Your Pathway to Doom Speedrunning + Peak Moments

[Kinetic]

In discord some people were talking about how they got their way into doom, doom speedrunning, and the community in general. So, this thread is for players to flesh out their histories prior to this game and how they got into doom speedrunning, if they wish to share. Additionally, you can include the "end point" for how you got to speedrunning this game, aka the moments that keep you speedrunning or the ones you remember most fondly from speedrunning. If you feel like you're on a soapbox chatting about your own history don't worry, it's fairly interesting to a lot of people I bet.

 

Mostly though it's about the prior history part. I'll go first.

 

Spoiler

I was about 2-4 when I first started playing Doom, we had the Playstation version of Doom and Final Doom. My dad would have me sit on his lap while he played, and sometimes he let me play but I was obviously pretty bad.

 

After about 4, I would play Playstation Doom on my own on and off for probably the next 6-8 years or so? I also got into watching some early youtube doom content, I particularly recall watching 2 channels. The first was PieceOfPie software, which I think used to be called Paul's Gaming back then, he would play some random pwads on GZDoom and I always thought he was really funny. My favorite videos of his was his Belly of the Beast wad playthrough, and also some random pool level with cybruisers and stuff. The other channel was something like PsyRaptor? I remember it being pronounced like that though, and I remember he played Doom 64.

 

Also around the late 00s and early 2010s I remember playing Doom 3 for PC on our family computer, which was a laptop (we have only ever had laptops as our family computers, even up to today in 2024).

 

At some point in the early 2010s our family got a Playstation 3, as well as Doom III BFG Edition. I was super stoked to play Doom III's expansion pack Resurrection of Evil, as I had only seen youtube playthroughs of it before I got D3 BFG Edition. I also was super excited to play Doom and Doom II "normally", as in with the original music and normal enemies I had seen on youtube, as opposed to the slow, ambient horror of Playstation Doom with slow revenant missiles, enemies, and lack of archviles. It was also super fun to play No Rest for the Living on D3 BFG, because I had no idea it existed before, so it sort of was almost like my first PWAD. I probably played Doom this way up until 2016 or so, maybe 2017.

 

In 2016, Doom 2016 came out, and I got and played that, was pretty fun. I never did an UN run, but I did play it all the way through with Nightmare.

 

In terms of other games in these years, I remember in 5th grade for some reason some guys in my class introduced me to a game called Tanki Online, it's a "Tanki browser-based multiplayer free-to-play video game" to quote google.  I played that for about 1 summer and then in random short spurts during middle school. When I was really young I played other playstation games like Crash Bandicoot (we had the entire trilogy on PS1), NAMCO museum, Jetmoto, Resident Evil 1-3, and Silent Hill 1 even though it was too scary for me and I mostly watched my father play it. On the Wii, I played a ton of New Super Mario Bros, RE4, Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga, and Donkey Kong Country Returns in the early 2010s. When we got a PS3, I played Minecraft, the Madden series, Plants vs Zombies, few God of War games, South Park Stick of Truth, Uncharted games, Bioshock 2, and even Duke Nukem Forever lol. I had an entire COD zombies era as well, mostly playing BO1 at my house alone, and sometimes BO2 or BO1 at friends houses, back in the early 2010s. I'm probably forgetting some games, but this is what I was doing mostly in terms of gaming late 00s and 2010s.

 

I don't have as good of a grasp on what I was playing in 2017-2018 all that well, but 2019 ended up being the main year I got seriously into Doom.

 

After years of it being in the background and seeing random PWAD demos of cool maps showing up on Youtube for me, and probably also the emergence of Doomtube with Decino, I decided I wanted to make the cool maps I kept seeing online. Since I was a growing boy of 14 years, I decided to actually finally take action on that desire, and mustered up enough courage to try purchasing something online and asking my dad to buy Doom II + Final Doom on GOG as an "early" birthday present in Spring of 2019. I had done my research on how to download run and use sourceports, discovered doomworld, discovered the Top 100 Maps of all Time article, and learned that if I got the iwads, I could both make my own maps, and access a near infinite amount of content for free, and using these arguments I convinced my father I could basically be entertained infinitely for the small price of $5-$10. I was so excited. He ended up getting it for me in May of 2019, and I immediately downloaded and played Valiant as my first PWAD through GZDoom. And then I just got absolutely hooked on the game for the next half a decade.

 

At first I was just mapping in DB2/GZBuilder (bugfix) and casually playing with GZDoom, before I eventually became interesting in pursuing challenge wads and improving skill in 2020, used the famous Skill Progression thread for that. Then in 2021 I got into the speedrunning and challenge max community through david and twitch/youtube, started my own youtube channel and twitch channel to show/archive my runs, and got speedrunner pilled naturally as a progression from trying to beat the hardest maps to trying to be one of the best players. This was my first speedgame, I hadn't competed in videogames really or done challenges for a game, the closest I had to that was trying to get to high rounds in COD zombies as a kid, or trying to reach high ranks and get good K/D ratios in the aformentioned Tanki Online.

 

I didn't realize I've been heavily involved in this game for 5 years now, I've stopped playing other games entirely basically.

 

Peak Moments:

 

Spoiler

I remember when I got my first Dimensions Map03 UV-Max, I had been working on it for over 2 months, had thousands of attempts. I had never worked that hard to achieve something in my life, which is honestly kind of lame but it was important to me at the time, I had never invested so much time and effort into trying to do something nearly impossible to me. I had like 15 deaths in the finale fight before I finally got it, and when I did, I remember jumping out of my chair and yelling around my house shouting "I DID IT". I even told my parents that I had done it even though they had no idea what I was talking about. I even felt a little taller after getting it lol. I don't think I've ever had more raw joy after getting a run.

 

When I got my lv02 0:56 max, I remember feeling a mixture of joy and relief after getting it. I remember spamming stuff in discord vc about getting it, after 200 hours and too many nights just playing it for 8 hours straight throwing everything else away like an idiot for it. I had to put up blue light filter setting just for my eyes to withstand it at times, first time I remember my hands and arms really beginning to ache after long play sessions. I was happy that I got it, but so glad it was over, and really happy to share the news with everyone. I ate some purple doritos after I got it while watching Meowgi stream the stupid ass textfile.

 

Getting the Sunlust D2All was mostly relief instead of joy. I was so relieved to get it, I thought the night I got it would be my last chance to seriously grind it until the next summer, since it was right before my wisdom teeth surgery and then the beginning of a college semester. I had started working on it in February right after lv02, so 6 months later it was nice for it to pay off. One of the attempts close to my exit that failed I remember getting up from my seat and laying in my bed for several minutes thinking about my choke. It's long and quiet minutes at 4am. But when I got it it was so nice to get it at the last minute, and so nice to share the moment with everyone in my stream.

 

I think D2All streaming is probably my favorite thing that happens in this game, it's all of us coming together to cheer someone else on for weeks, months at a time, day in and day out. the maps cycle quickly so it doesn't get boring to watch. That cycle of entering stream, saying hello to people, talking about how runs have been so far, then meandering to random conversation about other topics or wads or runs, and then back to focusing in on the game and locking in during deep runs, it's just a really beautiful thing I think. It's equally enjoyable to be both the runner and a viewer in those situations to me.

 

Sorry for the walls of text, my ability to ramble is somewhat genetic and I take a UV-Max approach to talking sometimes adding in unnecessary details.

 

Anyways share your paths here and vivid speedrunning/community moments that keep you here, I'm really interested in player histories and details =D

[Andrea Rovenski]

I started playing doom when I was around 2 or 3 years old because of my grandpa. I never owned a computer at my house until much later, so Doom was always "that one game I cant play" unless I was at my grandpa's house, so as a kid it had a bit of a mystical vibe because of that and of course the violent gameplay hehe. That eventually grew to me drawing paper levels and me and my grandpa trying to make them into real levels (sadly nothing survives of this time to show :() but around when I was 11 or 12 I got a PC at my house and from then on I wanted to play custom maps and make my own. For most of my childhood I didn't have too many games, so I already was accustomed to the speedrunning lifestyle of playing the same shit over and over again, but when I was a teenager I also started streaming (big mistake) and that's where I found that people actually DID play the same shit over and over again and it was called "speedrunning", so I was hooked ever since. Maybe around 2012-2013, with me starting doom around late 2013 and wanting to learn to speedrun pwads because no one was doing that as much, that's where I found stuff like Memento Mori. 

 

Peak moments are harder to describe. Some of my favorites are getting all 3 iwad d2alls back when no one ran max movies (free wr), doing the mm and demonfear tables were super fun because I used mm as a barometer for my skill over time for about a decade and demonfear I was always afraid of trying because I never thought I'd do well with short maps (vs mm maps which are 20,000 years long). I also love when people post demos of my own levels, and consider watching any or competing in them to be peak moments just because it's so cool. 

[MFG38]

Been playing Doom since 2008. I just kinda decided to record a couple speedrun demos in 2022 and it took off from there.

 

Peak moments, uhh... Charcoal D2All, FFDoom E1 UV-Speed, Gehenna E1M5 UV-Speed (still the most annoying UV-Speed I've ever recorded).

[kvothesixstring]

I started playing Doom when I was like 6 or 7, right around when Doom came out. I remember my dad brought home the shareware version from work (he had gotten it from a friend I believe). I had watched him play Wolf3d and remembered being just entranced by it. So when he brought home Doom it was like that but even crazier action. I didn't have very good hand eye coordination so I was keyboard only because that just made more sense to my child brain. I would poke around the levels, hiding from the monsters and finding secrets like I was Indiana Jones or something. When Doom2 came out my dad took me to the local computer store and we brought it home and played it together, taking turns after each of us died. He eventually built me a computer of my own out of scraps from his work and we set up a LAN connection in the house. We played Co-op and deathmatch a lot. I also got Final Doom around when that came out because my computer couldn't really run Quake with any kind of stable framerate. I had no idea that custom levels were a thing back then so I just played the iwads over and over. 

 

I would always come back to Doom as I grew up. I stumbled upon the Master Levels at some point as well but that wasn't one I got into a lot because I thought some of the maps were broken so I gave up lol. 

 

I loved watching KingDime do his RTA iwad runs. I ended up in his discord after a GDQ event where he was teaching the Episode 1 UV Speed route. I had gotten Crispy Doom for that and it was my first SourcePort. I really enjoyed learning the skills involved to go fast. But I never really got competitive with it. Mostly it was just a personal challenge to improve.

 

Fast forward to 2020 and I discovered PWADs via Decino doing his Sunlust playthrough on YouTube. Needless to say I was stunned at what the community had been able to come up with in the intervening 25 years. I immediately downloaded GZDoom and Sunlust. I had started streaming on Twitch a little bit before this and so I thought it would be cool to play it on stream. Unfortunately there were a lot of people in chat being pretty unhelpful and rude about me playing on HMP. So I ended that playthrough around map10. A few months later I saw Ancient Aliens being played by someone and I thought it was beautiful. So I gave that a try. I remember having some visual glitches on GZDoom and I believe it was Bytefyre who convinced me to download DSDADoom. 

 

Then I reached map23 of Ancient Aliens and found a skip all on my own lol. So I got some help from Daerik, who taught me how to glide properly (you can blame him for my brainrot). It was here that I fell in love with speedrunning. The rush I felt from performing tricks and jumps was a thrill.  That midi will forever bring me back to that time and place. 

 

I don't know if I can say that I have any real high points in my speedrunning career. Plutonia Map13 Pacifist was definitely the point that I actually considered myself a speedrunner though. I don't know if you can call doing 43,000 attempts at gliding next to an angry baron a high point, it's more like a mix of determination and stubbornness. I knew it was possible so I did it. 

 

I think I am still learning new things about the game every time I boot it up. I don't consider myself an expert or anything. But this game has been a place for me to escape and create and I will forever be grateful to be a part of this community. With very few exceptions you folks have been welcoming and helpful and I really didn't expect that from a competitive hobby.

 

 

[Kinetic]

On 5/4/2024 at 12:30 PM, kvothesixstring said:

kvotext

Doom does always tend to be something that floats adjacent to people after their first experience, it always lingers in the background somehow. Yesterday I was at a deathmetal concert (I don't even like/listen to deathmetal) and I saw some guy with a black t-shirt with Doom logo on it); I imagine if I hadn't played doom since childhood, that would have been an impetus to check in on what people are up to now and that could have been a catalyst for me getting into this game in an alternate reality.

 

It's really awesome that aa23's music puts you back in a time and place. Sometimes the reverse happens for me, where a time of year will send me back to a doom memory.

 

Those people who were being rude about you playing on HMP for sunlust should've shut up.