Your first experience of Doom?

[GreenAnime]

Am I the only one who have a odd history of Doom? Like it was like the year 2008 or 2010 when I was a kid (yep im a zoomer). I was dreading so much for "free FPS games" in the Internet till I discovered DOOM 1 the flash port of the game on y8.

[DNSKILL5]

I played the shareware off the registered version of Heretic in the late 90s. It wasn’t until 2004 when I got the Doom Collector’s Edition that I experienced the full game on PC. I had played Doom 64 and Final Doom on console, plus had the first Doom on GBA. 

Edited February 3, 2024 by DNSKILL5

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

I'll be honest, I don't really remember how I came to know Doom in its entirety, although I think the reason for this was possibly due to a series of videos about low-resource retro games to be played on the computer I was looking for when I was younger, maybe around 2009 or 2010, and among the things they recommended in the action section, they showed me the Doom video game, and I was honestly delighted with everything the video game had shown me, so I decided to look for it to try it, and that was when little by little I would try it until I became addicted to it, and when I discovered that you could add mods to it 2 years later, the experience was tremendous, and it got even better when I discovered the well-known brutal Doom to be able to install itself in it. port he played. (I use Zandronum because it was my childhood lol)

[scrm]

In 2002, when I was about 7 or 8 or so, a friend brought over a copy of ZSNES with a bunch of games loaded on it, one of them being SNES Doom. With no context to what Doom was, the game felt very unique and imposing. Young me felt very overwhelmed by the 3D environments and first-person perspective. The display resolution of that port probably didn't help. I couldn't get too far into it, but at least I made it to level 4 once.

 

At some later point, I finally downloaded the shareware version of PC Doom, casualing my way through Episode 1 on ITYTD with keyboard aim, before getting to the barons, who promptly clawed me apart. I just figured they were intended to be such a jump in difficulty I didn't even try beating them a second time and just quit.

 

Only later, around 2015 or so, would I finally buy Ultimate Doom, and later Doom 2 and Final Doom and properly get into the game and the Dooming scene.

Edited February 3, 2024 by scrm

[lokbustam257]

I never really heard about Doom when I was younger, back then all video games I played was Plants vs Zombies and Empire Earth II on my dad's laptop. I only heard about it after I saw some youtube videos about Doom 4 years ago. Interested and then download a pirated version (or some people call it "trying before buying") and finish the first three episodes on GZDoom with mouselook, texture filtering, OpenGL rendering AND with jumping.

 

Eventually I bought legit copy of Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 on Steam because I'm scared that one day a floating dismembered head of John Romero is gonna break trough my house and take me to his secret underground dungeon for having an illegitimate copy of both games.

[Cutman 999]

I don't even remember. The first time I played doom was in 2020 in a sourceport, but I'm sure i knew about doom earlier, somehow. Maybe was because an Old and deleted discord server organized some zandronum events, or just 8BDM.

[Ozcar]

12 minutes ago, lokbustam257 said:

Eventually I bought legit copy of Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 on Steam because I'm scared that one day a floating dismembered head of John Romero is gonna break trough my house and take me to his secret underground dungeon for having an illegitimate copy of both games.

I hope you enjoy my shitty edit.

Edited February 4, 2024 by Ozcar

[DiavoJinx]

After my friends and I had been all over Wolfenstein 3-D (with the strategy guide with maps of every level, fascinating dev commentary all over that book!), Doom was the Next Big Thing of course.

 

Friend had acquired the shareware version (IIRC it was v1.1 which had the savegame bug where any save besides slot 1 and maybe 2 got erased or something like that each save, or saves would always overwrite slot 1 or something, it was nasty) and I installed it after school (high school) one day. That was early 1994.

 

I distinctly remember playing e1m1 and picking one of the lower difficulties at first... and then not being able to leave the first area.  Coming from Wolf3D, the only thing in the beginning area of e1m1 that looked like an actual door was the fake door behind you right when you started. The real door (which we know as BIGDOOR2 texture) didn't look like a door to me, and when I went around pressing Space on all the walls looking for a secret wall a la Wolf3D, I must have mis-pressed on that door or something as it didn't open and I kept looking around... for a while.

So I restarted the game, thinking maybe I missed something (duh! I did, lol) and chose Ultra Violence just to see some bad guys and actually do something.

...from there I continued my first play through on UV. That was fun. =)  I normally stick with easier difficulties for first play-thrus; however I had been doing some blind (actually blind: not looking at the screen) level plays of Wolf3D e1m1 and knew so much of Wolf3D like the back of my hand (all of episode 1 completely memorized, much of the other 5 episodes too), so I was primed for Doom 1 UV. ;-)

Edited February 8, 2024 by DiavoJinx

[Bolaum]

First time I played Doom my father got it on my PC when I was 5-6 years old I think. My mom got mad and made him delete it from my PC and I completly forgot about it.

 

Something like 20-25 years later someone posted Coincident's video about the block map bug in /r/speedrun, I thought the video was cool and decided to watch some videos in his channel and I thought some of those maps were really really cool (specifically the Japanese Community Project, Pirate Doom, Valiant and Ancient Aliens) and decided to play these maps myself.

 

Now, after playing over 100 WADs (Eviternity 2 being the last WAD played) I gotta say what the community did with Doom is incredible, I don't see myself stopping anytime soon.

[Downcologo one]

1 hour ago, Cutman 999 said:

I don't even remember. The first time I played doom was in 2020 in a sourceport, but I'm sure i knew about doom earlier, somehow. Maybe was because an Old and deleted discord server organized some zandronum events, or just 8BDM.

I think I remember that you had said something about that in the interview with hunted

[Varis Alpha]

played it on a shovelware disc when i was 4 or so years old even though i wasn't allowed to do so. eventually i was allowed to play it and got to play other games such as quake 2, unreal and dark forces 1 and 2. some years later i got the doom collector's edition, but it wasn't until late 2000s when i discovered doom mods were a thing and got hooked ever since.

[DiceByte]

I’m sorry to say, but I unfortunately had to start Doom with the mobile ports last year (I think). It was still a hella fun time, though! Now, I am playing Eternal and 2016!

[Caffeine]

It's time for another one of the threads, I see.

 

Back in 1993 I was a teenager and a friend lent me his 3.5" inch floppy disks (save icons, lol) with the shareware version. I convinced my parents to mail away for the full version when it released. Later on I bought Doom 2 and Ultimate Doom when they came out because I was finally old enough to get a job and buy them myself.

 

I played the hell out of Doom back in the 1990s until I got hooked on Blizzard's games from their golden years, mostly WarCraft 2 and Diablo 2 and was distracted for a decade or two. I still played Doom off and on again until about two years ago when I came across decino and spectere on YouTube and noticed that Doom has some really good maps now, which motivated me to play much more frequently.

 

Doom is probably my favorite game of all time even though I have not played it consistently for the past thirty years. However, I always come back to it and enjoy seeing what the community is able to create.

[kevansevans]

I'm only two months younger than Doom, so it's sort of always been with me. I think my earliest memory of Doom was E2M8. My dad would enter in the IDDQD and IDKFA cheats for me and just let me play. I remember knowing which keys were which gun, and thinking it was ironically funny beating the cyberdemon with a rocket launcher. (Or as ironically funny as a then likely 3 year old me thought it was). I would take the copy of Ultimate Doom or Doom II on CD to school just so I could install it and play it. I don't mean "or" as in I couldn't remember which one I had, I knew they were full games and would go in between moods of which one I wanted to play. Eventually I upgraded to USB's in highschool when I felt like a wizard for getting around the schools "No installing games" rule. Wasn't until I was around 14 I learned of ZDoom, and then took an admittedly embarrassing amount of years after that to understand how making a PWAD worked and how to make mods.

 

Doom's been a constant thing in my entire life, and I would not be here today had my parents not bought that game.

Edited February 7, 2024 by kevansevans

[ZeroTheEro]

Back in 1995, my family got our first computer. Included were shareware discs, one had Doom on the cover, and the other is Rise of the Triad. (the discs were labeled Zodiac or something, it had a short video of asteroids banging into each other)

 

Our Pentium PC did come with a soundcard, but for some reason I never could configure the music and SFX to run right (some trial and error was involved), so I was stuck hearing PC speaker noises to the point that I could remember the beeps and boops as the game runs the demos. I can even remember how the action goes, and because of that I could pinpoint the shareware version on the disc as v1.666 these days. Playing the game back then as a kid scared me, I remember reaching the end of E1M3 on HMP and not proceeding any further. Saw my babysitter's son got Doom 95 and there I saw him running Heretic for the first time. I didn't even realize that Doom II had a sequel like almost a decade later, where in late 2000s cyber cafes and warez are a huge thing. olddoom.com was among the first sites I encounter.

I didn't actually get to buy Doom and Doom II until it was 2010 with my own money, and funnily enough the first two things that I bought on Steam with my own debit card.

[Amaruψ]

We used to have an old Pentium 3 machine in the family, which I kid you not, dad had bought for his mobile phone shop from a junk collector. When the shop eventually had to be closed due to financial problems, the machine became our family computer for the coming decade. Back then, we didn't have internet so I bought pirated games on discs. Yes, "bought" pirated games, because it was (and still is) a common practice for the video game specific shops here to illegally obtain copies of a game, burn them onto a disc and stick it in between a pair of cheap paper cutouts with the game's artwork in a plastic bag and sell it as an official game. The genuine copies of the games fetched thousands in my currency compared to two digit numbers I had to pay for these cheap knockoffs. 

 

One of these software compilation discs had DOOM on it, more specifically DOOM II. I still remember the young me roaming through the halls, exploring this frightening and surrealistic game, unlike any other FPS game that I've played up until that point. I didn't play much of it however, and simply opted out because that disc also gave me a virus and we had to flush the entire HDD. Years later, I recall not knowing about source ports and fiddling with DOSBOX trying to get this old game working because now I wanted to play it badly. Once I discovered Zandronum the rest became history. 

 

 

[Craneo]

When I was a kid I went to my aunts house, saw a PC, wanted to play some games, clicked one, and it was Doom, it scared me off cuz I was easy to scare as a child, and I would cry cuz it was a creepy demon game, years later as a teenager I was surfing the web for pirated games and found that one game, and it unlocked that memory, I downloaded it but the build didn't have mouse support, that's when I found sourceports (and Doom Brutal v19 GRAAAH!!!), later on I eventually got the game legally 😛