days. By the time I entered high school in 2004, I stopped playing PC games entirely and had moved over to the console rat race. I left Doom in the dust for approximately 15 years.

 

As for what brought me back to Doom and sparked my growing obsession with it and the community today, it's all thanks to YouTube's favourite boomer shooter aficionado, Civvie11. I'd already been subbed to his channel for two years when I started revisiting the old shooters of my youth (Duke 3D and Quake) and Civvie began putting out his Pro Doom series of videos, which would spark my decision to revisit the game that started it all for me. Not just for revisiting the game though, as his sly mentioning of the Doom community as well and how it was still thriving and making new content after 20 years also got me interested. In fact, Civvie's showcase video of an early build for Prodeus would introduce me to my new friend @Dragonfly who Civvie would mention briefly and noted how good Eviternity is, thus declaring that our boy's involvement in the game was a thing people should be excited about. So, Dragonfly would be the first Doom mapper I'd take notice of and subsequently become a big fan of. The following year, I joined Doomworld after lurking for a couple of months to get a feel of the place and now I've been playing nothing but Doom since I got here, sinking more hours into it than I ever did back when I was a kid.

 

I returned to my first game after more than a decade and now I'm submerged in a never-ending whirlpool of amazing content that I refuse to pull myself out of. :^P

Edited April 6, 2022 by Biodegradable

[Gibbon]

I was fairly well acquainted with ID games already as in 1993 I was allowed to blast Nazi's on Wolfenstein 3D on our 386.  Later in the year, my dad bought the shareware copy of Doom and a 486 machine to play it on.  At the tender age of 7 I upgraded from Nazi blasting to Monster blasting and I was hooked for life, needless to say, Episode 1 is very special indeed as we never got the full version of DOOM but got DOOM II instead..  I didn't get Ultimate Doom until the early 00's and never played Final Doom until around 2008 as I ignored it due to it not being by ID (such a purist I was!).

 

We never had the internet until 2002 and so the only pwads I was able to play were anything we found at markets on floppy disks and CD's.  No idea what they were, wish I kept them now.

 

Always played it, I'm not one for these newer fancy games.

 

 

Edited April 4, 2022 by Gibbon

[Anonymous Space Marine]

Coincidentally, like Kor I also started to play Doom in the spring of 95 when I was 12. I had just entered the seventh grade, and a friend had an IBM with Doom. My family didn't have a computer back then, but I did have a Super Nintendo. I had never seen anything like Doom, and to say the least, I was mesmerized. Later I bought a used copy of the SNES port, however, I dreamed of getting a computer to play the original in its entirety. 

 

That day didn't come until I was in my early 20s. I played through the four iwads, unaware that there was a whole community dedicated to Doom. A decade later I had a renewed interest in Doom, and was blown away by the incredible content. Today Doom is much more than a game to me. It is vibrant, dynamic, and alive.    

[CoolerDoomeR]

So i'm new to Doom, i started playing doom and doom mods in early 2019, i saw a poster in a website that shows "High Noon Drifter" modification.

I searched the internet to download that, and when i saw the its gameplay and the power of the doom engine, I was very excited at that moment and I said to myself I have to play this!

Also as i said, I did not have the chance to play this game in the 90's.

[Obsidian]

I was 7 or 8 and played it on a neighbor's computer: there were no speakers and I didn't know there was a Run button at the time. :P I spent the many years afterwards daydreaming Doom map ideas before finally getting my mitts on Doom Builder 2 back in 2012.

 

Or was it 2011?

 

It might've been 2011.

[The_SloVinator]

For me, it was 2001. My half-bro introduced many games to me before, like Commander Keen, Duke 3D & a lot of shareware games but shortly after, Ultimate Doom was introduced to me & not long after, Doom 2. I was hooked & fascinated. One time I played the entirety of Doom 2 for the whole day & it felt like an adventure.

 

At the time, there was no internet access for me, so after finishing UD & D2, I thought that was it. Played them a couple of times more till I got sick of them & moved on to other games. That was till in 2006, half-bro gave me a disc that contained Re-Volt & Final Doom. Needless to say, my urge to play Doom returned that day & not only that but I finally got the internet access & searched up Doom related stuff.

 

Well, the rest is history.

[Stethr1]

I'm a dumb zoomer so it was mainly Brutal Doom that got me interested in it around 2014 or 2015. It especially got me interested in modding Doom since I had no idea stuff like that was even possible. I'm certain I had played it before that (I think I came across Zdoom when browsing the web somehow) and played a bit of it then but didn't really get into it until discovering Brutal Doom.

[ZeroTheEro]

My dad bought a family computer in 1995, and the prebuilt computer comes with two discs of shareware games - one had Doom on the cover, and the other had Rise of the Triad.

I played all those games to death, but I think I spend more time on Doom than everything else (but still didn't finish it any further than E1M3 on ITYTD) because it scared the piss outta the little me). I still remember the demo loops of v1.666 in its PC speaker-only glory.

[VanaheimRanger]

In 1995, I was 11 or 12, and visited a friend's house.  His dad was playing the shareware version on their PC and he let us play it a bit.  I was in love with it immediately.  Sadly, my family didn't own a PC, but I had a Super Nintendo, and about a year later it came out for the system.  I bugged my grandmother to buy it for me and she did...it was terrible, but I still loved it, lol.  Then another year or so later we got our first home PC, a crappy IBM Aptiva with a Pentium 1 and 8mb of RAM (it was even overpriced crap at the time) and my grandmother once again bought me Doom, this time it was Ultimate Doom with the packaged in Doom95 port on the disc.  And that's pretty much it.  I've played Doom ever since.  And believe it or not, aside from a couple of smaller classics like UAC Dead and Lost Episodes for Doom, I never actually got into custom maps until much later in life, around 2017, right before I discovered Doomworld and all the fine people here.

 

EDIT: After reading some other stories, here, I realize a lot of us share very similar intros to the series, lol.

Edited April 4, 2022 by VanaheimRanger

[Murdoch]

I first met Doom in a bar in Brooklyn after the war. We hit it off right away. We drank top shelf whiskey all night and shared combat stories and...

 

Wait what? Oh right.

 

Kind of tired of sharing the full story for like the sixth time so here is the edited version: saw a friend play it, got shareware 0.99 on a magazine cover disc in early 1994, ran it on our shitty computer, had fun and here I am nearly 30 years later the end.

[Jayextee]

It was the late '90s and my favourite game ever was Quake; which I really wanted to make levels for. With no access to the Internet of my own, I couldn't get hold of my own editor, but a friend did get hold of a copy of WadEd for DOOM. Fair enough, I can maybe learn the ropes with this, I thought to myself (not knowing how different the approach between the two games was).

Anywho, when I found myself playing the actual levels happily after my own short experiment's exit linedef had been walked over, that was the start of a 20+ year addiction...

...and I still haven't made any levels for Quake.

[Doomkid]

^{The official™ Doomkid origin story, as told by me 99 times, but with all the dates corrected and confirmed by my family this time!}

 

When I was just a toddler, I remember my uncle, dad and brother playing Wolf3D, all huddled around an ancient laptop with no color. My dad laughed at the "Can I play daddy?" difficulty, and that memory is crystal clear even though I was so young at the time. Possibly one of my first ever clear memories.

 

In late-ish 1997, my brother saw how I just kept playing the shareware Doom E1 over and over, so he did what any great older brother would do: he somehow found an illegal bootleg of Doom2, the super common 1.666 bootleg (that DeHackEd acknowledges is fake when you try to use it). Neither of us knew what it meant to be "pirated" back then. I was so grateful to him for doing that, because it pretty much cemented that I would be a hardcore Doom head for all time..

 

In 1998, my dad helped me download my first ever custom wad: DOOMED 2 DIE, aka dmd2die.wad. The wad would have been brand spankin' new at the time, which is hilarious because it's so old and dated - Any Doomer who became a fan post-2000 would look at it and wonder how it can even be nostalgic, but damn, it is.

 

My dad had obviously taken note of me regularly getting on our shitty dialup net (excellent at the time, that 56k goodness) and scouring the net for Doom wads. He ended up buying me the big box version of The Ultimate Doom for my birthday in 1999, which came with Doom95 - and, after playing the DOS EXEs all that time, playing in 640x480 with all 4 episodes unlocked made it feel like a "true sequel".

 

For the first week I was way too obsessed, and (without my parents knowing ofc) I actually stayed up past midnight working my way to the end of the game, IDDQD on of course. When I finally saw the Sweet Little Dead Bunny ending, I absolutely shit my pants with fear (figuratively, thankfully) since I adored cute, small animals. I instantly turned off the PC and went running to my brother, who was comforting me but also extremely amused that something in "Plain Ol' Doom" scared me so much.

 

After a few years of visiting EVERY SINGLE Doom site I could find on Yahoo! and signing all guestbooks and such I could get access to (and downloading weird little tools and a bunch of wads), in 2001 I finally found Doom Connector, which then lead to me becoming much more deeply ingrained in the community. I've been loitering ever since!

[Dexiaz]

I told my story few times in other similar threads, so I won't repeat much.

 

Long story short: my parents bought me PS1 on my birthday with 3 games - Resident Evil 1, Duke Nukem Time to Kill and Tekken 2. Some time after I've got Duke Nukem Total Meltdown (Duke 3D for PS1) and I said that's a cool first person shooter. And my dad said that there is an also cool game called "Doom". And few months after he bought me on X-mas the PSX Doom. That's changed my life, lol. BTW, my mom bought me PSX Final Doom a year later on my next birthday.

 

P.S.: as kid I was dreamed to work in id Software because they are cool guys who did such cool game, lol. It never happened, of course, but I always wanted to make a "Doom game". This is how I've got into the Doom modding.

[Astronomical]

After playing Doom 2016 on my brother's Xbox, I was curious what doom from there had to offer, I got the XBLA version and installed it.  Had a blast with both games but Thy Flesh consumed smacked me hard.  I later picked up the whole series including eternal on steam, and custom wads have kept me busy ever since.

[thiccyosh]

I bought and played Doom on the Switch during Lockdown in June-ish 2020, as I had some money left from my last purchase. Doom was like 3 bucks on the store so I thought "Sure, why not". And then I was obsessed by Doom, bought Doom 2, loved it to shreds, found decino which only fuled my interest, joined Doomworld and left Reddit (Yes, one was very active in r/doom) and now I'm here!

 

I'm very happy to be here with very nice people on this site!

[Vladguy]

I don't exactly remember when and what started my Doom obsession, but I remember it was somewhere in 2019, as said by my first WAD ever's properties.

Whatever started it? It was either Vargskelethor Joel's second Doom Contest, Aquarius199's Crappy Doom WAD series, or ICARUSLIVES's Doom Mod Madness. Maybe even That Cybert Channel's Doom marathon. Or actually a mixture of all of them! WHO KNOWS!

All that I know is that I made a right choice of game.

[resle]

1993, literally just days after the Shareware version was released. Someone, somehow, was copying shareware games to poorly concealed subdirectories on the computers of our high school labs. Commander Keen. Wolfenstein. The Incredible Machine. You name it.

 

This particular lab belonged to "statistics" and under c:\lotus123 the \doom foolder was a quite intriguing sight.

The machine in question was a 486 SX running at 25 glorious megahertz.

The game ran, slowly but it did, and I couldn't really tell what was I looking at. 

 

It was just... different. And eerie in so many ways.

By the Christmas/New year holidays, I had found a way to - cough - obtain all 3 episodes, and played through them on my 386 in one day, morning to past bedtime, resulting in flashes and nightmares and a weird feeling of anxiety all night long.

 

It really took me a whole day, despite saving all the time here and there, and playing on - I seem to remember - "hey, not too rough".

I know this stuff always closes with "those were the days,

but jesus h. christ those really indeed most certainly were the very goddamn days.

 

[Btyb88]

As soon as the shareware came out, my dad got a copy and we played together. I was just about to turn 5 at the time. I would use the keyboard and he would use the mouse.

 

After he died I didn't play too much but got back into it in the late 90s / early 2000s once I realized doom95 and doomworld we're a thing.

[MFG38]

It all began in 2004...

 

There was a gaming show running on Finnish TV at the time - I believe that show is still ongoing - that I watched religiously. In one of the episodes from that magical year was a review of Doom 3, and I was instantly enamored by what my young eyes were witnessing. I daydreamed about the game for a few years until, in 2007, I got to experience it first-hand by way of a friend at the time who owned a copy of Doom 3. I'd take any opportunity I could to go visit him and play the game on his computer. One could say I became addicted to that game.

 

Eventually, I became more and more interested in classic Doom and what it had to offer. One day in 2008, while I was browsing a flea market with my family, I stumbled upon a boxed copy of Doom 2 and ogled it for a few moments. And it was only €2! Unfortunately, I didn't have any coins on me, so I pestered my mum about the game until she caved in and bought it for me. And as soon as we got home, I installed the game onto our WinXP PC and started digging into everything it had on offer - the game itself, the PWADs, the source ports, even Doom Builder. It became an addiction to me very quickly and that addiction still isn't showing any signs of "healing".

[Captain Ventris]

My mom was out grocery shopping, and saw that Chex cereal came with a CD ROM. She was always trying to find games for my older brother and I, and figured it would be worth a purchase.

 

Boy was she right. I’ve been glued to a computer screen ever since!

[Borg]

Wolfenstein 3D was the gateway drug for me. It was in 93 I believe. I was 40 and could afford a decent computer. I don't remember how I was introduced to it but it led to Doom very quickly. Both of my kids played and their friends. They all knew that when I got home from work, the computer was mine.

[Kor]

2 minutes ago, Borg said:

Wolfenstein 3D was the gateway drug for me. It was in 93 I believe. I was 40 and could afford a decent computer. I don't remember how I was introduced to it but it led to Doom very quickly. Both of my kids played and their friends. They all knew that when I got home from work, the computer was mine.

I remember playing Wolf3d in like 92.  I remember when I first played Doom I suspected it was made by the same  people who did Wolf3d.  I don't know how I suspected that, as I never paid attention to who made Wolf3d. 

[Mayomancer]

My parents just happened to buy final Doom for the ps1 and, a few years later Doom 3 for our PC, and I got a lot of memories of playing Doom 3 with my dad. Once I discovered how the internet worked I really started to read everything about the games in the doomwiki, printed out a bestiary for the game and all. By then I was a middle schooler and figured out how to download source ports like ZDoom, Chocolate Doom and Skulltag, and played through the original games (except for Thy Flesh Consumed IIRC), then I really started getting into a lot more WADs in highschool.

In 2016 I played a lot of the Doom remake and Ancient Aliens as well, then created an account here the next year. After 2018 I got a lot more into action RPG titles like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter but I still go back and forth to Doom pretty regularly.

[ImproversGaming]

I started out with Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D. I think for me Doom started around ’94. A friend of mine from school got their hands on the Shareware version and passed it on (I got all my previous games from them too). I really enjoyed playing it and we used to travel to each other’s homes with our computers to deathmatch each other – this was really tough as these were big systems and not very portable. We used to connect them back-to-back and play for hours.

 

The computer was my Dad’s primitive work machine so I had to be careful to not affect his programmes with my gaming setup. Also don’t remember every having internet at the start and when we did get it, it was very slow and primitive, so I was reliant on my friend for downloads for a long time.

 

I still remember the feeling of hearing my Mum’s footsteps upstairs and knowing that I was in trouble for staying up too late. She would hover over the plug and threaten to disconnect it and I would plead to give me a few more minutes. I remember staying up over night on many occasions and trying really hard to ensure nobody noticed I was tired, particularly at school.

 

I dipped back into Doom periodically over the years, but play much more frequently now. I spent the guts of a year playing the Division 2 (a modern-day shooter), but still enjoy Doom way more. In gaming I have a major weakness for Doom and Dune (I just cannot get tired of them).

[7Mahonin]

I was introduced to it via Doom II around the time it came out. It was definitely before Duke or Quake that I had played it. I had only heard of the first game and didn’t play the shareware until after I played Doom II. A friend recommended it to me when I was going through a very rough time due to a loss of a girlfriend, who died in a car accident. He said to play the game maybe it would help get my mind off of it. While it didn’t help me accept the loss and move on, it definitely helped pull me away from the situation a bit, and I became a fan very quickly. I bought my own copy of Ultimate Doom and Doom II soon after I finished beating my friend’s copy. This was the first first person shooter I ever played. It was mind blowing at the time.

 

I have played Doom WADs all this time too, but never felt the need to join this forum until I started having the idea to create WADs of my own during the pandemic. I guess also, I was looking for somewhere to talk to other fans of the game. 

Edited April 4, 2022 by 7Mahonin

[MemeMind]

I watched a review of Doom 2016, its been downhill ever since.

[Doomlover77]

I first got into Doom at a friends house in December 1993. Played it. Loved it. But in April 1995 I first played Doom2 at my friend’s house. I kept getting lost. Loved it, still love it now. 
 

In June 1995 it was my 18th birthday and we had our first computer from Escom ! My father installed Doom shareware version 1.666 onto it. Kept playing it again and again. Then in September I purchased DEU, DEU2 and Ultimate Doom & Doom2. I also had my first Doom wad CD called Toolkit for Doom version 2 with 1100 Doom wads and 200 Doom2 wads. 
 

Then in August I purchased a Sega 32x for my Sega Megadrive. It had 17 levels. Completed it in September in 28 minutes. Fast forward 16 years now to August 2011 where I found DS Doom for the Nintendo DS. Excellent game but the first version port wasn’t perfect, but a later version featured a WAD menu by allowing me to choose what levels to play by setting up BAT files to launch the game with the level on the SD card using Doom.wad or Doom2.wad
 

From 2016 I found lots of good Doom & Doom2 wad shovelware CDs. Happy times. @Doomlover77  

[Salmon]

I first played Doom in '96 or '97 when my family got a computer.  I was not quite a teenager.  We had this disc with all these games on it that included shareware Doom.  Funny enough, I played shareware Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Heretic, and the Dark Forces demo all at the same time because of that one compilation.  I also played SNES Doom a bit over at friend's house during the same period.  While I played shareware Doom over and over again, that was really the only Doom I would play for another 20 years.  My parents didn't like violent video games so I had to play all of that stuff kinda surreptitiously.  By the time I could have bought it for myself I had lost interest.

 

First PWAD I played was in... '98 or so, I think?  I had mostly moved on from FPS to RTS then (lots of Warcraft 2 and Starcraft).  It was some awful map a friend of mine made for Doom 2 that I played on his computer.  Not sure what editor he used but I remember messing around with it a little.  His map was bad, all I remember is pistoling lots of pinkies in a dark hallway.  No idea if he ever uploaded it anywhere.  That was my first experience with Doom 2, PWADs, and editors.  It gave me a bad impression of all three, unfortunately.

 

I goofed around with Freedoom a tiny bit around 2009, but other than that I didn't touch Doom until the summer of 2020.  I was bored during Covid lockdowns and, like a lot of people, feeling nostalgic, so I bought all the classic Doom games and played through them for the first time.  I had such a great time that I started looking into modern PWADs.  Sigil, Ancient Aliens, and Scythe were the first ones I played.  I was so impressed by Ancient Aliens that I was curious how someone would even make Doom... do that.  So I downloaded UDB in August 2020 and have been messing around with it since.

 

It's weird--on one hand I definitely feel like I missed out on a lot, since in retrospect I'm sure I would have had a good time if I joined the community 20 years ago.  But on the other hand I'm really, really happy to have gotten started with all of the high quality modern editors, source ports, and PWADs as examples.

[Kor]

12 hours ago, The_SloVinator said:

For me, it was 2001. My half-bro introduced many games to me before, like Commander Keen, Duke 3D & a lot of shareware games but shortly after, Ultimate Doom was introduced to me & not long after, Doom 2. I was hooked & fascinated. One time I played the entirety of Doom 2 for the whole day & it felt like an adventure.

I have a half bro to.  And he was involved in the early days of my creating levels.  My full brother and I often had him playtest our maps.  

 

We didn't get Doom 2 until a few months after getting Ultimate Doom.  But I didn't really make levels for it for a while.  

Quote

 

At the time, there was no internet access for me, so after finishing UD & D2, I thought that was it. Played them a couple of times more till I got sick of them & moved on to other games. That was till in 2006, half-bro gave me a disc that contained Re-Volt & Final Doom. Needless to say, my urge to play Doom returned that day & not only that but I finally got the internet access & searched up Doom related stuff.

 

Well, the rest is history.

I didn't have access to the Internet when I started playing Doom either.  But thanks to shovelware CDs I had plenty of pwads to play.

 

I disengaged from the community in about 2000, when my website went down because the server that hosted it went down.  I've played plenty of other games, but very much got back into Doom when I was recovering from a major health issue in 2013 (truth is I still deal with effects of all that happened but Doomworld isn't the place to go into that).  Now I pretty much focus on Doom, the Elder Scrolls and the Mass Effect trilogy.  Doom is the one I play most, by far.