How did you find out about classic Doom?

[Astro X]

Was there any specific game that you got to know previously, that then led you to classic Doom?

[zokum]

Wolfenstein 3D for me. I first played Doom in 1994. I think we started playing Doom over serial link in the summer of 1994. I have some vivid memories of those sessions. I remember having a dream about e3m5 and cacodemons. Must be why I like the map so much! It has some fantastic visuals.

[Drywtler]

The first FPS game i've played is Counter-Strike 1.6 because it was inescapable back when cybers were thriving, then Half-Life.

A bit later I wanted to play Grezzo Due, so I did. Didn't understood what a sourceport was back then.

Eventually I downloaded doom iwads from a guy on youtube which came packed with Skulltag funnily enough. I loved the Invasion game mode, which I also played a lot on Grezzo Due because of the absurd arsenal that game has.

Much more later when I tried to play with mods I realized none of them worked on Skulltag, so I started to find another sourceport and I found about Zandronum, then GZDoom, then the rest.

Nowadays I play on DSDA-Doom or Crispy Doom if it is a vanilla/limit removing map, unless I want to play with mods that is.

[Captain Ventris]

All about that Chex Quest life, baybeeee

[Terrcraft]

doom 2016

[Sonikkumania]

It was one of the games I played on DOS. 

[Osmosis Bones]

As far as I can recall, the first Doom related media I saw was the Did You Know Gaming video about it. 

[Hebonky]

I played Half-Life 2 on the Orange box, and I wanted to go back and see the lineage, I found out the original was made from the Quake 2 engine, so I kept going back until I hit Doom and fell in love with it...

[BGreener]

My big sister’s friend was a guy into fantasy, tabletop, and CRPGs. He got me into things like Heretic, Hexen, and Daggerfall before I got into Doom. My first foray into it was through Final Doom when I finally had it purchased.

 

As good as it was, the thing that really glued me to it was when I first stumbled into Zdoom several years later. I had only played it through the .exes and Doom95 at that point so I was blown away by all the features. It eventually got me into coming across places like this site, back when it had a sidebar of total conversions and other content.

[fai1025]

3 years ago I saw a Doom mod showcase on my Youtube recommandation

I went on Google and trying to figure out what Doom is, and rest of it is history. 

[Xim]

I played Wolf 3D first on an old Windows 3.1 pc, then later we got a bunch of floppy disks including a copy of the shareware version of Doom. I am not that old, but I am older than Doom and I guess being older than Doom is a thing now.

[Midnight_00]

Now that I think back, the main games that eventually led to me playing Doom would be Jedi Academy, Half Life and Portal and possibly Deus Ex (in which case Metal Gear as well even more indirectly). Interesting to think about.

[Mr. Hypnos]

By learning that my biological father is Dr. Sleep.

 

Seriously.

[bejiitas_wrath]

I first played Doom on a 386 machine and it was slower, but it ran fine, I had the shareware copy on floppy discs. I played Wolfenstein 3D later on the 3DO. But playing Doom in the `90s meant purchasing shareware CDs from the newsagent that had countless Doom maps on them to try as well as Doom utilities and editors. Lots of fun.

[Mr. Freeze]

I played it on SNES in 1996. 

[Matt Mello]

I played the PS1 port of Doom and Alien Trilogy close to around the same time when I was a little kid in the late 90's/very early 2000's.

Later on around 2005 or so, I got to play the Ultimate Doom Trilogy Collector's Ecition for Windows XP after finding it at Goodwill, allowing me to experience the classic Doom games in their original form. 

[Yousuf Anik]

It was around on 2002 or so I first saw my uncle playing Doom on our very model old PC. I was so little back then so I didn't understand a thing but it looked really cool, even at that age it looked amazing to me. I tried playing but you know the result lol :D Then at 2009 I found a CD which had many different games in it, including Doom 2. I then started playing Doom 2 and the journey begins. Eventually I got internet connection on my PC (although it was not good enough) and I found out about Ultimate Doom and DOSBox. The real fun of playing Doom in DOSBox begins and I finished Ultimate Doom in 2012. Then after getting proper internet I downloaded ZDoom along with Plutonia, TNT, many other WADs and mods and so on. It was all fun and I still have fun playing Doom!

[xScavengerWolfx]

For me i found out about OG Doom when they announced Doom 2016 back in 2014. I did some research and found out there was a Xbox live arcade version of both doom and doom 2 as a bundle, so i bought then and never looked back.

 

When Doom 2016 rolled around i started playing that and same thing never looked back, but when i did snap mapping i looked up wads and decided to be a map maker. Well i joined during the Covid 19 lock down of 2020 and here i am, two years later and still going strong.

 

I may not be a crazy outgoing mapper but making maps for a 30+ year old game gives me a chance to flex and show off my style since i've wanted to make levels for video games since i was a kid but never had the chance, since now i do i am going to use it until i either get too old for it or i lose interest in forever. 

Edited June 25, 2023 by xScavengerWolfx

[Professor Hastig]

Doom was all the rage when I was at school in 1994, but back then it wasn't meant to last. I quickly moved on to more technically sophisticated titles - first Duke Nukem, then Quake and on through the usual suspects of 90's and early 2000's FPSs. But as time went on the games became ever more stale so I eventually started to work my way backwards through all those games I once loved. Some were a joy to play again, others not so much - but the best thing was the endless supply of user content the original Doom has amassed over its almost 30 years of life. Just the original games wouldn't have done much for me anymore, it's the ongoing activity that keeps things interesting and made me take a deeper interest in this game.

 

 

[Helm]

my dad saved up for a long time to buy me and my brother an IBM compatible 486 back in 1995

[Somniac]

Doom was probably the first "serious" video game I was aware of. I remember in 1994 or so, seeing my dad playing it and being terrified and fascinated. Back when KDITD was legit scary! Before then I'd only played some educational video games like Word Rescue and so on. 

[RHhe82]

Doom was all the rage back in 1994, when I was playing Wolfenstein 3D on 386 and 486 PCs. The shareware version we’d get quite quickly, and the full version thru less-than-legit ways (in early 90s Finland, regular working class families didn’t have credit cards or other means of purchasing stuff from foreign countries as far as I knew).

 

[Professor Hastig]

29 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

Doom was all the rage back in 1994, when I was playing Wolfenstein 3D on 386 and 486 PCs. The shareware version we’d get quite quickly, and the full version thru less-than-legit ways (in early 90s Finland, regular working class families didn’t have credit cards or other means of purchasing stuff from foreign countries as far as I knew).

 

 

Oh, those memories. Trading games at school was very common back then. Bless those times when copy protection was for the most part a non-issue and no-CD cracks were easy to come by, if the games forced such a check. :D

 

[Stupid Bunny]

It was back in c. 1997 at the age of 6 or so when my dad let me play it on -nomonsters under the assumption that would make it less scary. I’d argue it actually made some levels more scary, especially where you could hear crushers off in the distance, but nonetheless I had a great time playing through E1—the sci-fi/tech designs with all the computers and lights and cool map and stuff really fit with my preferred Star-Wars-informed tastes of the time. E2 and especially E3 freaked me out a bit, what with all the flesh walls and blood rivers and skulls and whatnot. E3M4 scared my young self enough that I wouldn’t play again until finding a Doom shareware CD-ROM in his old disc book around 7 years later. I was like 13 at the time and the game definitely clicked with me a lot more. It was all over once I became exposed to the modding scene—I had already begun dipping my toes into modding Commander Keen before that time, so the impetus was there.

[Doom_Dude]

Pong. Bro used to fix electronics. He got a pong console somewhere in the 70's. Beep blip boop.... time advances a few decades.

 

Nothing really lead to Doom. I was playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gold box games like Pool of Radiance on the Commodore 64, then one day my bro bought a Pentium 166 with win95 and the Doom shareware. I'm minding my own business one day, walking along doing nothin' in particular, that I can remember, and I decide to go see what my bro (not the one who had pong) is up to and he's playing Doom. It all changed that day. Now it's 2023 and I don't know how the fuck I got here so fast.

[zokum]

This is the story on roughly how I got introduced to multiplayer Doom.

My cousin had serial cables from the software/hardware suit Fastlynx (fx.exe). It had reddish serial cables and cyan parallell cables. I am pretty sure this image here is what he had: We played loads of games over serial and used the parallell to transfer software much faster. We didn't know about the other Doom network drivers that could use serial for more than two players or parallel cables.

After a while we upgraded to network cards with 10mbit coax. I had a used original NE2000. I think it's still at my parents place or I might have it at my flat. In early 1996 before we had network cards me and a friend had gotten hold of the Qtest, but we had no serial cable. He did however have two old broken serial mice, one from an amiga. We spliced those cables together. We couldn't find any tape so we quickly reused the adhesive label on some candy (tic tac thingy). Since we only had a few of the wires we had to configure Quake not to use certain options in order to get communication over our 'cable', but it worked in the end!
On his 486 it wasn't all that fun to play, but the client server architecture and complex 3D world was amazing tech.

My p100 with 16meg ram and 256k cache ended up getting quite decked out. Over the years it got: 10mbit nic, scsi card, 12/4x scsi cdrom (teac), awe64 instead of vendor card, isdn card, later a 100mbit card with RJ45, an extra hard drive and more ram if I'm not mistaken. I also got a better monitor, a Sony Trinitron 17". Loved that one. That one broke on the way to The Gathering in the early 2000s.

I had several friend circles I played many lan games with. Anders, Henning, Malde etc was one of them. There were other groups I introduced to dm and we played a lot of dm in the 90s. We even played over modem occasionally. Modoom was never a big thing in Norway since local calls cost money per minute. I went to a ton of computer and lan parties, playing games, exchanging software, meeting cool people.

I think I started mapping in 1994 or so, with an early version of DEU, later ADE2 and then DETH. Tried others but I just liked DEU the most. The idea of making maps is more appealing to me than playing them. When I make something, it tends to be very technical and complex. That's sort of why I started the ZokumBSP project. None of the tools could do what I wanted and that one was the best open source node builder.

[joepallai]

Dragon Magazine's Sandy Peterson telling the world that he had written his last computer game review article and was joining a small Texas game company called id Software.   A few months later there was an article showcasing the game and I had to wait a few years before I could afford a computer capable of running it.   It turns out that I ended up playing Doom on the Playstation first then after my tax return I was able to buy a new computer; been playing the game ever since.

[Astro X]

I forgot to put Blood, Perfect Dark, Alien trilogy in the options (too many heh). But in my case, it was Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom, and so on.

[RHhe82]

1 hour ago, Professor Hastig said:

 

Oh, those memories. Trading games at school was very common back then. Bless those times when copy protection was for the most part a non-issue and no-CD cracks were easy to come by, if the games forced such a check. :D

 

Indeed. And the agony, when the floppies had ”bad sectors”, and you’d have to bring new ones for your pal to retry ”trading”!

[MrFlibble]

It was somewhere in the third form at school that we started actively discussing video games with my classmates, so this was around 1994-1995. One of my friends was really mad about Doom and made some really good drawings of various monsters as well as the DOOM logo. I think he had the shareware version at first and then asked another classmate to make a floppy copy of the full thing which fit on I think seven 3.5" disks. Back then I did not have a strong enough PC to play these kinds of games, and only saw screenshots in gaming mags. We also had a local TV show which covered new video games, but I don't remember seeing the episode where Doom was featured. But I had the general idea of what the game was about, and that it was scary.

 

In 1995 or maybe 1996 I played Wolfenstein 3-D and Heretic for the first time at my friend's birthday party, along with Warcraft II and Mortal Kombat. I did not actually get to play Doom until 1999-2000 when IT classes began and I discovered the shareware version on one of the computers alongside Duke Nukem 3D and some other games (including Warlords, which was the first fantasy turn-based strategy game that I liked -- I had missed all the HoMM2/3 hype from the years before). In fact, I believe all the PCs in the IT class had Doom shareware installed, as some of my more tech savvy classmates (both went on to become professionals in the IT field) quickly set up a LAN session for us to play around a bit. I also played the singleplayer levels and got to E1L3 or maybe a bit farther.

 

Sometime later I got myself a shareware copy and discovered the various source ports as well, Doom Legacy being the first that I tried. I believe that my first complete playthrough of E1 was made with Doom Legacy. All the new features felt really mind-blowing, and since I was involved with some Dune II modding back then (I actually discovered Doom Legacy because one of the devs was also involved with Dune Legacy), I even fantasized about a Doom TC set in the world of Dune II, with some kind of storyline similar to Command & Conquer: Renegade.