When did you meet Doom?

[K_Doom]

Hello, this topic is a field survey. I want to know how old you are and when/how you met Doom.

I'll start with me. I'm 26 years old and my name is Victor. I first met Doom at age 13 on one of those now defunct flash game sites. It was only the first episode (Knee-Deep in the Dead), after that I couldn't play anymore.

Later I finished Final Doom on psx, the scariest one in my opinion. So at 15 I tried to finish Doom II and in the same year I discovered mods. Since then old trying other wads sometimes.

So how old are you and when did you meet Doom, dear fellow forum member?

[Biodegradable]

I first met Doom at The Morning Wood Café in the winter of '93. I don't remember much regarding our first conversation that would bloom our friendship, only the frightfully-purple scarf he wore that looked like he was being strangled by the world's longest eggplant. Since it was bequeathed to me in his will after he died in '97, I still wear that horrible thing every winter to remember him.

[K_Doom]

7 hours ago, Biodegradable said:

I first met Doom at The Morning Wood Café in the winter of '93. I don't remember much regarding our first conversation that would bloom our friendship, only the frightfully-purple scarf he wore that looked like he was being strangled by the world's longest eggplant. Since it was bequeathed to me in his will after he died in '97, I still wear that horrible thing every winter to remember him.

 

Wow, so you're older than I thought. That's been a long time.

[Zilch]

It was a dark and stormy night...

[DankMetal]

It was the far year of 2010, my mom found her old Nintendo 64 and a bunch of cartridges, one of them was an original copy of Doom 64. I fucking loved that game because i already played a very similar shooter also made by Id. Some years later, thanks to the Internet, i found out about the other doom games, and it surprised me that they weren't focused on survival horror like Doom 64 and quake.

[theBigLebowski]

A few years back in 2019.

[LadyMistDragon]

I was 8 years old, I saw the marine with the huge pecs holding a demon head and from that instant, I knew I would become his constant companion. Through years of traipsing through piles of flesh, traveling to all sorts of strange and terrifying worlds, and constantly being exposed to horror and carnage, we forged a bond tighter than most of you can possibly imagine. It was such a terrible, yet wonderful thing at the same time. I only wish I could see some tears in the rain. That's how bleak everything has become now.

[Craneo]

I've told this story so many times on Discord at this point I think, but sure, I'll post it in this forum too:
 

Spoiler

It all started when I was very young, I was visiting my aunt's home, one that used to live pretty far away at the time (still in the same city tho), idk how but I have this vague memory of being on a room with a bunch of stuff and an old deskopt computer, I was looking at games in that PC when I saw a funny looking icon, I clicked it and saw a hellish red screen with a dude surrounded by what clearly were demons and a skull as the menu cursor (I guess, again, vague memory), being a child at the time and very, VERY easy to scare, I started crying because of this "evil demon game", fast forward years later I was a teenager looking for videogames to yarr harr harr on some Spanish sea shanties videogame website, when I stumbled upon a very familiar sight, memories filled my brain as I downloaded what once scared me as a kid, I installed the thing, but was dissapointed at the lack of mouse support it had (and I didn't know as much about the game back then), looked how to enable mouse, saw someone recommend ZDoom (sourceport), installed it, and out of curiosity I went to Doom's Moddb (I already knew of the site due to HL1 modding), where I found Brutal Doom, that kinda really got me hooked, the rest is history

(my story with Doom is longer but I think these are the only relevant bits to the thread)

[Ganbare-Lucifer]

My cousin used to have it on an old PC when I was 8 or 9 years old, he played it and I watched.

 

Then many years later I saw mods for it and met GZDoom, downloaded the wads and the rest is history.

[taufan99]

I've been exposed to emulation for as long as I remember, but didn't go far away until when I was a 3rd grader in an elementary school, by which time I got to access the internet and started to pick other emulators and ROMs outside anything related to VisualBoyAdvance. One of these was Kega Fusion, and I got fascinated to the 32X port, before eventually moving to Snes9X and the SNES port. I soon learned that it was originally a PC-DOS title with various source ports still active, and grabbed ZDoom to (admittably, at first illegally) play the game. The rest is history.

[prfunky]

1995, had a roommate who had Doom, Doom 2, Heretic and Hexen. I never bothered

to get into it. I was busy at the time with a game called Corridor 7. Had this other friend

who had me into Wolf3d, Spear of Destiny and Rise of the Triad earlier.

 

1997, different roommate situation entirely. Roommate and friends wanted me to play

deathmatch Doom with them. IPX/SPX stuff was a hassle and one of them ended up

getting me to install Windows 95 for the first time. Luckily it was OSR2.0 as I had a job

dealing with the two earlier versions of Windows 95 on customer's PCs and it was the

biggest pain in the A$$! I still preferred my junky OS/2 Warp 3.0. About this time also

tried to work with Slackware Linux too and my roommate and I got a kick out of my first

experience of "kernel panic" ~ too funny to us I guess.

 

Can't say I really got into playing Doom until maybe 2002. By this time, I was helping

raise my girlfriend's two children, boys, who I introduced to Doom about 2003. So that

would be about the time I started with the Doom editors (beginning with DoomCAD)

and got sucked into this Doom vortex I'm still in today. So, Doom may be about to turn

30 but I've only been into it for 20 years.

 

I'm not about to do the maths for my age, just know I dropped out of college in 1985.

 

[Yousuf Anik]

Around 2003 or 2004, that time I didn't understand a thing or even knew the name but it attracted me greatly. My uncle used to play it. Then in 2009 I found it (Doom 2) on a CD along with many other games and I could remember the game scenarios from what I saw back then. This excited me very much and I started playing it. This is where my Doom playing began and I am still loving to play it every other day, in many ways I like. 

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

First DOOM experience: DOOM95 on a shareware CD.

First DOOM II experience: The DOOM II disc from the Depths of DOOM Trilogy, purchased by a family member in the 90s.

First Final DOOM experience: The 2003 release of DOOM - Collector's Edition, which I purchased myself in a local game store.

 

Edited August 24, 2023 by TheUltimateDoomer666

[DRON12261]

It was only three of us: my PC, me, and DOOM.

[Optimus]

It was during mid 90s. It's interesting to me when I first met wolfenstein and Doom, how my brain couldn't react to the 3D environment well and it didn't impress me, rather I was struggling to make sense of the graphics. Back then I was impressed by 2D games especially adventure games with finely pixeled graphics. In one case I visit a school friend's home to exchange some PC games, he shows me spear of destiny. It was that first map with some transparent vines. But it seemed to me like you were walking through them, so it seemed weird to me and didn't impress me. Then way way later in a party, someone shows me Doom in his 486 and points out how great shooting the bald shotgunners is because of the blood they spout. It also didn't impressed me but got the game somewhere anyway. Then installed it at some other point in my father's PC (I think it was a Cyrix 486 that I later got for myself when he bought a Pentium), and tried to adapt my brain and play, I would move in E1M1 upwards to the green armour over the stairs. I do remember that when I reached there, I rotated and shoot some guy down in the distance. And somehow I felt the depth there, that that guy was far away in the distance. But I don't know who he was, maybe the shotgunners hiding behind the pilars in Ultra Violence. Ah yeah, I remember, I selected UV because I thought this was a slider for the violence and didn't know it was for the difficulty.

 

A bit later 97-98 I found out about the Doom WADs community from a magazine. It had a floppy with few WADs and editors, like Deu, Dmgraph, Dmaud, Dehacked. I started out of the blind to try to make maps, without knowing anything, figuring out things myself. We changed the audio which was easier. I did some UFO sprite for cacodemon which I lost unfortunatelly. I didn't have internet to download WADs. A bit later, I noticed a CD collection DeathDay, I bought it. Started playing a lot of random WAD. Later through my university internet, I started collecting them and playing the classics.

[Ofisil]

 In the first age. In the first battle. When the shadows first lengthened...

 

aka I was there from the very beginning :)

[bobstremglav]

I born in 2003, so I'm 20 years old now. I met doom 2 when I was 5-6, thanks to pirate disc.

Didn't liked it much, was prefering Bulletstorm and Left 4 Dead.

For some reason I was really afraid of nightmare difficulty. Was imagining that you would start game surrounded by zombiemen. See "Can you beat Plutonia, when the monsters are multiplied by 100x?" video to try understand how that would look like, lol.

Actually beaten doom 1 and doom 2 first time when I was 14-16 years old.

[thiccyosh]

Early Summer of 2020, I met Doom. I was 16, and he was 27. This accidental encounter turned out to be the best thing that could ever happen to me, it was like a match made in Heaven (or evil tongues might say: A match made in Hell). Ever since then Doom has become my best friend, it has been three years now, and we still do a lot of things together. We went through shit, but also made a lot of memories we both treasure to this day.

 

Doom is my soulmate, platonically speaking. I feel very misunderstood by my friends, they don't understand how much you can love a game like this, spending endless hours into it without getting bored or switching to games from their bottomless pits they call Steam library to catch a break. They don't understand. They just don't understand under what circumstances I met Doom. I met Doom in the middle of complete isolation, where nobody was allowed to meet anyone or else you would be heavily punished for it. Feeling down from the lack of social contact with anyone outside my family, I was stuck in a vicious cycle of watching videos, porn and people infighting on Reddit. And Doom was the knight in shining armor for me after meeting him. And after all, I've grown bored of Animal Crossing due to its, very unfortunate, boring gameplay loop of doing three things every day and talking to virtual anthropomorphic animals with the occasional event in the middle of each season.

 

To me, Doom is versatile like no other game. Given the surge of new members summoned by popular wads, I am very happy to see that Doom also caught on with others.

 

I hope Doom will never die.

[Xim]

Very young in the mid 90s. Played it on a friends pc and later got Doom 95 on CD when we got a Windows 98 pc. Found a book about modding and use to read parts of. I finally got into modding in the early to mid 2000s. First mod I played was WolfenDoom 2nd Encounter on Legacy. There's more to say probably but that's the gist of it.

 

[Meerschweinmann]

It must be january or february 1994 as we got the DOOM shareware from a friends father. We have played it over LAN on our 386 and 486 Computers with our NI1000 and NI2000 BNC network cards. That was a very good time.

Every time i play DOOM these memories come back.

 

When i later got my 486 DX4-100 i was blown away how smooth the game could run. The next boost was with the waveblaster card for my soundblaster. The music was so good with it.

 

No game fascinated me so much than DOOM as it was released. Nothing was like DOOM. It blew everything away. It was the Crysis of the 90s, but more intense.

 

As we got DEU a new universe opened up to us. Building own maps was endless fun, even as it was pure pain on these slow PCs when the map reaches more size.

 

 

 

Edited August 24, 2023 by Meerschweinmann

[Nootrac4571]

Early 1994, when I was a teenager. It'd been hyped in the videogame magazines for months. I don't remember how I got hold of it (maybe the shareware version was on a coverdisk? - either that or I copied it off someone at school,) and it didn't run amazingly fast on our low-end family PC, but it totally blew my mind, I played Knee Deep in the Dead over and over again. I really wanted the registered version, but phoning a number in America to buy a videogame via international mail order seemed prohibitively difficult/expensive at the time - I'd need permission from my parents and it was certainly not the kind of thing they'd understand, so I never even considered it. But a few months later my local videogame store got a bunch of boxed full versions, which I assume they'd ordered from the US and put on the shelves with a significant mark-up. I seem to recall it was around £30, (about £75/$100USD today accounting for inflation,) which was a lot of money to me at the time. I saved my Saturday job money for a few weeks and bought a copy, terrified they'd sell out in the meantime; by far the most expensive piece of entertainment I'd bought at the time. I've still got the original skinny box and floppies in the attic somewhere.

[Juka]

I was about 7 when I got my first PC, my dad told me of this game he used to play when he was a bit younger, so we downloaded the Doom shareware version and played it out. I was pretty afraid of the monsters back then!

 

After that, I just kinda never stopped playing it. I discovered wads, TCs and mods, and after that I found myself coming back to Doom every now and then.

[prfunky]

10 hours ago, Meerschweinmann said:

It must be january or february 1994 as we got the DOOM shareware from a friends father. We have played it over LAN on our 386 and 486 Computers with our NI1000 and NI2000 BNC network cards.

 

 

OMG! I forgot. My computer was an AMD386dx-40Mhz and yes, our network setup was with those

damn 10base2 nics! I forgot all about that coax cable/bnc connectors/and terminators thing!

 

10 hours ago, Nootrac4571 said:

 I've still got the original skinny box and floppies in the attic somewhere.

 

I'm not saying to ever sell but you need to pull it from the attic and take pictures of that

stuff to add to your post here!

[G19Doom]

It was a big deal when I first saw the demo reel playing on a friend’s computer and I remember that was when I was first introduced and became hooked. I remember Doom was the start of “games will never look better than this” for me. It’s funny to look back on now, but at the time the colorful nature, the rocking tunes, etc. were no match for the true impression of terror the game left a mark on me with. Actually physically dodging the fireballs, getting shocked by surprise attacks, lights going out or flickering, all stuff people take for granted now, but at the time I had seen nothing like this. It was truly frightening hearing the demons roam around, seeing the levels get deeper into hell, etc. 

[Gibbitudinous]

It's funny how I can't remember at all when I first heard of Doom, but it was probably by way of Doom 3 or the Doom movie (can't remember which) in the mid-2000s, but it took until late 2015 for me to actually try classic Doom, tho I had tried and quit Doom 3 more than once before then because I've just never found it a particularly compelling game. Reason for the former being that in my formative years getting into video games, I had been infected with the "3D is the future" mind virus from the late 90s and even after I had gotten over it, I didn't really think to try out Doom until after Doom 2016 was announced. Not gonna lie, my first playthru of Doom made use of the... Zion mod? I think that was the mod I used, and it honestly probably helped the initial experience a good bit by making enemies more threatening (e.g. barons having exploding fireballs), tho I've come to more properly appreciate classic Doom since then.

[Pomps]

My brother was playing it back in 2000 and I was only allowed to watch and never play cause it was his PC :( but roll on the years
and since I was able to have my own PC from Santa one year I have been Dooming ever since! :D

[Cutman 999]

I started playing doom at mid 2020, after being curious of the game for so long. Literally the only fps games i played before doom were just Half life and TF2, so i wanted to see how legendary and influential games like doom and quake truly were in order to you know, influence some of the games i played at a younger age. After i finished doom 1, i was really hooked with ist gameplay, and i started to play the iwads, then i entered the modding scene thanks to doom zero and AV. 

[SealSpace]

I first met Doom on one of those old classic shareware disks I used to buy from those local retail pc stores back in the early 2000's. 

 

When I was still in the later years of my elementary school.

 

Ironically, I knew C7 before I knew Doom. 

[Faceman2000]

I met Doom in 2010. He said “It’s Dooming time” and then Doomed all over the place and I’ve been hooked ever since.

[StillWind85]

1996. I was 11, an awkward kid in middle school. I bought a set of Doom 2 floppy disks off a friend with allowance money, and then proceeded to install it on the homeroom computer and play when I could get away with it. The IT person always removed it, I kept the disks in my backpack and I always put it back on as soon as I could. Later on, I hid it on the home computer and would play late at night or when I was home "sick" from school. I have played off and on since then, from vanilla DOS on original hardware, through early source ports like Doom Legacy up through today. It's been quite a ride.