How'd you get into Doom, anyway?

[Origamyde]

Born too late to discover Doom when it was first released, so it mainly happened during the mid-2000s, when I was still a lil' teenager.

 

Then, during the mid-2010s, I got back at it more seriously, and had my first taste of fanmade Wads like TNT / Plutonia, Memento Mori, Scythe and Alien Vendetta (the latter etched into my young, impressionable brain). Then, I forgot as well about that period of time, before going back at it YET again, before I finally started working on maps via Doom Builder 2, and then UDB.

 

You could say my (very short) mapping career is more consistent than the way I apprehended those juicy Wads back in the day 😅

[reefer]

dunno, somewhere along the line I subscribed to decino

lost intrest after a bit, then regained it from mt pain27

then my friend bought me UD D2 and Final Doom for my bday

[Pegleg]

I'm pretty sure I've told this story before, but here it is again. I have no problem telling the same stories to the same people multiple (just ask my wife).

 

It was late June 1994. I was 15. My mom had driven thee friends and me to the mall and we were at Electronics Boutique. I was looking for a computer game.  I had one friend that had Wolfenstein 3D, and I had seen it as his house once. He told me that I had to get it, so, after much deliberation over some different titles, I got Wolfenstein 3D. It came bundled with the shareware version of this game called Doom. None of us had ever heard of Doom, so none of us thought anything about it. The point of the purchase was Wolfenstein.

 

When I got home, I tried installing Wolfenstein and found that one of the disks had a bad sector, so the game wouldn't install. I was dejected, but rather than return the gamew, I decided to install that other game, the one called Doom ("where the sanest place is behind a trigger"). This particular game installed fine and I was able to play it. And it was incredible, and different than other games that I had played (which were mostly adventure or sports). I never bothered to get a new copy of Wolfenstein 3D. I played A LOT of that shareware episode. The shareware Doom box is still on a shelf at my parent's house (complete with small holes where my sister's cockatiel had nibbled on the box), along with the two 3.5" disks containing version 1.2 of Knee Deep in the Dead.

 

I got the full version of Doom (version 1.666) from a friend sometime later in the year and was as thrilled to play the rest of the game as I was to play the first episode. I ended up finding out about mapping in early 1995 and tried my hand at that. I got Doom 2 some time in 1995. I kept playing and mapping (although I never released anything or even showed anything to anyone) until 2000, when finishing college and going to grad school came to dominate my life. It ended up being years before I touched Doom again.

 

I had briefly played Doom 3 when a friend and I rented it from Blockbuster one weekend in 2003. I didn't enjoy it as much as Doom and Doom 2. In 2004, I briefly looked up Doom on the website Dr. Sleep's Apothecary and found that the latest development was this thing called JDoom. I briefly considered mapping again, but ended up not doing so, and I drifted away from Doom again for several more years.

 

Then, for some reason, I returned to Doom in 2016. No, it didn't have anything to do with Doom 2016. I've still never played Doom 2016 or Doom Eternal. To this day, I'm not sure why I came back to the fold, but I did and I've been here ever since.

 

And that's my story of how I got into Doom, left for awhile, and ultimately came back.

[RandoBust]

I was a kid in the early 90's and my cousin had Doom on his PC. We'd play together, I'd shoot with spacebar and he'd move around. I thought it was fun but not as fun as my Sega Genesis.

 

Years later with our own first PC dad got my Doom as well as a joystick. 90's. The game wasn't really my favourite still. I played the hell out of Duke Nukem 3D and it remains one of my favourites to this day.

 

Got Doom 3 in 2008 or so and dropped it not long into the game. Can't See Shit Captain.

 

It wasn't until 2019 or so that I started looking more into retro shooters remembering how much I loved Duke 3D. I'd been getting disillusioned with video games for a long time and combined with the fact that I had less time to play I started moving more toward games that were all about the gameplay with little to no emphasis on story (I used to play games just for the story and long RPGs were great). I'd heard about Doom wads and how many there were so I started from Doom and played all the official games. Liked them more and more as time went on. Then wads changed everything and I was hooked. 

 

Now other games are ruined for me. 

[Tolwyn]

On 4/20/2022 at 1:03 PM, Kor said:

Do you still make levels/music?  I remember in the 90s I liked your stuff.

 

I don't work in general midi anymore. But I still mess around with music in my studio.

 

[Hellektronic]

I kinda grew up with Doom, I was born in '92, it was born in '93. My brother used to play the shareware version and later the full game, so as a little kid I'd watch him play Knee Deep in the Dead a lot of the time.

By the time I was old enough to really be good at it, I was playing other things. But now, as an adult, I really appreciate the depth of the game design- to this day, it's an excellent game. Playing it with the right mindset you notice a lot of crazy things about how it was intended to be played, which aren't always apparent to people. People seem to misremember the game as being nothing but full speed action and not much depth, but in reality it was pretty damn complex. It's tactical, it's engrossing, I sometimes wonder if the original id Software team made a pact with Satan.

[1Destro3456]

So basically, idk if youve heard, but there's this crazy thing going around, called COVID and when it first started we could barely do anything but stay at hom, and a bored me found this community, so yeah

[DoomGater]

I've got it from a friend, but I did not know, what it was. I did not like shooters or violent games. I just played sokoban and tetris before. When I figured out, how to setup/start it,

I was blown away, but I thought that it is quite huge for a 3D-demo. I enjoyed the perspective view and the colors and everything. After an hour or so I found the first door and was annoyed about the unfriendly persons there. I did not want to kill them, but I had to, because they attacked me. So please believe me, when I tell you: I DID NOT START all this violence.
THEY did!

[Frost-Core]

I'm pretty recent to doom (so don't bully me of course) but here we go :

I was at an IRC room and they were talking about that if my potato pc runs doom, then its usefull, at the time i knew very little about doom, never knew about wads, etc... also i thought that freedoom was the entirety of doom for free just with different monsters, so i went ahead and got a copy of doom shareware and it ran well! also i liked how doom looked so i searched more about it and found out about this neat lil website where lil fans can talk about everything doom, named "Doomworld™" so i hopped right in!

Edited May 2, 2022 by Frost-Core

[DoomGater]

I hope you've paid your dues by now and bought legal copies of Doom, Doom2, TNT & Plutonia :-)
Hop over to GOG.com, if you didn't already :-)

 

[Sleep Deprivation]

I first got into the series by playing the god-awful N64 version, then, fast forward a little. I'm playing the BFG edition of DOOM3—which was probably the worst purchase I've ever made—After getting through terrible campaign of DOOM3, I decided to play the 'old' games on the main menu. It was then when I realized that sometimes, old is gold. I don't think that I've ever had as much fun as I did playing those two gilfs in FPS form.

 

So, now I've been playing these games for a bit now, and even introduced them to a couple internet friends, and even some IRL friends.

 

I signed up for this forum by just looking up 'Doom forums' on my search engine.

[Sarmenti]

Back in 2014 little ol me heard about this doom game from a youtuber that covered various game franchises (don't ask, channel's probably been deleted by now), and deciding that taking a break from playing korean MMO's was a good idea, I bought (by that I mean I asked my mom if I could use her credit card to purchase them on steam) the whole pack of classic doom games available at the time, Final Doom, Ultimate Doom, and Hell on Earth. Does master levels count? Got it for free, but I'm sure I was uninformed enough back then to have spent money on them if possible.

Of course, I was a tad bit dissapointed about the fact that they were running in DosBox, familiar I was with the program due to my cousin introducing me to Tyrian 2000 many years before (classic game btw, banging tunes!), I knew something was amiss. Googling why the mouse wasn't working, why the music sounded bad, why everything looked really pixelated... eventually I saw the topic of source ports, and got introduced to GZDoom.

What followed was probably a lot of people's first experiencec really playing the games, texture filtering, mouselook, jumping and crouching, and the whole shebang that it came with... it all felt natural seeing as source games were the first real experiences I had with FPS's. I remember giving Doom 1 a shot and getting to i think the middle of E2 before dropping it. Doom 2 fared a bit better, as I got to like map 15.

What I really spent my time with were mods, course, I started with the big boogeyman, Brutal Doom! Didn't stick with it long, from then to even now, I never much liked its brand of shooting and movement. What I really spent my time with was GMOTA and DRLA, man I remember going places with my family and bringing my old dog-ass laptop with me that had those two, some others I can't remember, Scythe 1 and 2 and maybe the final doom wads, and I just blasted through them for evenings on end... I swear, the layout of the first 15 maps of Scythe 1/2 are permanently burned into my mind and muscle memory, could go through them with my eyes closed at this point. 

After I was done with that and moved onto another hyperfixation (such is ADHD life...) I mostly forgot about doom, only really remembering my time with the games when I saw it brought up on youtube or other assorted forums I frequented, only really last year did I begin coming back and playing assorted stuff. I know this post was a bit of a long wall of text that reads like a train of thought jumping from point to point, but I guess that's just how much I had to say!

[Alex S.]

I was physically assaulted by a stranger when I was a small child. Doom helped to de-sensitize me to violence and create an environment where I was in control and could win.

[Eugene Krabs]

The first part of my story may seem like a deviation, but it will make sense after you read. I'm Gen Z (2003), so a huge part of our culture was Flash games. All of the classes and schools I went to as a young kid had computers. Cool Math and various unblocked sites were the coolest sites. Down the line, we also branched out to other websites and games. We play on our phones, but we also started playing the Oregon Trail on Archive.org. It was kind of the game that the class would watch one kid play, and we would make funny names and see who lives. Rumors of Flash dying were becoming more prevalent, and we all started getting mobile devices, so while we all still played flash games, it wasn't as much as before. (As of 2022, the genre of browser games has died. Seriously, try to find an HTML5 game that isn't a heartless mobile game port or .io game).

 

I started playing the first Shareware Doom (Archive.org) on the class Chromebooks. It was cool, retro, and people would watch. Cut to summer 2016. We were going to travel to Montana, but the trip was canceled. So now I'm stuck at home. I've always wanted to make a game, so I decided to start then. Unity didn't run well on my old computer, so I switched to modding games. I thought back  to Doom (and I had recently seen Doom 2) so I decided to make maps for Doom 2. I started with Doom Builder. I didn't really make anything great, just learning the ropes. After summer, I stopped doing Doom stuff. BUT, in 2019 I re-entered the Doom scene. I was older, and had an actual PC. I use Ultimate Doom Builder now. Now i have a 24GB Folder labeled "DOOM". I play other games, but I always find that I default back to Doom. I still haven't made anything that great, but I'm planning on dropping at least one of my WADS on /idgames.

[Eugene Krabs]

On 5/4/2022 at 5:14 PM, DoomGater said:

I hope you've paid your dues by now and bought legal copies of Doom, Doom2, TNT & Plutonia :-)
Hop over to GOG.com, if you didn't already :-)

 

Or FreeDoom, if you are a younger fan who doesn't have the spending money