things in doom that weirdly scared you back then

[Dreemurr Deceevurr]

Remember getting spooked by the "wooooooooooooooh" in The Demons From Adrian's Pen when I was little.

Edited April 20 by Dreemurr Deceevurr

[Misty]

I was afraid to get out of e1m1 starter room, because these zombies and imp were too scary, approaching me, shooting and I didn't know that I can shoot them until they die. Also e1m8 death pit where you're helpless to stop taking damage until level ends.
Cyberdemon in e2m8 was one of challenging and scary moments too, those stomps and rockets were no joke back then, if you take it into your face, screen turns red and somewhat I imagine getting that annoying ringing in the ears. I still feel uneasy when I encounter it in various levels. 

[DJVCardMaster]

Back in the day, the whole game scared me, because I was replaying Doom on a 32x emulator, of all ports I could have chosen. For some reason my dad downloaded that emulator, with the game, and it felt scarier than I remembered it to be on PC. Everything is darker, the fart music gives you an uncanny mood, E2 maps have hellish textures rather than "corrupted tech-base" ones. I had like 12 years when I was replaying it (My first time with Doom was when I was six, I wasn't as scared). I have to give it to the 32x version for having a shadier look than the original, definitively a different setup than the usual action-FPS. Also, no strafe-running, so it feels like playing a tank-controlled survival horror.

[JoJo_BadDoom]

Doom on the 32x certainly does have that darker feel, for sure. Even without the messed up music.

For me, that "maze" in e1m4 always got me nervous when I was a kid. Kinda pushed me to learn the jump that skips that bit! (that run to the ledge by the yellow key)

[MoreMending]

I remember when I was extremely new to doom 2, encountering the arch vile always felt like a jumpscare (I genuinely do not know why), and that was like 2021

[erzboesewicht]

I was scared a bit by one of the ambiance sounds which seems like acid or some other dangerous liquid is leaking somewhere. Much later I learned that's simply one of the sounds imps make  when they roam around and has nothing to do with damaging liquids ...

 

I also generally was scared by E1M8, not only by the barons but also the general mysterious structure of the map with the star-shaped platform, this weird room with pinkies running around like crazy (demons possessed by demons?), and of course Sign of Evil. I stil think this map atmospherically is a masterpiece, even if it is quite simple and very easy for everybody with minimal FPS experience.

 

[Maximum Matt]

That thing where you are checking the automap and are basically blind and vulnerable to attack - there were plenty of times I parked myself in what I thought was a safe area, then pressed tab to examine the map, only to get my ass mauled by the one demon I missed.  That's always a heart-starter

[The Royal We]

Hunted

[Grungo]

Grungo got scared of deimos labs, it was creepy

[Logamuffin]

I find it interesting that people say “Doom was scary back then” because I always thought the game was more cartoonish than anything else. The thing is though, that’s by modern standards. I imagine back then when Doom’s technology and style was fresh, it must’ve been a lot more scary because there wasn’t anything else like it. Nowadays though, it seems absurd that it’d be scary to people because of how cartoon-y it is, and it just goes to show how our perceptions and standards when it comes to media have shifted over time. I’d liken it to that one Garfield comic (You know the one) where the joke is so mild by modern standards that it doesn’t even register as a joke for most people anymore.

[Napeyear]

8 hours ago, Grungo said:

Grungo got scared of deimos labs, it was creepy

 

When I was little the soundtrack spooked me, but I always thought the 'red room' that houses the yellow key (along with a crusher trap and shotgunners) was really uncanny. Crusher traps in general freaked me out, as they always caught me by surprise and I managed to die every single time. During my first play through of Doom, after the first crusher trap I encountered splattered me, I would creep around the map without sprinting or back in and out of doorways to try and trigger them, hoping to avoid the same fate.

 

[Fireseth]

Too bad I started playing DOOM when I was around twelve years old, which was the age when nothing scared me! 😎

 

If I had started playing earlier, I’m sure I’d have more fond memories and nostalgia for DOOM, but I don’t.

[The_MártonJános]

On 4/22/2024 at 4:06 AM, Napeyear said:

 

[...] Crusher traps in general freaked me out, as they always caught me by surprise and I managed to die every single time. During my first play through of Doom, after the first crusher trap I encountered splattered me, I would creep around the map without sprinting or back in and out of doorways to try and trigger them, hoping to avoid the same fate.

I remember developing trust issues similar to that by E2M6's chaingun room (the vaguely T-shaped optional area with the vines and the rather nonsense secret tag.) The crusher in question also has the diamond shaped light texture on a brown surface, which used to rub me the wrong way for some unknown reason.

[EDIT] copied the image link from the DoomWiki if someone was super unsure

Edited April 23 by The_MártonJános

[Wahrnehmungskrieg]

Large post inbound.

 

Doom's manual, without the game, was far scarier than the actual game (before I played it and so 'defused' the manual, which had promised so much). I know this to be common experience: the 'prelude' / preparing materials' never matching the actual product was also felt by William Bennett of Whitehouse, whose musical inflection was inspired by no music ever matching up to its sleeve art by the time he actually got round to listening to it:

 

The Bennett Lecture in Question

(The bit I'm on about is at the start so no timestamp.)

 

As a young one I flipped thro' the pages of the manual of my father's copy of The Ultimate Doom (the English version with that unnerving demon staring you down as the cover, wearing the BBFC logo as an earring) long before I played the thing, and concieved the game as an incomprehensible, unending nightmare. The description of the crushers stuck with me in a way then that was never matched when I actually played the thing: I must have seen the whole game as a literal Hell and equally malevolent; the crushers being a way in which the entire environment could turn on you in an instant (and not in a 'lol you hit a tag 0 crusher' way a jokewad would do it, it was some total violation of geometry, some complete and sudden apocalypse of metaphysics, that cut into the core). It's literally impossible to express in a game the way I felt after reading the manual, I can not even imagine a way to approximate the Hellish concepts that manual conjured, no poet even comes near an inch of the apocalypse within myself what occurred within that text.

 

At the time, I was being plagued by waking visions where when witnessing some otherwise-innocuous image, I would become entrapped in a fantasy where the world I lived in was penetrated by some otherworldly force that would lift the hermetic veil of the firmament such that I was obliterated by the sudden heady rush of comprehending the true height and vertical depth of things: naturally such nasty image would incorporate itself into the vision of Hell that was generated through the manual. Part of my getting into Doom was to experience that thing again; as much as I despised that sensation of the mind, I also loved it, and wished to mutilate it, to violate it with some blunt instrument.

 

The closest anyone has ever gotten to how I felt about Doom before my adolescence was done by TS Eliot when he appropriated Dante in the Waste Land:
 

Quote

 

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

 

(Emphasis mine for the most powerful line: which happens to be the chief Dante appropriation. Whatevs.)

 

I reread this part of the Waste Land so often that I began to revisit the same chill I felt all the way back then reading this, ruined my day. (And to go off-topic, the Tiresias bit in the same poem was also equally annihilating for different reasons.)

 

But to turn back more on-topic, but discounting that 'back then' to about 5-6 years: Hell Revealed's MAP07 is so physically-nauseating to me that I never, ever wish to play it again. It sticks in my mind like a nightmare where you witness an Old God and from which you awake in a fit of screaming. No other level, not even a level textured similarly, has ever done this. Hail Haggay Niv.

Edited April 24 by Wahrnehmungskrieg

[iamtheultraidiot1]

I PISSED my TROUSERS when i saw the archvile and when the bunny show up its the Big long stick i shit my fucking pants. and then my dog came in and took my piss and shit pants and started runnig around with them, and then my step father came in and i creamed for my life

[blueyosh43]

On 4/21/2024 at 1:18 PM, Logamuffin said:

 Nowadays though, it seems absurd that it’d be scary to people because of how cartoon-y it is,

My first playthrough of doom was in VR so idk if that makes a major difference, but it could definitely be scary, and I say that as an adult. Make it dark and hard to see, throw in some creepy music and it's not difficult to make it scary. My knees shook as I walked through Halls of the Damned. 

[fruity lerlups]

 

simply put.. this damn face.. and i'm a scaredy cat, still am to this day (i cannot watch the horror movies my bf watches). This damn image still gives me the heeby jeebies and is etched into my brain.

[fruity lerlups]

On 4/22/2024 at 3:09 AM, Grungo said:

Grungo got scared of deimos labs, it was creepy

tbf grungo you think the thunderspirit is angry when the bfg fires

[Venezolano Hambreado]

Definitively the Pinky's first apparition in DOOM 3

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-uaHUqmuPQ

[TheMightyWhoosh]

This soundtrack still terrifies me even to this day. 

[enigma101]

I remember being creeped out by the first bit of "Countdown to Death" in MAP03.

[pantheon]

One of the earliest impressions I remember was being creeped out by infighting. It wasn't something I'd ever seen before. If they do that to each other, what are they going to do to you? Yikes...

[TheGreenZap]

Arch-viles always scared the hell out of me.

[LegendaryEevee]

     My favorite Doom Game ever made (Playstation's Final Doom) with the somber sounds / Liminal Spaces / and oppressive sky boxes.  This game containing (13x) Doom II Master Levels / (11x) TNT / (6x) Plutonia Levels made you constantly feel alone with death around every corner.  The creepiest level for me was my favorite TNT Level Ballistyx.  I mean look at it......JUST.......LOOK AT IT =O

 

 

 

 

Edited May 2 by LegendaryEevee

[rita remton]

was terrified the first time i saw an archvile and what it could do in [doom2 map11: circle of fire]. nowadays, the gameplay of a map would feel incomplete without a couple of them :P

[LegendaryEevee]

2 hours ago, TheGreenZap said:

Arch-viles always scared the hell out of me.

Especially when you hear them breathing and don't know where they are

[Korsuv]

Theses typical traps were nerve-wraking to me : https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxagcYfV-Ar8hMdFAKU521R0HMiRo52Hs4?si=iIyH42AXZ6uOcW0G
 

[Bedingungsl.Grundeinkommen]

On 4/15/2024 at 8:52 AM, VICE said:

>Thread about things that scared you about Doom as a kid.

>OP is talking about 2016 Doom.

>Lol

ROFL this is so funny rn 

[JeffAri]

There's nothing that really scared me about the main doom games tbh, although there was a mod that I played not too long after I started playing doom that really creeped me out so I guess that's something?

 

btw don't ask me what the mod is called because I just can't remember what it is called for the life of me

 

Although I kinda remember that it might've had some kind of asylum area in it? and apparently the story had some pretty dark themes (child abuse, stuff like that) and when I downloaded it, it wasn't in a finished state yet

(I also got it off of ModDb)

[Sonikkumania]

Pain Elementals, and IoS og bgm.