This one is pretty lame, compared to most real death-matchers but here
goes. I was playing Doom on a 486 Ergo Brick (anybody else ever used
one of those) that I had "borrowed" from work, with no speakers except
the pc-built in one. Me and my roommate Tim were obsessed with the game
and would play for hours taking turns. Tim became obsessed with playing
on a real computer, because a friend had told him that with a sound card
you could actually tell the difference between monsters. So he went out
and splurged on a Pentium 70 (which he still uses, BTW, having just
played through Quake2 on a screen area the size of a postage stamp).
So we had 2 computers on the dining room table, much to the chagrin of
roommate #3. Since both of us were kind of dumb when it came to using
PC's, it told us about 3 trips to Radio Shack looking for cables before
we figured out how to deathmatch. I kept setting it up wrong. One day I
came home from work, and without even getting out of my suit, screwed
with it until I got both PC's hooked up and running in a DM level. Just
then Tim walked in, and we sat down and started playing head to head.
We played through all the levels of Doom I. It's amazing how naive we
were. For example, we tried playing DM with monsters in for a while.
Duh. Slowly, strategy came to us. We played about 6 hours straight,
still in our work clothes. We went through like a case of beer and 3
bags of doritos. (DOOM FOOD)
In months to come, we would slowly discover the wonders of DWANGO and
user-created WAD's, but I still look back at that night as the best
ever. Tim eventually even was a moderator for a while on DWANGO. I
ended up going to the Microsoft Doom-showdown in Seattle in Oct 95 (not
as a player, I got work to pay for it as a "business developement"
expense).
BTW-when you play somebody with a PC speaker only, just turn your own
sound all the way down and shoot rockets. When you hear their computer
make the noise, you know where they are.
