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Boingo

Doom Will Be 20 Years Old In One Week!

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December 10, 2013--one week from today(!)--will be the 20th anniversary of DooM.

Can you believe it?

DOOM MEMORIES:
=============

Twenty years ago this holiday season I remember talking with someone about shareware games.

Back then the internet was really small and uncommonly used, CD ROM drives were expensive and not owned by many people, and shareware tended to be purchased in computer and electronic stores or the new dollar stores on either 5 1/4" or 3 1/2" floppy disks, or had to be shared (as the name suggests) by friends willing to part with the floppies they had, despite having to pay at least a dollar each for them.

Earlier that year I had played the shareware version of Blake Stone, and I was recommending a guy I was talking to should definitely try it. Another guy came up to us and said "Forget Blake Stone. Have you tried DooM?". He raved about how good it was, but I had no way of trying it yet, and did not think much of it at the time, and continued trying to talk about Blake Stone.

It wasn't until April or May of 1994 that I finally Got hold of a copy of the shareware version of DooM. I got it at my favourite dollar store at the time in a clam shell package with a version of the DooM title screen on the front. Every shareware game I had seen up until that point had come on a single floppy disk, so I was very suprised to find two floppies in the package. After all, DOS 5.0 took up only five disks, and it was the entire operating system for my machine!

My machine was a 80386SX 33MHz machine with 4Mb of RAM, which was the minimum required specs for running DooM. Unlike oher games I had tried, DooM installed and started without trouble. The frame rate was slower than Wolfenstein on my machine, because of the specs of course, and I often had to play with the screen size reduced or in the 160 x 200 low res mode toggled by one of the function keys.

I was not terribly impressed at first. The geometry of E1M1 was better than Wolfenstein, but I was trying to game on "I'm Too Young To Die" and there wasn't really much action yet. The controls did not quite work the same as Wolfenstein 3D, so it was very clumsy at first. It wasn't until I got into E1M2 with its dark flashing maze and Romero's surprise room at the top of the stairs that I really started getting into the game. By the time I finished E1M3, I was hooked.

I didn't get through DooM all in one go. There was a lot of time put in, and a lot of save spamming required.

One day after one of my early sessions of DooM, my mother came to me concerned (I was still living at home at the time). She had heard the sounds the troopers make when they are being shot and somehow thought *I* was making those sounds. She thought I had either gone mad or was masturbating! (How is it mothers are so skilled at completely embarrassing their sons?) I explained to her that it was only game, and tried as hard as I could to forget the incident after that, albeit not hard enough, because I am remembering it now.

After I finished episode 1 the first time, I tried again at a higher skill level. This time however, I had a partner in crime. My older brother wanted to play the game as well, and we came up with a simple system, where he played, but I gave him direction, since I had played through before. The problem was I had only seen a pinky demon once in ITYTD mode, and had killed it at a distance, forgetting the encounter shortly afterward, so as we went into the maze in E1M4 we were completely unprepared for what happened. We turned around and met pinky for the first time, point blank, just as he chomped down and killed us. The two of us pretty much jumped jumped right out of our skins.

I have many more stories to tell, but this post is kind of getting long, so I think I will leave them for another post.

What are your DooM memories?

Post as many of them as you can below.

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Earliest Doom memory? Playing Doom II on a friend's clunker of a computer with no speakers when I was 7 or 8. Doom just simply stuck in my head until I rediscovered it a few years ago.

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I find it intriguing to hear these tales about how people nearby seem to interpret the zombie sounds in Doom.

I mean, another user recently declared that their brother hearing them play Doom thought the zombie sounds were 'odd'.

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Oh my God, it's amazing how time flies by. It feels like yesterday when I was that 4 year old kid back in 1997 playing Doom 95 on my dad's work lap top. lol I enjoyed every moment when I played Doom 95 for the first time. The pinky demon always scared the living shit out of me, especially in the cluster-phobic part of E1M4. I have so many memories of Doom and it is so difficult to recall the "best one." lol But I think I enjoyed playing the game at night in my footie pajamas.

I do recall the first time I picked up the hobby of WAD editing for Doom 2 though. I remember it was back in November of 2011 when I started using Doombuilder for the first time and experimented by making shitty levels (I had no idea what the flying fuck I was doing lol). 2 years later, I still make wads and they are significantly better than my unreleased wads of 2011.

You can check them out here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/pzidl0l34128x8m/Finished+DG93+WADS+12_2_2013.zip

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One of my earliest memories of Doom is actually the first time I fired the rocket launcher. I was in PSX Phobos Lab and I fired it out into the courtyard from just up the stairs near the start. Both me and my granddad thought it was the imp's fireball for a fairly long time, until I finally ran in a way that I saw the rest of the rocket.

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I first heard of Doom when I was an avid Amiga user. The story went at the time that Id didn't release an Amiga version because the machine couldn't handle it. So, I played Alien Breed 3D, Gloom, Fears and a number of others until 1997. Then the source was released and within hours there were a bunch of ports floating around Aminet. ADoom was the best of the bunch for my set up and I could even play with a CD32 controller - take that PC keyboard users! There was no music though so it was a few years before I heard the MIDI metal that is the Doom OST. Incidently, I've always preferred the ambient D64 soundtrack probably for the very reason that it was the first one I heard (love that game).

So, yeah, my first memories of Doom are non-vanilla Doom with a controller and no music... and I had a blast! I'll always have a soft spot for AB3D though. :)

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Average said:

I first heard of Doom when I was an avid Amiga user.

Same here.

It's the embarrassing stuff that tends to stick in my memory longest - such as trying to kill the soulsphere in E1M3.

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GreyGhost said:

Same here.

It's the embarrassing stuff that tends to stick in my memory longest - such as trying to kill the soulsphere in E1M3.


It took me years how to figure out the path to obtaining that soulsphere. It frustrated the shit out of me back when I was a little kid.

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doomguy93 said:

It took me years how to figure out the path to obtaining that soulsphere. It frustrated the shit out of me back when I was a little kid.


Glad I wasn't the only one :D Up until that secret I thought you could open doors and trigger other effects only with the "use" key. The fact that something could open as a result of me simply stepping somewhere else shocked me :P

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My first memory of playing Doom was sometime back in 1996, when it had just recently come out for the Playstation, which was also new at the time. The atmosphere, the music and sounds, the violence all just struck a chord with me and I was, and am still, hooked.

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Growing up through 2000 and forward, I pretty much grew up with Dark Forces 1 - Sith, all rented from the library. While they were all fairly darker than other SW material (Other than a n umber of fairly disturbing events in Dark Forces, including the sewer monsters and charred corpses on the second level), I was completely unprepared for the level of violence introduced to me with Doom, probably first running across it around 2004 or 2005, where I played the shareware for a little bit on XP with little configuration. In other words, there was music, but no actual sound.

That first Pinky on E1M3 I think hooked me with its death animation, blowing two big holes in it with the shotgun, with blood covering its pink body. I think I more or less enjoyed the chaotic violence over it all, though it was also notably faster and in many cases more intense than Dark Forces II (As for DF, it was just faster, though DF had probably just as many hectic fights as Doom with loads of enemies and guns blazing from all directions). I think I sorta left it for a while though after getting half way through, and then picked it up again in the summer before Freshmen year. Then I couldn't stop talking about, much to the annoyance of my CoD-loving peers.

Also plenty of memories of making shitty maps too. Too this day I believe I have only ever released one map, in four different variations, probably around two years ago. Still working on it today, though I doubt it'll ever be "finished".

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Guest Unregistered account

I can't wait until the Anniversary! I didn't know about Doom's other Anniversaries, you see... I wasn't alive.
__________________________________


My first memory was from when I was about five years old, in 2006. I was in the Family room with my two younger sisters when my Dad came in holding a case. He said, "Hey Joe, can you spell that?"
My reply was: "It says... Ooom!"

I can remember so many tiny snippets of the game that I, despite being 12 years old, have felt nostalgia for them as I visited them just like my Dad when I recently got it for my laptop, and some which I have yet to discover (maybe they were different Pwads?)...

I can also remember:

- Me and my sisters would crowd round the computer watching Dad blaze through the levels, but when he let us play, we'd be too scared to move, even in the bright levels.

and

- I thought Doom and Doom II were just one game, Doom, so I thought that the Super Shotgun was in Doom (1).

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Joe667 said:

I can't wait until the Anniversary! I didn't know about Doom's other Anniversaries, you see... I wasn't alive.
__________________________________


My first memory was from when I was about five years old, in 2006. I was in the Family room with my two younger sisters when my Dad came in holding a case. He said, "Hey Joe, can you spell that?"
My reply was: "It says... Ooom!"

I can remember so many tiny snippets of the game that I, despite being 12 years old, have felt nostalgia for them as I visited them just like my Dad when I recently got it for my laptop, and some which I have yet to discover (maybe they were different Pwads?)...

I can also remember:

- Me and my sisters would crowd round the computer watching Dad blaze through the levels, but when he let us play, we'd be too scared to move, even in the bright levels.

and

- I thought Doom and Doom II were just one game, Doom, so I thought that the Super Shotgun was in Doom (1).


Wow dude, you're a young doomer lol. That's pretty cool that someone your age actually respects a good old game like Doom. I tip my hat to you sir.

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doomguy93 said:

Wow dude, you're a young doomer lol. That's pretty cool that someone your age actually respects a good old game like Doom. I tip my hat to you sir.


Well, thanks very much! Unfortunately, my schoolfriends don't see Doom in exactly the same light...


===========================================================================
Now I just have to realease a wad to /idgames and my nomination to the anniversary will be complete have started!

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Joe667 said:

Well, thanks very much! Unfortunately, my schoolfriends don't see Doom in exactly the same light...


It's probably because they never grew up playing it and that don't have the same nostalgia as us. It's harder for kids who were born in the very late 90's or early 2000's to appreciate a game like Doom. If I was your age now in 2013, and I took 1 look at Doom for the first time, I would say "WTF this crap sucks" because it doesn't meet the current expectation of what FPS have today. Most of them probably never heard of the Doom series before...

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doomguy93 said:

It took me years how to figure out the path to obtaining that soulsphere. It frustrated the shit out of me back when I was a little kid.



yep. i entered that key room too cautiously, so the doors would always close before i even got to see them. once a friend (who also didn't know the secret) simply ran in, and i saw the soulsphere door closing as i was watching him play.

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Probably playing Grezzo 2 (with english patch)... a political mockumentary styled Italsn mod with no shame. Its a contender and probably winner of Mockaward. (and seeing how bad things are in that country right now, its no wonder that somebody pissed enough who loves Doom and modding, would make one). Its so over the top words don't even describe...

If anyone hasn't already, you should share your favourite wads with the DoomDB community
http://www.moddb.com/groups/doomdb

It's always nice to hear about good wads! We also release community packs on there so you can stay upto date with that can kind of thing.

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I can't remember much of the PC itself cause it was my dads pc and I was only 5, but I remember he set it up so all I or my brother had to do was power on the pc and type "Doom.exe" or "Doom2.exe" (along with "wolf.exe " and "raptor.exe"). I remember playing with cheats and also saving overwriting a saved game where my brother and I managed to get to 2nd last level of Doom 2! I wasn't scared 1 bit (Using IDDQD might of caused that)

I remember finding and playing doom again when I was 14, and it being 1000x scarier due to lack of cheats this time round. I remember playing it in Ultra Violent, and getting to the end of Map10 in Doom 2,ut hadn't cleared the room with the Cyber first, so I crapped it when I saw the cyberdemon, ran away to safety, sigh relief, crapping again it from the cyberdemon teleporting etc etc about 4 times before I got to the room with the invul power ups and finially taking him down.

To Doom and to another 20 years of Dooming!

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TheUnbeholden said:

Probably playing Grezzo 2 (with english patch)... a political mockumentary styled Spanish mod with no shame. Its a contender and probably winner of Mockaward. (and seeing how bad things are in Spain right now, its no wonder that somebody pissed enough who loves Doom and modding, would make one). Its so over the top words don't even describe...


Grezzo 2 is actually an Italian wad. It's a mocks Italian culture in just about every stereotype possible. And I think Italy is a real close second to Spain and Greece's financial situations.

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Oh god...

I started playing Doom 2 after seeing my dad play it. He was on map04 when I noticed. I never saw nor heard of it til that moment. He taught me the basics.
I was so happy when I killed my first zombie man :-) but got koed by the other one.

2 weeks later, I beat the game before my dad (taking the secret level exits I didn't know about) map30 was the map I just stood there. I didn't know what to do.

I learned how to strafe before he taught me.

I played Shareware doom 2 years later on a disc I found. Next year, I found doom95 with all dooms (ultimate doom, tnt, plutonia, doom2).

That's how my doom legacy began. 6 years old.

I remember getting brutally telefragged in the end of map06, me laughing at the mancubai, finding the e1m3 bridge switch...

Ah, good times.

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20 years and still going so strong, that's absolutely impressive for a computer game.

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I saw Doom for the first time when I was searching for Doom64 online, because I thought this game also had a PC version and I wanted to download it. I fell on it while I was seeking for free games on the internet. All I found was the shareware version of Doom 1.2. When I figured out how the game worked (resources in one file, engine in the another, ...), I removed the strange "1" from doom1.wad. The game didn't load completely, so I realized that I needed a file called "doom.wad" to get all of the three episodes. I found it on a French website called doom4ever.

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It's hard to believe Doom is going to be 20 years old on Tuesday.

I first played in Canada in the summer of 1994 as my relations over there had a hardware business at the time. I think we played on 486s.

I was 11 years old. At home in the UK the most advanced thing I owned was my Master System. Doom on a PC blew me away and literally nothing was ever the same again.

We were in Vancouver for three weeks and I begged to go play Doom downstairs at every opportunity. When I came back home I had major, major withdrawal symptoms. We couldn't afford a PC for years, so my first taste of it again was PSX Doom in about '97-'98 which, fortunately, was excellent.

I think I bought the id anthology before sorting a machine to install it on. As soon as I did, never looked back.

I still think Doom is the greatest game of all time: initially in its own right, and since 2000 because of the community that has taken the library of content to a level beyond that of any other FPS in terms of quality and creativity. I suppose it will inevitably tail off now, but still I think Doom, as a simple and now resource-non-intensive game, has a role to play in the 21st century.

Another older forumer - Zark - and I will be playing co-op hopefully on Tuesday if we can make the UK-Aus timezone thing hold up between our work, to celebrate the Doomiversary.

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It was Feb '94 more and less, and I was 12, I used to go to a computer store where I had an older friend working and we would try games, hardware and so... One day the handed me two floppies and told me to go play that. Memories:

- "Doom Operating System 0.99"? WTF? This game needs his own OS?
- ID! The guys from Wolfenstein
- This titlepic is badass
- Completely hooked from the beginning, the graphics were better than real life itself
- Shooting the soulsphere at E1M3 is a classic
- Looking out at every window and wondering how to get to the other side
- Dying at the first encounter with a demon, and staring, dead, at his ugly yellow dirty teeth in shock
- Never having bullets because it was so cool to make monsters dance with the chaingun
- Panicking every time I walked on nukage looking for an exit
- Jumping in the seat with the spectres when they ambushed you. They are harder to see in vanilla doom in low resolution and its darkness than every other port.
- Feeling TERROR with the barons of hell (only to be surpassed later by the cyberdemon)

Like 6 months later I got an AWE32 for a soundcard (didn't have any), and my jaw literally dropped to the ground. Also, I recall my mother asking if I was killing cows because of the zombieman's death howls.

In a nutshell, what I felt when I firstly experienced Doom only came back (and just briefly) with Heretic shareware... Never again a game brought me there :/ Guess it's because of the age :P

I just played E1 with Chocolate Doom and recorded it for the Youtubes, and I will replay all of D1 this weekend with chocolate doom. I had almost forgotten how different it was when it was vanilla.

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As sad as it may be, I started playing Doom on the Xbox 360. I remember having looked it up, and when I started playing, I thought, "Jesus Christ, this game was brutal for something released in 1993! I love it!"

It's 2013's end, almost, I'm 17 too, and I've been playing Doom since 2011. A newcomer I may be, but a Doomer nonetheless.

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I remember first seeing my cousin on two separate occasions playing Final Doom Plutonia and Doom 64, eventually my brother had a Nintendo 64 and my friend had Doom 64 back in a think '97 when I was 10 years old which I borrowed and got to play a bit of.

In 04 when I was out of school I first went to TAFE FOR an IT course and had found out about gameboy emulators on the internet there, so I downloaded one of them and a copy of Doom for GBA and played it then eventually downloaded Doom 2 for GBA and played that also.

Finally in '06 I had a LAN party with some of my TAFE acquaintances and obtained a copy of Doom 95 with every Doom wad, all four of us put on a coop game with TNT Evilution but right away we started stupidly shooting at each other then ended the game, a shame since I didn't get a chance to ever play coop properly around then.

I got back into playing Doom in '07 and went on from there and after lurking Doomworld in '08 I decided to join around middle '09.

Ever since I've been playing Doom at times with minor mods and such as well as custom megawads.

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I first saw Doom on the Sega 32x at a friend's house in late '94 or early '95 when I was 11 or 12. He was playing Spawning Vats and I thought it was too scary.

Then in the summer of '95, my family was about to move to a different city. My dad was already working there and I went up there with him before we moved, so I could try out for the hockey team. I went to his work and one of the guys who worked there had Doom on his computer and let me play it. He showed me the cheat codes and how to get to the secret exit in e1m3.

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pagb said:

I recall my mother asking if I was killing cows because of the zombieman's death howls.

Makes me remember my brother. He once found a file that was doomguy's hurt sound played backward repeatedly. His speakers' volume was raised to the maximum after he played music. Everybody in the house thought he was watching p0rn. I'll never forget this and the reaction of my parents.

Happy birthday Doom!

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