Who here played a lot of co-op classic DOOM back in the 90s?

My next door neighbor (386) and I (486 DX2/66) did over dial-up modems! We preferred that over deathmatch. ;)

And then, came with SirDOOm via BBS. Wow, four players. :O

Thank you in advance. :)

I was working for Roland at that time and we _legally_ had a copy of DOOM in our office to check soundcards compatibility (MPU401 & SCC1...)

4-player IPX all day in the office. Countless times we played the IWADs coop from 9:00 to 17:00...

When Team TNT's Deathmatch Map-Packs Pursuit, Grievance & Bloodlands were released we
switched to DM...

Team TNT Memo

Closest I got in the 90's to classic Doom multiplayer was two Playstation's and a link cable.

I certainly played multiplayer with friends back in the '90s, both over dial-up modem and LAN. Mostly deathmatch though rather than coop. A friend and I both had more than one PC and a LAN in the house, so we could meet and play deathmatch that way. Another friend of mine played more on dial-up via BBSes.

Things were certainly a lot different back then. I remember swapping floppy disks at school containing WADs, since I didn't have an Internet connection for a long time. I remember TNT: Bloodlands and Grievance, and hearing that Pursuit had come out too. My friends and I were inspired by TeamTNT and put together Decamatch and Decamatch 2 which at the time was really just us having fun making some levels, but these seem to have grown in popularity over time, and I occasionally see mentions of them being played on ZDaemon etc.

1 hour ago, fraggle said:

I certainly played multiplayer with friends back in the '90s, both over dial-up modem and LAN. Mostly deathmatch though rather than coop. A friend and I both had more than one PC and a LAN in the house, so we could meet and play deathmatch that way. Another friend of mine played more on dial-up via BBSes

 

Things were certainly a lot different back then. I remember swapping floppy disks at school containing WADs, since I didn't have an Internet connection for a long time. I remember TNT: Bloodlands and Grievance, and hearing that Pursuit had come out too. My friends and I were inspired by TeamTNT and put together Decamatch and Decamatch 2 which at the time was really just us having fun making some levels, but these seem to have grown in popularity over time, and I occasionally see mentions of them being played on ZDaemon etc.

That was an interesting read. As someone who grew up in the 90's but not around the PC scene its interesting to hear the other side of things. It must be pretty cool to see something you did so long ago become popular.

I didn't play Doom until '97 on PSX , link cable was all we had.

I also used to play both co-op and DM over BBSes. My friend and I played all the way through Doom and Doom 2 multiple times on co-op, we both had 2 phone lines in our houses, so we'd be playing Doom while talking on the phone at the same time. Imagine that! There was no Teamspeak or whatever the whipper-snappers use these days :)

Rarely played Doom multiplayer only because we lacked the necessary hardware to do it.

My brothers and I got coop working on two Macs, but it required us to unplug the phoneline and so we were never allowed to actually do it without our parents chewing us out about it.

A neighbor friend had PSX Doom and we knew it had the capabilities to do multiplayer but we didnt have a link cable or Doom ourselves.

Doom 64 didn't have multiplayer while Duke64 had 2-player coop and up to 4-player deathmatch, so we did play that game coop to completion.

I had downloaded demos of other people playing coop and I would watch them and pretend like I was actually playing.

The new millenium, I got a GBA and Doom but no friends had nor wanted to get Doom so I was still stuck there with just solo.

The month before Doom 3 came out I finally had my own computer and used it to play ZDaemon and this was FINALLY my first chance to play Doom online, and boy did I. I remember playing all the official iWads with people who had obviously played the hell out of Doom since they all came out and talking about Doom 3 and all the cool shit that would be in it.

A little time after the Xbox port of Doom 3 came out I got Xbox Live and played it with some friends in High School and blah blah here we are today.

My dad got a nice top-of-the-line computer back in '94 for his AutoCAD work, which I promptly took over as a gaming machine.

Around the same time, my older brother moved in, and also brought his own computer with him.

We set both of them up on the same desk in the basement, and thanks to the marvelous technology of serial links, we got multiplayer up and running.

That was also when I found out about male and female cables, and spent the next few days incredibly amused.

I had actually tried it previously between my dad's computer and an old 486-33, but even though a DB-25 to DE-9 converter worked for transferring files, it failed at Doom multiplayer. In fact, I still have that old FX.exe file transfer program sitting around.

Anyway, we were one of the few houses in town with linked computers, let alone good computers, so word gradually spread, and by the time I started high school in '95, there were usually people coming over for a few hours at least 3-4 days after school every week, and sometimes longer on the weekends. The went on for about 3 years, and we almost always played coop. Deathmatch was a nice variation, but only 1 or 2 people preferred it. It's not to say some of our coop games didn't turn into deathmatches eventually - that was almost always what happened when too much friendly fire went around. And physically being in the same room, it occasionally spilled over into real life too.

Warcraft 1 and 2 were also regulars on the multiplayer rotation, but the id/raven games probably accounted for 80% of our time. Part of what made them last so long is that we were learning to build our own maps with WadEd and War2Edit, though I was the only one who really took off with the mapping and kept it going after all this time.

Quake and Quake II eventually came along, but we found ourselves going back to the earlier games, if only because they were what we could make our own maps for.

The multiplayer kick eventually died out when we got to senior year, partly because school was gradually getting harder and partly because most of us started part-time jobs later in junior year.

There were a few stray dial-up modem games in those days, and some netplay with zdoom in the years after graduating (AV was popular during that phase), but multiplayer's mostly a thing of the past for me. I don't think I've played in over a decade.

I honestly wouldn't mind getting into it again, but it seems most of the scene is dedicated to deathmatch and other deathmatch-geared mods, and that doesn't particularly appeal to me. Plus I'm one of the few people who preferred deathmatching on maps like 13, 10, 09, 27, 15 and 28. Close quarters wears itself out in minutes. I prefer the suspense of the hunt. And that's why essentially nobody wants to deathmatch with me :P

But yeah, some coop would be great. It was always the most fun I had playing games.

On 12/29/2017 at 1:45 AM, DoomGater said:

I was working for Roland at that time and we _legally_ had a copy of DOOM in our office to check soundcards compatibility (MPU401 & SCC1...)

4-player IPX all day in the office. Countless times we played the IWADs coop from 9:00 to 17:00...

When Team TNT's Deathmatch Map-Packs Pursuit, Grievance & Bloodlands were released we
switched to DM...

Team TNT Memo

You were testing its audio cards at the same time. ;)

On 12/29/2017 at 2:30 PM, Lüt said:

My dad got a nice top-of-the-line computer back in '94 for his AutoCAD work, which I promptly took over as a gaming machine.

...

Funny. I did this with my friend's dad's 386 PC when I went to his house. He also did ACAD for living. Haha. Eventually, I got my own custom built 486 DX2/66 PC after IBM PS/2 model 30 286 (can't run DOOM).

On 29.12.2017 at 11:30 PM, Lüt said:

We set both of them up on the same desk in the basement, and thanks to the marvelous technology of serial links, we got multiplayer up and running.

Same here, a friend of mine brought his PC to my apartment. We connected them with a DE-9 null modem cable, copied all necessary files over this connection via Norton Commander, and played dozens of hours Doom Coop.

Yeah, my brothers and I (plus my dad, occassionally) have played a range of LAN co-op games over Serial IPX (if I'm remembering the terminology). This was mostly IWADs, but there was some PWAD play back then. We've still done some of this up to quite recently, using ZDoom (mostly for testing my stuff). The extra Cyberdemons in Doom II and TNT were particular highlights, which inspired me to do the same with some of my maps when they support multiple players. Killing eachother was a frequent issue, so rocket launchers were discouraged. A lot of time was spent being stuck in places like the Tenemants entrance and start of Downtown, plinking away with the pistol through repeated deaths at the cyberdemon as he spawn camped us, too.

Id love to now but so many servers are running brutal doom or some other wad. Its hard to find one that isnt modded, let alone one not modded with players.

5 minutes ago, doomslayer11122 said:

Id love to now but so many servers are running brutal doom or some other wad. Its hard to find one that isnt modded, let alone one not modded with players.

Try ZDaemon then.

Just now, printz said:

Try ZDaemon then.

Ive tried ZDAEMON and its dead. Most I found was like 10 people death matching. Maybe I was on at a bat time, I dont know.

I played alot of coop!  What fun...man I remember the Dwango servers, jeez I'm old!  Used to have LAN parties with my buds back in the day!  Playing on a 14.4 modem, then moved up to 28.8 and the a 56k modem...oh man, what speed!  Hahahahahaha!