Doom Will Be 20 Years Old In One Week!

It's midnight in Wisconsin, so it's now 20 years to the minute when Jay Wilbur hit the button to upload Doom shareware to the University of Wisconsin's ftp site, only to find that the site was full of people waiting to download it and id couldn't get on to do the upload! Happy 20th Doomsday! Bring on the Cacowards!

YES, THE CAKE IS IN THE BUILDING!




I've been waiting for that thing to pop up all day. Happy birthday Doom!

I don't care what everyone says, Doom won't turn 20 until those 30 mins after they kicked everyone out of the net to upload the shareware pass :P

That damn cake...

Since I mostly played Doom alone with few to no people watching me, I don't have too many memorable moments of Doom back in the day. But my grandmother had a registered copy of Doom so I always played it at her house. I only had the shareware so it was such a breath of fresh air that I could play episodes 2 and 3 at her house with no strings attached (and being able to play Doom at her house was a reason I'd get excited to sleep over there as a kid).

I played episodes 2 and 3 on the SNES port of Doom before playing through them on the PC, and the Cyberdemon is much easier in SNES Doom than it is in PC (it only takes like 10 rockets to kill it, is it because of reduced HP or does rocket splash damage actually hurt the Cyberdemon in SNES Doom?).

So the first time I played Tower of Babel on PC Doom, I got a pretty rude awakening from the Cyberdemon as I was not prepared for how much more difficult it was on the PC (compared to SNES).

Happy birthday Doom!

I started my affair on the xbox 360 version, I played through the whole thing, Doom 1 and 2. Then I got the PC version and played the hell out of the Master Levels before finally getting into Brutal Doom and everything the modding scene has to offer. I'm still trying to make heads and tails out of what next to play. Its a shame that my brother never got me to play it, considering how into gaming my brother and dad are. Seems the classics get overlooked, even during the good old days of 2001. Oldest game I ever tried to get into before hand was System Shock 2 that my dad had. I had to revisit it recently because back then I thought it was to nevrve wrecking to play. Personally all my memories are with Half-Life, but Doom definitely deserves to be in the top 5 list of best FPS's of all time.

Today, I wrote a text of 666 words at school.

Well, here comes an essay about how I became a doomer. I already posted this about two or three times before, but this one is the most detailed one.

I started playing Doom on my Xbox (original) in 2006/2007 when I was 12/13. One day, I was looking for some games to play since my Xbox has emulators with large amounts of games integrated to it. Its emulators are NES, SNES, SEGA Genesis/32X, and N64. That same day, when I was browsing my SNES game library, I stumbled upon Doom. I gave it a try. It turned out to be the same game I never figured out to play as a kid on PC because I did not know how to open the doors (silly me).

After I figured out how to play it, I fell in love with its graphics, being impressed that it was a SNES game. I wondered why did I never cared too much about it as a kid, since it's a hell of a game. However, I had trouble playing it. It was hard for me, even on the easiest skill level, and the Shores of Hell can only be played on Hurt Me Plenty or higher, and Inferno on Ultra-Violence and Nightmare. Weeks later, I found Doom on the SEGA Genesis and N64 emulators. I liked how the game performed, sounded (SFXs), and looked better (less choppy graphics with higher frames per second) on the 32X port than how it did on the SNES one, despite I thought the music sounded terrible, its levels' walls had less texture choices (although the ceiling and floor were textured unlike the SNES port), and several levels were also missing (although it did have a couple ones that were missing on the SNES port). I disliked the N64 port back then, mainly because it was so different than the other ones, but nowadays I like it for that same reason. I did not know English that well back then (Spanish speaker, Costa Rican) so I didn't understand the text screens and messages.

Later on, in early 2008, I got Doom (replaced it with The Ultimate Doom afterwards), Doom II, and Final Doom on my stepdad's PC. By this point, I knew English better than before, so I knew what was the story about, and what the messages said. I ran it with DOSBox. When I got my laptop for the 2008 Christmas, I started playing both Dooms with source ports. I started with Skulltag when I downloaded it to play a Super Mario sprite and sound mod. Then I switched to Doomsday/jDoom for a time. I loved its graphics, but after a while, I became more interested on gameplay than graphics, so I switched back to Skulltag. I began downloading more mods, including Insanity Doom (randomizer) by Jimmy91, which was my favorite, and I played it for years. Some other mods were not supported by Skulltag because it was not as updated as ZDoom and GZDoom, so I got those two ports. Since my laptop was low-end, I played with ZDoom for performance on detailed maps, and GZDoom for graphics on less detailed ones. Insanity Doom only worked in Skulltag, so I wanted a mod similar to it. I got Scaliano's 667 Shuffle. In mid 2012, after giving away my laptop to my sister-in-law (she needed it), I bought a gaming PC later that year, and stuck to GZDoom only because it handles the graphics very well with nice performance. After playing with Scaliano's 667 Shuffle for a year, I decided to stick with Brutal Doom.

Happy 20th birthday, Doom.

pagb said:

- "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

oh man. exactly my memories. a game needing that "doom operating system" (actually the 4gw dos extender iirc) was something completely new. it looked like alien tech to me since it needed its own OS. before, i had spent time cleaning the autoexec & config of lesser pcs so i could play wolf3d.

you know when you feel old? when you meet people you knew when they had little kids and suddenly there are young adults at their side. that's our doom, you play it, and suddenly you realize that you've been playing it for 20 years already.

axdoom1 said:

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!

lol. reminds me of one night, after i had moved to a new apartment building. i was playing doom with loudspeakers on at 4 a.m. (requiem.wad to be exact, funny how those details pop up). boom, reload, boom, reload.
then someone knocked at my door. an elderly woman in a nightgown, looking rather confused.
"i'm sorry, what's this noise? something's going BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!"

Many happy returns :D