Best Memories of Classic Doom

What were some of your favorite moments with Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom, etc years ago? :)

Well, of course I remember vividly when I first saw Doom. A friend of ours brought a magazine with a floppy disk attached to it. On it was Doom and when my brother and I installed it, we were instantly blown away... by how choppy it ran! We still had a 286! xD We resized the viewing field as well as turned on that weird 2x1 pixelmode. Was that a thing or am I remembering that incorrectly? Whatever happend to that mode in modern Source Ports? :p

Anway, just a couple of months (!) later we finally got a 386 and I was able to play Doom. With keyboard only. Ahhh, the memories...

The first time I finished TNT.wad. Then I had to figure out how to get to the secret levels, when I did I was blown away by the creativity of them both.

Probably the only time in a game I've had been happy to see what the next level holds.

first time of cyberdemon

I remember going online to find the no clipping cheat for Doom 2 after idspispopd didn’t work. I remember it saying “idcli” but fortunately having the common sense to figure out. 

A big one for me was when I first set my own controls, i.e. when I started strafing. That almost immediately increased my skill like 5 fold. I had basically never played without cheating. That moment is basically what revived Doom for me and turned it from a fun game I played in the 90s to eventually something I’m still doing today. 

I also remember being obsessed with lots of Doom 1 music tracks, humming them in school, etc. 

I could get into actual map moments, but I’ve written plenty already. 

Playing Shareware Doom for the first time and saving files with names like 12, 16, 17 and so on thinking I would come back to them when I was around those ages.

Looking through the manual while installing Doom II and being fascinated at all the new monsters on display.

Playing pretty much all of Doom II, especially the bigger maps like Downtown and Industrial Zone, but they all have their nostalgia and charm one way or another.

Pretty much using Doom95 at all.

Playing Final Doom on the PC for the first time beginning with The Plutonia Experiment and working my way over to TNT: Evilution. It was good to be playing these while simultaneously mapping for the first time since it helped me along with some additional inspiration outside of the first two games.

Downloading and playing PWADs for the first time and knowing if I started myself going down this road of playing and downloading levels I would find it very fun and addictive and I was right.

My fondest memories from Doom are the entirety of episode one thanks to the Shareware version, i played the hell out of that when i was 5 years old.

Getting the collectors edition and playing Doom II and Final Doom for the first time when i was 9, PC gaming was unbearable and shitty for me when i was a kid, most games were either shit or didn't even work on my PC, very few games brought the amount of joy and happiness that the classic Doom games did for me.

Discovering source ports, Megawads and mapping in general in 2008, while im kind of a mediocre mapper i still enjoy making maps as much as the first time i started.

Specificially when it comes to the maps themselves, all of episode one from Doom 1, the first half of Doom II, Well of Souls, Ghost Town, Compound, Bunker and Tombstone from Plutonia, Wormhole, Redemption, Stronghold, Steel Works, Mill and Administration Center from TNT Evilution. Those maps i found enjoyable and as such i remember them the most.

Getting stuck in the starting room of map18 Courtyard from Doom 2. Many "oofs!" were used in that room as a kid, I think I spent two-three minutes in there before punching that lion in the mouth out of frustration.

I have a Quake 1 memory that I feel is too good not to share even though it's not the point of this thread. In E4M5 I ran into a Spawn and naturally ran as fast and as far as I could from it. Then when I wondered where it had gotten to, I saw it had picked a fight with a group of zombies. Because they'd keep getting back up to fight it, and it could only put them down for good with its dying explosion, it was a win/win situation that was fun to watch.

I liked The Chasm, Nirvana and The spirit world. Best memories playing this game were these maps.

When I played Doom 2 for the first time over at a friend's place - no source port, ITYTD, keyboard only, IDDQD + IDKFA.

Things have changed a little since then.

Playing E1M5 for the first time. Probably the map that sealed my love for the game. There was something special about the progression and interconnectedness of the map compared to the previous ones. The music and unsettling atmosphere probably helped as well. The only other map in the IWADs that I found memorable for similar reasons was E1M8.

Surviving E4M1 and E4M2. Boy were they tough back then. Despite the inconsistent difficulty of E4 as a whole, these maps were extremely memorable for how jarring they were coming off E3.

Replaying Plutonia. Wasn't really fond of Plutonia the first time I tried it. But I really began appreciating its intricacies after replaying it a bunch of times. It slowly grew to become my favorite IWAD outright; to the point that I consider it the best official release by ID to date.

Those were just from the IWADs. The PWADs have a whole host of interesting stories to tell, but getting into them was also a fascinating experience.

It was 1994. I didn't know anyone else who had a copy of Doom (I had 1 friend who had Wolfenstein 3D, and I had seen him play it all of once for about 5 minutes), so I had absolutely no idea what I was in for when I installed my shareware copy of Doom (v. 1.2, oh yeah). I have a number of memories.

• Starting E1M1 and hearing At Doom's Gate. Some friends and I will still hum the initial bars when we talk about Doom (baa-daw baa-daw baa-daw baw-dawww).
• Finding the secret in E1M1 out to the courtyard with the mega-armor.
• Running down the long hallway in E1M8 and expecting something big to come, especially with the mournful music playing.
• Seeing those 2 Barons of Hell for the first time.
• Finishing the shareware episode on UV (I had already beat it on ITYTD) and feeling such a sense of accomplishment.
• After learning about the cheat codes, I started Nightmare, figuring I would used IDDQD and it would be a breeze. Nightmare, ha! ... It was then that I found out the cheat codes didn't work in Nightmare and I died rather quickly (as I recall, I was shot in the back by a fast-moving reanimated sergeant).
• Arriving in E2M8 and seeing the dead barons on the wall and wondering, what the heck was coming. I snuck around that level (the music really helped heighten the tension, I thought) waiting to find whatever it was that was waiting.
• Stumbling into the entrance to E2M9 and being amazed that I found the secret level. And then promptly being shocked by the opening where you're surrounded by Cacos and Barons.
• Beating the Cyberdemon, seeing the ending text for the episode, seeing the Deimos base floating above Hell ... and then waiting for the next episode to start. After about a minute of staring at the computer, I realized I had to start the new episode manually.
• Being excited for the final level (E3M8) and then being disappointed, because I was expecting more from the final level (E3M8) than I ended up getting. (On well, I expected more out of the final battle with Dracula, too, in Simon's Quest. I guess we can't always get everything.)

I don't have a lot of vivid memories from Doom 2.

• I do remember arriving in Map30 and hearing the sound of the spawn cubes being fired and wondering what those were. It took a bit before I realized they were spawning enemies.
• Then I ran around Map30, trying to figure out what to do.
• I remember looking at Map30 in an editor and seeing a stray linedef hanging out in the void and wondering why it was there and figuring it must have some significance. As I far as I can tell, it doesn't.

Pretty much everything that had to do with meeting new stuff. This includes: monsters from Doom I, all of them actually, I used to like spectres a lot. Weapons of course, the BFG in E4M2, and then never using it lol. Secrets of course, one of the main reasons I play this game is because of them, I still remember my determination to find each and every single in UD, with help of videos and this forum of course >_> ... The first pain elemental, my god that thing scared the hell out of me, a huge floating ball with a huge single eye and an unique voice. Chasm of course, hearing so much hate about it, but I happened to enjoy it more or less. TNT's amazing music and long adventures. Plutonia's savage gameplay took me to search for more Doom, and then I found pwads, and here I am (:

• I had a thing where I would play E1M1 to E1M3 before going to school for a while, pretty much every morning. Used to piss my mother off all the time to hear Hangar's music again at 7am. XD
• After realising I loved this game alot, my mother bought Doom2 for me, and also entered into a competition in a games magazine for me to win several shovelware discs. It required you to come up with a slogan for 'I like playing Doom because...' and my entry was 'its the best thing since Sliced Head' (I was a morbid child) XD. I won the competition!
• I discovered extra maps and mods for Doom early on (mostly through said shovelware discs) and it awoke my general love for modding all sorts of games. At one point, my copy of doom had a whole bunch of ridiculous sound effects and the Imps were replaced with Barney.
• Though I attempted mapping at that point, I was still 7, and Doom editors just confused me, so the best I could manage was creating a 64 vertex room and shuffling all the vertexes around to make a pseudo maze and then filling it with guns and monsters and torch actors, with an ending involving Romeo's Head as I couldn't understand linedefs and switches. Eventually I went on to make Unreal Tournament Levels that were considerably better when I was older and wiser.
• Later on, I got a serious telling off because my Doom directory on our computer was using 40 MEGABYTES of our 386's 120 Mb drive!
• I came up with a stupid song called 'give 'em the taste of a chainsaw'. Like I said... Morbid Child... its amazing I turned out as well-balanced as I did.

Just seeing DOOM II running on my Dad's then-new Pentium 166mhz machine for the first time. Going to that from a 286 CPU, it was like witnessing sorcery.

Completing the game for the first time without cheats. Was quite fun. :)

I remember when I was on a really crappy netbook laptop, could only really play Doom, and even then I had zero clue how it worked, could only play plutonia/tnt since the wadseeker somehow found them. Anyway, late into the night I would be up doing coop and my dad would bring home fat stacks of Arby's roast beefs since they were like a dollar each, and I'd get the munchies real bad with those.

sorry for the life story lul

For me it's gotta be the first and only time I beat all of Final Doom.  It was such a garbage game that I have no desire to ever play again.  I remember when I beat it, I right away played Doom 2 on UV difficulty to wash the nasty taste outta my mouth! 

12 hours ago, Maser said:

For me it's gotta be the first and only time I beat all of Final Doom.  It was such a garbage game that I have no desire to ever play again.  I remember when I beat it, I right away played Doom 2 on UV difficulty to wash the nasty taste outta my mouth! 

What did you not like about Final Doom?

Freaking the hell out seeing the barons coming at me for the first time in E1M8 on the shareware DOOM, played on Doom95 on a potato Toshiba laptop. I was so innocent~ 

I have distinct memories of seeing the game being played for the first time by my much older cousin.  I think he played through the whole first episode, and the thing I remember the most were the weapons.  Any time he would get a new weapon I would think "whoa that's a cool gun!", and it just kept escalating from there.  I think he must have cheated at the end and got the BFG to show it off to me because that was the image that stuck with me the longest.

Once I finally got a chance to play the game for myself, I was a little confused because the awe of seeing those things for the first time had already worn off.  I expected to see more crazy weapons in the game :P

The start area of E1M3, the red key area of MAP02, and the start of MAP04 left the biggest impression on me when I played (PlayStation) Doom for the first time. Those were the only areas I distinctly remembered when I picked the game up for PC years later. (I really missed the translucent windows and green lighting in E1M3.)

Playing 1v1 deathmatch on Doom 2 map23 with a friend over a 28.8k modem.  He kept camping me right behind the first teleporter destination, but I was absolutely determined to run to the end of the hallway.  We had a lot of fun and laughs that day.

I also have fond memories of firing up DEU in DOS and writing batch files to help me launch whatever I was testing at the time.

I have vague memories from 1993 of a friend showing the game first time for me. What stuck in my head were the Cacodemon and BFG, which he called the camera that kills everything. Also some memory of the Spider Mastermind and flashing it down with the BFG. I always thought it was the shareware until I released it must have been the full game because 1st episode didn't have Cacodemons, BFG's or Spiders for that matter.

My best memory of playing DOOM is from new year's eve 1995-1996 when we returned to the same friend's place where our parents celebrated the changing of the year. I was up in a dark room all by myself when everybody else was downstairs socializing and played through E1 (IDDQD on) and part of E2. I remember particularly well being absolutely lost in E2M2 for a very long time, just walking around and having imps rip and tear at my back without understanding where that noise was coming from because I had IDDQD on and shooting at anything that comes in front of me. Then before midnight we went to blow some fireworks outside and I didn't play DOOM until the summer when I got my own PC and started to practise what it is to design maps. :)

EDIT: Another great one was spending time at the summer cottage of my best friend and we played DOOM with pc speaker sounds on his fathers laptop, which was a 386 with 8mb RAM, eating salted liquorice in the same time. So much fun :D

First time ever seeing the game in the mid-early 90s when my brother and dad were playing it. Love at first sight.

Downloading wads from various GeoCities sites in the late 90s. My dad showed me how and after that I was truly hooked.

My first ever 'proper' deathmatch in 2001 on an early version of GreenWar with Grotug (hellbent) and R on Doom Connector.

Making my earliest maps in WadAuthor, which was sent to me by DoomRampage.

Fun times!

Watching my dad and his friend play it on a PC at my dads work (our one wasn't a good enough spec!). I remember shaking in excitement when my dad bought us a new family PC and we ran doom v1.2 shareware! also i remember being excited when i got to e1m5 and e1m7 as they were the levels in the demo sequence (after e1m2) and i'll never forget the two barons in e1m8....

playing the first game in the public library(it was installed and hidden in some folders) and finally getting to the last map of the first episode and seeing a cyber demon for the first time I was like 13 and this was the scariest boss battle everything was perfect just an empty level with some lost souls and something making weird noises when you see it and your like OHSHIT!

I remember downloading the first Shareware were of doom and playing the 1st episode man.

It was awesome! But I first played Doom 2 and Heretic at a friends house.

I was blown away for the time it was the most epic graphics I had ever seen...

And then my teens and early 20s spend drunk alone in a dark room..

playing all the dooms games and Heretic and Hexen...

ahh good times.. I remember spedning one whole day to beat the first doom..
and I was so drunk.. it was a wonderful time.

I need to drink and beat the first doom again.. it's still my favorite game of all time.

Even though I play a lot of new mulitiplayer games online now..

Nothing will ever and I mean ever comapre to the orignal doom,..

it is an artistic master piece!

But I do enjoy the new Brutal Doom 64 Mod lately...

been playing it a lot..

On 7/17/2018 at 7:09 AM, The-Heretic-Assassin said:

What did you not like about Final Doom?

Well, in short I just didn't have fun with that game at all.  The levels seemed to drag on way longer than they needed to.  That game spammed the chaingun guys way too much.  There were a lot of levels that seemed to just be re-skins of previous doom game maps.  I forget whether this map was on Plutonia or TNT, but I kinda did enjoy the map called "Hunted".  I thought that was kinda clever turning an FPS game almost into a survival horror game.  And yeah, I know all about the infamous secret level called "Go 2 It" (or something like that) which is apparently the rite of passage for all Doom players, but once you played one slaughtermap, you played them all in my eyes.