What Got You Into Doom?

[MemeMind]

A review of Doom 2016, thought the game looked great so I played it. Loved it. 

I have this autistic thing, where if I like a game then I have to try most of the franchise.

 

I also have another autistic thing where I need to mod a game that I like. 

 

[Kor]

Copied from the topic I started a year or two ago, where I asked the same question.

 

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 disappointed.  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.  

 

As for the other questions, I continued playibg Doom because it's just fun. And with a community that never quits, there is always new stuff to play for it. 

Edited January 11 by Kor

[Gothic Box]

In 2012 when I was but a wee lass looking for free games my MacBook could run I came across a Blogspot page while googling. It had with links to ZDoom and most IWADs as well as a selection of PWADs, most notably Congestion 1024. Shortly afterwards I found Doomworld and was introduced to Brutal Doom through Robbaz on YT. Doom 2016 helped me even further down the rabbit hole. Doom's also one of the main things that got me into oldschool shooters in general.

 

What really piqued my interest though was the dreamy, almost timeless atmosphere Doom is so good at conveying - like a neverending early evening. I feel the track Legion of the Lost from TNT gives those vibes exactly.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

I knew Doom, Heretic & Supaplex before I even knew reading. And they are good games in general, otherwise I wouldn't be still playing them!

[BoxY]

I actually can't remember at all. It's like I just hit my head one day and woke up with no memory of how I got here.

[smeghammer]

I was young(ish), studying for my MSc, and I was VERY aware of it imminently arriving. I was avidly buying the PC gaming magazines at the time (PC Gamer, PC Zone, PC Format etc.) and I got the shareware release basically as soon as it dropped. You know, the original one with the Swastika in one of the rooms... played it to death and then bought Doom 2 before I bought The Ultimate Doom - so I never actually owned the OG 3 episode Doom 1 game. 

 

Like one or two of you here, I'm still playing it...

:-)

[valkiriforce]

My dad's friend told him about Doom, my dad got Shareware Doom on his computer - I got on my dad's PC and started playing it, and the rest is history.

[Somniac]

I grew up playing Doom, Heretic, and Hexen along with a few other DOS games like Star Wars: Tie Fighter, Descent, Duke3D, Terminal Velocity and some others. My earliest memories of Doom were on our Windows 3.11 machine, though with the advent of stuff like Unreal and Half-Life I have more memories of using 95/98 for video games overall during the mid-late 90s.

[prfunky]

On 1/10/2024 at 11:05 PM, Gibbitudinous said:

...in the lead-up to Doom 2016's release date, I decided to finally try out OG Doom and discovered that it was in fact vastly more fun than Doom 3 ever was.

 

While Doom is a solid game at its core, the sheer breadth and depth of its modding scene is absolutely its biggest asset, with an endless variety of content to play of wildly varying levels of resemblance to the original game.

 

Doom is the Energizer bunny of video games, isn't it?

 

On 1/11/2024 at 7:36 AM, Demion said:

...Somewhere around 2010/2011, I stumbled onto something cool – fan-made levels. Requiem was the first I played, and I've been hooked ever since...

 

I loved the "value" of megawads; Requiem was one of the first I did outside of the original levels. Others I played at the time were Hell Revealed,

Icarus: Alien Vanguard, Realm of Chaos, DemonFear and Alien Vendetta. Nowadays, with my even shorter attention span, I've learned to appreciate

single-map or smaller episode wads.

 

On 1/11/2024 at 9:45 AM, DreadWanderer said:

... I got a PS1 around the early 2000s and one of the first games I got for it was Doom. You could say I was raised with PSX Doom...

 

Although I'm not into it yet, I really appreciate the interest in PSX Doom-styled wads of late. I've never spent too much time using the PSOne I

own and definitely never had a copy of Doom for it. I find the lighting/graphical differences in this port to be attractive though. We'll see if I ever

"get around to it".

 

===========================

I grew up in the late 70's and early 80's. That means I remember when Pong was new. I had an interest in learning how to program video

games once they were finally in color instead of black & white. I spent a lot of time in the video arcades of the day and my favorite titles were

the ones produced by Williams Electronics. Our family's first home game console was ColecoVision. Coleco's rendition of Donkey Kong

(which was included with the console) lacked the cement tub/pie screen of its arcade counterpart. Too, their copy of Mr. Do! was lacking in

the authentic arcade gameplay department. So I bought an Atari 400 computer with my paper route money. Life went fast then, I had to work,

graduated high school began college, etc.

 

Fast forward to the mid-90s and I had a girlfriend who had part-time seasonal custody of her to children, both boys, 10 & 13 years old. At

that time, I had a PC and was still trying to figure out how to program games in C. I was very focused on 2d "retro-style" games. The kids'

eyes would glaze over when I'd try to explain to them what I was doing in programming (hey; they asked!). So as a way to let them not

start with the tiny building blocks of if/then, for/next, while/wend logic, I instead hooked them up with a copy of DoomCad from the CD in a

book a friend had given me. It wasn't until the next girlfriend with a different set of two boys that I started to really appreciate what Doom

was. By this time, I was now running deathmatch servers with them using DoomLegacy port. I guess the humor and hilariousness of the

game is what finally bit into me and I've been mapping and tinkering with Doom ever since.

 

The biggest factor for my continued involvement is the expandability of the Doom world. I'm just loving the DECORATE and almost

exclusively live in a Zandronum world these days.

[TheHambourgeois]

When I was around 4 years old my extended family had a co-op setup of heretic going on at some family function. one of my cousins was playing, either my dad or uncle was the other player, who got him with the morph ovum and then threw me in the hot seat and said "get the chicken!!!"

my return came in ~2005 when I, on a whim, grabbed the old doom2 win95 cd sitting on the shelf and installed it. It had a bunch of compatibility issues, i googled what compatibility mode you had to run it on and found out about all the source ports, then the rest is history

[JeffAri]

I found out about Doom sometime in 2019 when I got one of Decino's Doom analysis videos on my recommended page, I watched a few of those videos and then forgot about Doom for year and then in August of 2020 saw one of Decino's videos on my recommended page again and then decided to actually play Doom

Edited January 16 by JeffAri

[mcerjack]

Early January of 2023, my brother got me a month of XGP as a new year gift. He recommended some cool stuff like stardew and sniper elite, but the only thing I played was Wolfenstein 3D and Doom 1 re-release simply because I'm curious about old stuff, things that predates me.

 

Wolf 3D is too mazy and boring so I stick with doom. Got sucked in immediately and finished E1~3 on HMP in like a few days. I'm a pretty tolerant person so I enjoyed even the worst maps you guys might think...

 

EDIT: Initially I never thought doom would have a sequel, but after watching decino's analysis videos I wondered "revenants? Arch viles? Where are they?" And I realised Doom 2 was a thing. Went to steam and purchased doom 1 & 2 and also finished E4. Later I also heard there is this final doom thing so i went ahead and finished tnt. Still on my way of beating plutonia, I specifically chose a UV pistol-start blind run for plutonia, and the first 10 levels are a lotta fun.

Edited January 16 by mcerjack

[misterdado09]

I grew up playing it, so with time I became a fan.

[Carmelo]

My dad installed this on his pc when I was like 5. It was the most terrifying, visceral and violent thing I had seen or heard before. And even though I was scared shitless enough to have nightmares every night, I couldn't look away, less forget it and move on.

 

After that, when I was 14, I knew sufficient enough english that allowed me to navigate doomworld idgames and download wads. Also my pc was a potato and I could only run doom at decent framerate. I played the community chest wads for hours. 

 

Right now, Doom is part of my dna. I don't even see the pixels anymore, my imagination does all the work and I keep seeing the vast strange skies, the corpses on walls and the infinite unfathomable darkness of the black void texture. 

[crug]

I am part of the all new myhouse.wad wave of players. Got doom 2, played through myhouse.wad not getting half of it, and then I thought "hmm, I wonder what the actual game is like?" and boom. I was hooked.

[Geqoph]

Both of my brothers loved oldschool shooters, so naturally, they infected me with the love as well.

[Aeddes666]

Nerdness.

Edited January 17 by Aeddes666

[durian]

Being 12 in 1994.

[JoJo_BadDoom]

I would have first played the game not too long after it came out, I think. I would only have been about four or so, so I'd sit with my Dad and we'd get to chainsawing pinkies! Always have a copy of Doom installed on whatever computer I have, but it's only recently that I've seriously thought about making my own WADs.

[Gifty]

I discovered Doom the way God intended, with an N64 and mess of controllers sprawled out on the top level of my cousin's bunk bed, with the ceiling so low you couldn't really sit up all the way.

Edited January 17 by Gifty

[continuum.mid]

I found Freedoom, Doom Shareware, and a bunch of source ports when randomly browsing the Debian GNU/Linux software repository sometime around 2016. I beat episode 1, then pirated most of the games for the engine, struggled with the rest of them, and shelved it for a while. I think it was watching decino and MtPain27 that pushed me to return to it a couple years later, and actually beat Freedoom and all the official IWADs. Then I discovered this forum, found it was surprisingly active and welcoming to newcomers, and started sharing my music here.

Edited January 17 by continuum.mid

[T-Squared]

My dad used to play Doom II back in the 1990s. One distinct event I remember was around 1994/1995, I was only 3-4 years old and he would shut it off when I came into the computer room. (I complained, because I wanted to see the cool stuff on the screen.) Eventually, when I was 8 (I think), he let me play the game without monsters, when we stayed in Michigan with relatives one Christmas. (We had a laptop that ran Windows 95) That was the coolest thing for me. There were a lot of things in the game that went over my head. (Such as the various bloody decorations)

 

It wasn't until I was 13 that I worked up the courage to play the game with monsters. (Hey, I was a bit sheltered.)

 

2005 was when I was introduced to the world of Doom mods, and later that year, I discovered Skulltag.

[faceplant641]

5 minutes ago, T-Squared said:

One distinct event I remember was around 1994/1995, I was only 3-4 years old and he would shut it off when I came into the computer room.

 

A couple years ago, my 3 year old wandered in while I was playing, and I didn't realize she was there until she started singing a Daniel Tiger song about how it's ok to be angry but it's not ok to hurt someone.

[JackDBS]

So it was like 2012 or something (I was like 11) when I saw a friend playing a flash game and I asked what it was and he said it was something called Doom. I got the link to the site off him, played it myself, got in trouble with the teacher for playing violent games in class, and then went home and played it more. I sucked ass at it, even on HNTR. I loved playing the eight maps (didn’t find the secret) and then forgot about it for a decade until 2020 when I saw the games were cheap as shit on Steam and played all the classic IWADs, bought Doom 3, hated it, forgot about it for another 2 years, and played the shit out of some custom WADs

[SealSpace]

Playing it on a MS-DOS shareware compilation disk on my old Windows 95 computer a little over two decades ago.

 

And my love for DOS games, FPS or otherwise, back in the day and playing first-person shooter games in general after my experience with Corridor 7 (and possibly Heretic). 

[Enzo Carozza]

A friend of mine got me into it ages ago - a simple but interesting gameplay dynamic is what's kept me into it; along with *cough* shameless Freedoom soundtrack credit self-insert *cough* ...I mean all of the amazing people I've met in this community.

[BUYXRAYS]

I started playing Quake and then I decided to play doom. I still play quake every now and then but I love doom

[fruity lerlups]

On 1/12/2024 at 7:24 AM, treulosetomate said:

Doom 2016 being boring. Then I got curious and tried old Doom and Doom 2 in Dosbox and was surprised how such a "simplistic" shooter, where you can't even look up and down, could be so much fun. A year later, I installed GZDoom to play through Doom again. That was around the time Eviternity was released, the gateway drug.

 

Thanks, Doom 2016!

i like your profile pic a lot its cool

[Weaseln_hecktor]

So I was a huge mincraft kid, and I played it for the longest time on my android tablet, and then I got bored and looked for other pixelized first person games, and eventually I dicovered Freedoom and then Doom (since it wasn't available until later) 

[Pepo]

My dad played Doom and Wolfenstein back when they came out and would usually talk about them when we had discussions about video games. I later ended up becoming a fan of FPS games and decided to pick up Doom 2016 one day and I've loved the series ever since