Your first connection to the DOOM community?

[AndrewB]

While I have been a fan of DOOM and the rest of the DOOM engine games (excluding Strife) for a long, long time, over five years, I'm rather new to the actual community. I've only been around it for about a year now.

My first connection to the DOOM community was about a year ago. Late last spring, I set out to put all the songs from the original DOOM on a CD. Since many of the MIDI files I had on my hard drive were edited, I wanted to make sure I had a fresh batch. Knowing there were many sites with MIDI files from DOOM, and not wanting to bother booting to DOS and ripping the MIDI files from the WAD, I set out, and quickly found Doomworld. After having downloaded most of the MIDI files, using my primitive combonation of an 8, 4, and 2 megabyte GM/GS soundfonts, along with a twenty-dollar 12MB drumkit, I began recording on my SBLive Value.. Soon afterward, the original DOOM soundtrack was on CD, for my own personal use of course. It wasn't intellectually stimulating music, and eventually I lended the CD to my good friend Marc. He still has it to this day.

Of course, spending all that time going in and out of the main Doomworld front page, I couldn't help but notice some of the healines broadcast. COMPET-N was one of the first sites I was drawn to, and after my first visit, I was hooked. It was my dream for months to be a COMPET-N player. On December 12th, 1999, my first four recordings were debuted on COMPET-N. TNT - Evilution level 3 in 6:45, and level 4 in :15, :14, and :13. My level 3 recording has since been disqualified due to the fact that it was previously beaten with a MAX recording.


Going back in time again though, I had spent the summer visiting Doomworld almost every day. The most memorable news topic that stuck in my head was the explosion of Rick Clark's computer in September, shortly after Doomworld's one millionth visit was recorded. That visitor would be Mancubus, and I would be stuck with number 1,000,003. That all happened late during the evening of September 20th, despite the estimation by Linguica that it would happen on the 21st. Not quite.


Another quite memorable incident was of course, Dukrous' final Doom2 box giveaway. I spent days trying to solve the problem. In my haste, I actually nearly sent in a false entry. After slowing down a bit, and actually figuring it out, I was sure I had it all right, and let me tell you, the Marine isn't a monster. That's some work of deception there. But it was quite obviously the Marine, though. Nothing else had the green that the Marine did.
In fact, in one part of my entry, where the entry "5. Demon" was entered, it turned up blank at Duk's side. That right. It looked like "5. "... That's because my dad had decided the previous day to install NetNanny on the proxy server, obliterating all things "DEMON" ... I sent him a clarification message that indeed, 5. was "DEM0N", using zeros. I said that I hoped I was still eligible. Indeed, late one Halloween night, I was utterly shocked and pleased to see my name there. Of course, I had to feel bad for the other 38 guys who were probably at least somewhat dissapointed. Indeed, I still do.

Wanting to spread the news to someone, I entered #doomroom for the first time that night. I was at first teased for having a sattelite dish company as my visible ISP. After being kickbanned several times, and bugging Linguica through ICQ to un-ban me, I realized that I probably wasn't too welcome in #doomroom. I said a silent goodbye, and didn't enter #doomroom again.


Well, after a few weeks of bittersweet waiting, I finally recieved my Doom2 box on November 25th. Half a year ago today. I took 45 pictures of myself that night. I decided the 45th one was the best, and that is the picture you see next to this message, and on Doomworld's picture section. In case anyone was wondering, that picture was taken of me lying on the basement floor, with a single white light shining down. The box held carefully with my out-of-view left hand. The pinkish tone was due to a color offset I had selected. Anyway, on the 26th, the image was posted on Dukworld's site, and it made the news. Hmm hmm.. At least Afterglow had the common courtesy to spell my name right, but hey.. I wasn't complaining..


I never did discover DoomNation until October, and the DoomNation forums remained concealed from me as well for a while after that. In late November, I had found the DoomNation forums. After a few weeks of joyfully posting there, the Doomworld news topic thread was unveiled. Doomworld and DoomNation forums would then become my two most visited sites. On February 17th, the forums were broken. A few months later, the Doomworld Forums debuted on May 1st. About the same time, DoomNation took a nosedive into the middle of nowhere, and here is where I stand. Back on Doomworld, my old faithful site. On the forums and the comment thread system. Waiting for QDOOM, waiting for QDOOM...


So, anyone else have a story to share?

[Jon]

I first played doom hmm, lesse- (counts) 12, 11, 10, 9, 8 yeah about 5 and a half years ago on a friends computer. I played for about an hour and was utterly hooked. He then told me he had doom2 :) This started a lunchtime addiction and eventually the serial linked 486 scenario so many people are used to.

Anyway in internet-retarded england I got online roughly 3 years ago and looked around for doom stuff- using my Alchemy book I stumbled across the old doomgate network which was long dead and I assumed the doom community went with it. Roughly two years ago from today I read about doom legacy and stumbled across doomworld et al- then the jirc-off thing brought the world of IRC to my fingertips and I've been an idle basrad ever since.

Seriously the #doomroom guys are kinda cool people when you know em. 'Specially the limeys.

[Arioch]

My first encounter with Doom was with the Doom 1 shareware (version 1.0 with OS 0.99 or whatever). I played it on a 486sx33 and man did it rock, PC-Speaker sounds and all.

This is gonna sound stupid:

At the time there were 4 of us who played Doom who lived in a little town together. I and my brother had a 286 and couldn't play Doom. One guy had a 486dx50, another had a 486sx33. Whenever we visited each other's houses after school or on weekends we'd play Doom. We played it the most primitive way imaginable: the owner of the computer controlled the player (up down left right), my brother on the fire key (ctrl) and I on the space bar. Lame, huh? That was back in 1993.

Needless to say, that control configuration sucked. Especially for me. But it really did not do very well against the monsters. (Understatement)

When we got to the Barons of Hell in E1M8, we'd get utterly wiped out because 1) the movement controller was slow because of his position. 2) the firing controller wasn't coordinated well with the movement controller.

Heh. We never did beat that level. I eventually went back to beat it, but "we" never did.

Some time after that one of us got our hands on a copy of the full version of Doom 1.2

We played joyously through the rest of the episodes (sometimes singly now) and just about then, we got news of Doom 2.

One of us got the full version of Doom 2 1.666 and we played through it, usually singly. Again though, we had awful problems with the boss level. This time, we didn't know what the hell to do with it.

The first time we reached it, it was my brother and the guy with the 486/50 who were playing. I was away somewhere else, and when I got back I heard that they had reached the final boss. You cannot believe how cool it sounded coming from their mouths. Something to the effect of "this huge demonic head that screams at you and then starts spawning demons all across the area ... " Wow.

It took some work to beat that thing, because back then not a single one of us knew there was a Doom community on the 'net, and we didn't have regular internet access anyway. Not a single one of us had ever played network Doom before.

After a while, I got my own computer ... the very first Pentium in our little group ... a P166. Then I got started on Quake. Keep in mind that Doom was always my favorite game, but I never figured that anybody still actually played it. During all this time I kept a copy of Doom/Doom2 on my computer, though I had moved on to play Quake, Quake2, Descent, Duke3d, and a host of the other 3D FPS shooters, my favorite "genre" of gaming.

About 2 years ago, I found a link to zDoom 1.14 while on ftp.cdrom.com, looking around because I had heard that id Software had released the source code. I downloaded it and played it... at 640x400.

And here I am today. :)

Arioch

[AndrewB]

AriocH said:

One guy had a 486dx50, another had a 486sx33. Whenever we visited each other's houses after school or on weekends we'd play Doom. We played it the most primitive way imaginable: the owner of the co

That's an interesting idea for 2-player playing. Even now, it sounds interesting. It would be challenging. Maybe Anders and Henning should get together and make a recording like that.. Episode 1 or something.. That would be great. :)

[Peter Heinemann]

My first contact with Doom was in 1997. After playing "Marathon" from Bungie Software on my Mac, I got shareware MacDoom from a computer magazine CD and played it on my accelerated Quadra 610 (which you can compare with a 486 DX4/100). I still have this machine, even though my newest one is (I do not know how many times) faster. It is still a nice one. Then I played Doom2, Ultimate Doom and Final Doom. Final Doom´s (Mac Version) Plutonia Episode was full of errors, for example level 12 "Speed" crashed my Mac so hard, that it switched off by itself - imagine that! I had to extract this level with "Hellmaker", the great level-editor on the Mac and save it into a new WAD-file to play it.
I bought a modem one year ago, and from this time on I spent most online time with reading Doom-related sites and downloading WADs. I do not have written any WAD yet, but I feel like a member of the Doom-community. Sometimes I use to dream of Doom at night, slaughter and be slaughtered, and I plan to pick up some of them for a new Wad of my own. Even though I like "Marathon", I think that Doom is still the best first person shooter up to now, much better than all these new 3D shooter. Maybe I am going wild now, but I think that Doom is a kind of "piece of art" since so many people have played and still love this game. On some WADs I use to hear baroque music (my favorite music) from english and german compositors in the background.

Oh - time to recommend a WAD:

Abdelazer
Filename abdelaze.zip
Author Thomas Drugg

There was a good review on team insanity
http://doomnation.com/insanity/reviews.shtml

has someone relocated "Team Insanity"? Please reply!

Abdalazer was a Orchestral suite composed by Mr. Henry Purcell (1659-1695), my favorite english compositor.

[Jon]

Doomnation is down, some would say permanently.