What were your first Doom impressions?

Hello community,
I've been wondering what were your first impressions on Doom? Impressions on anything to be honest.

For example,
my experience with Doom started because my family (mainly my dad and both of my older siblings) used to play Wolfenstein 3D and the shareware version of Doom on the computer. I started playing it when I was 4 years old, although Doom was released some years even before I was born, so this was around 2001 and I just felt in love with the game immediately. The graphics, the music, the sounds, the weapons, the enemies, the HUD, the menu... everything.

But being a shareware version of the game left me with a void feeling wanting for more. I thought weird that there were 7 weapon slots available but only 5 weapons inside the game (plasma rifle and BFG aren't available on Knee-deep in the dead). Also, we used the Doom 95 port, and I remember that the icon was a Cacodemon (which I thought was the mastermind behind everything, like the final boss or something... I just remember calling him "the boss") but never seen him inside the game.

It's funny that, apart from the Cacodemon icon for the Doom 95, once you start the Doom 95 program there was a banner where the Doomguy was fighting a giant mexican robot with a rocket launcher (or that's what I thought the Cyberdemon was at first sight). I'm gonna attach an image with it so you can see it and I'll just tell you that I thought it was a giant mexican robot because, with that side view of the Cyberdemon, I thought the horn was his mexican hat and the round metal part of this leg was a tambourine or something.

As a kid I could never succesfully download a game by my own until I got my first personal computer just for me as a christmas gift at age 10, so when I was a little kid I hadn't any experience as an independent internet user. Whenever I tried to download a Doom game, I just screwed things up with the family computer... like downloading a virus or surpassing the hard disk space limit (and the PC went nuts). And our family has always lived in South America so it wasn't that easy to buy something like that (or that's what I thought at least). I remember watching the "Read this!" section on the game's menu and reading that there were two more episodes on the full version, and there were some screenshots of it and there was the price of the whole game which you could buy using credit cards and I was just jealous of the people from United States because they could achieve something that I just could dream of. (Also attached because of the memories).

Some years went by and I was like 6-7 years old and I was looking for Doom stuff and I found a website called www.doom2.com or something like that (I didn't find it like searching in Google or something, I just wrote that URL hoping to work and it kinda worked... I mean there were Doom info, it wasn't official, but it works for me!) and I realized that there was a Doom 2 game! That just blew my mind. And I was drooling watching at that new title screen where, instead of being the Doomguy against some demons, it was "some guy" against a fucking giant beast: the Cyberdemon. That was art! The cyberdemon was gorgeously detailed.

Also, I remember seeing for the first time a Lost Soul on that website and I thought that it was like the Cacodemon's (or as I called it, "the boss") best friend / minion / henchman because there were like the two demons who can fly (after that, I discovered the Pain Elemental but for some reason I didn't think they were as near as good pals to the Cacodemons or the Lost Souls as the Cacodemons and Lost Souls are to each other. Even if the Pain Elemental summons Lost Souls ironically...).

I remember I used to say "the bull" instead of knowing that they were called Demon/Pinky. And as the Demons/Pinkies share a similar skin color palette with the Barons of Hell, I used to think that the Barons were kind of an evolution of a Demon, and so I called them "the standing bull" or "the bull on 2 legs".

Finally, as the game doesn't tell you much about the story (shareware version, and I could barely read/speak my own first language at that time so I didn't understand a single shit of english), I thought the main plot of the game was that the Doomguy was a guy who worked on an office and had a big weapon collection at his job but suddenly one day a portal opened inside the office and it absorbed all of the Doomguy's weapons so he just jumped inside to rescue his precious weapon collection.

Please understand that these silly things were product of my imagination as a kid, hahaha. Quite some funny theories I had.

And well, what were your first impressions of the game? I'll be reading.
Thanks for reading!

On 2/5/2019 at 6:30 AM, SirJuicyLemon said:

I thought the main plot of the game was that the Doomguy was a guy who worked on an office and had a big weapon collection at his job but suddenly one day a portal opened inside the office and it absorbed all of the Doomguy's weapons so he just jumped inside to rescue his precious weapon collection.

this should be the story 

46 minutes ago, neep said:

this should be the story 

Totally!

The first Doom which I played was PS1 Doom. And I thought the Doomguy should escape some kind of prison, because the exit sign at the end hints at it.

I was in highschool when doom came out. Was visiting family over Christmas or thanksgiving don’t remeber. 

Uncle had it on his pc and showed me, it was the greatest game I had ever seen at that point and fit me perfectly. 

I have been hooked since. 

The year was like 95 or something. The game was running at like 3 fps on my father's PC and could barely see anything on a really dark BW monitor. I was just pressing keys and my sister thought I was going through the levels (in reality we were just watching the built-in demos) but I couldn't even tell what was going on.

I think after a few minutes we got bored and started playing Hugo instead. Does anyone even remember Hugo? 

Anyway a few months later I got a better PC and a color monitor and the rest is history. 90's shareware FPS's were my childhood especially Doom.

When I was going into highschool I used money my parents gave me for Christmas to buy Doom 3: BFG Edition (lmao). Quickly learned that I didn't like 3 (Still don't) but I thought 1 & 2 were the shit and actually used playtime as a reward for making better life choices. Get up early, clean house, go to school, come home, exercise, play 2 hours or so of DOOM, and hit the sack. Lather, rinse, repeat for like a year. I still do the same sort of thing now as I do then; it's a good system.

Before that, the closest thing I had to experience with DOOM was playing Quake 3: Arena when I was too young to understand how the game worked beyond thinking it was cool that "killing was called fragging".

My friend had a N64 when we were like 5. Thats when I thought that this was like halo 2, the other fps that i played the crap out of. This was like '09, I came to doom later than most.

But until 2017 i didnt really think about it.

But now I'm hooked on it now.

something scary to think about: I played Doom so long ago for the first time, when I was so young, I physically have no memories of first impressions. My earliest memories of the game all have the game being something super familiar by then. So yeah, heh. It's actually scary to think about that I've been playing Doom for almost as long as I've lived.

My two brightest Doom memories from back when I started playing it were:

that I played it without sound (it didn't work in Vanilla and I didn't know about source ports yet), and I thought Doom wasn't actually supposed to have the sound in the first place.

The second vivid memory was of me falling into the inescapable toxic pit in the outdoor area of E1M3 (not into the central one with the switch, but into one of the side pits, which are inescapable) and watching Doomguy's face slowly being covered in blood. :(

18 minutes ago, InsanityBringer said:

something scary to think about: I played Doom so long ago for the first time, when I was so young, I physically have no memories of first impressions. My earliest memories of the game all have the game being something super familiar by then. So yeah, heh. It's actually scary to think about that I've been playing Doom for almost as long as I've lived.

Same here, but I don't feel like it's scary. I'd rather say that it's interesting!

And in my case kinda sad because I was the last one of my family to be introduced to the game but ended up being the one who got hooked by the game. The rest of my family never got caught by Doom as I did, probably because it blew my fucking 4 years old brain and felt in love with it.

Wow! It's amazing how a 90s game allows me to jump and look up and down!

In '94, when I was in my upper 20s, I got a CD that had a lot of shareware games and other stuff, and in the midst of all that was a game I hadn't heard of called Doom (shareware version 1.2).  It was so much more fun than any of the other games on that CD.

Wow, there's a lot of parallels between our stories SirJuicyLemon.

My dad introduced me and my older brother to Doom probably before I could read, and I've been in love with it ever since. That Doom '95 bootup screen sure brings back the memories... I still remember watching my dad play the first few maps of Final Doom before I could even comprehend how to use a keyboard (I vividly remember seeing Well of Souls for the first time). The time frames in which we were first introduced to the game are fairly in sync, I was probably around five years old when I finally started trying (and failing miserably) to play Doom on one of my dad's old computers.

Similarly to InsanityBringer, I don't really remember what my first impressions of the game actually were, but I'd safely assume that my three-year-old mind was blown the first time I saw my dad boot it up...

On 2/9/2019 at 5:44 PM, riderr3 said:

The first Doom which I played was PS1 Doom. And I thought the Doomguy should escape some kind of prison, because the exit sign at the end hints at it.

That is kind of smart to be honest. Makes sense to think that he was in prison with the exit signs now that I come to think of it.

4 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

The second vivid memory was of me falling into the inescapable toxic pit in the outdoor area of E1M3 (not into the central one with the switch, but into one of the side pits, which are inescapable) and watching Doomguy's face slowly being covered in blood. :(

Me too! I thought that it was an error to not have an escape option from that toxic pit, like the developers messed up.

3 hours ago, Juza said:

Wow! It's amazing how a 90s game allows me to jump and look up and down!

Modern source ports in a nutshell!

31 minutes ago, Empyre said:

In '94, when I was in my upper 20s, I got a CD that had a lot of shareware games and other stuff, and in the midst of all that was a game I hadn't heard of called Doom (shareware version 1.2).  It was so much more fun than any of the other games on that CD.

I remember having one of those "100 games in 1" CD and one of those was Doom shareware! I remember also an old game called Dr. Harrison, a game that was a good and fun version of Arkanoid and a game called Piranha Panic. Those were the days.

28 minutes ago, Skeletonpatch said:

My dad introduced me and my older brother to Doom probably before I could read, and I've been in love with it ever since...

Yeah! Really similar experiences! I remember playing Doom at 4-5 years old and even if I couldn't understand anything, even if I was bad, I loved the game and I didn't know why. Nostalgia punching me hard.

It's going to be the millionth time I tell this story but okay:

I started with Doom 2 in 2002 or early 2003 when I was 5 or 6 on my first Windows 98 machine, a family friend who gave us the machine installed a bunch of games and among them was Doom 2. Likely vanilla Doom and not the Doom95 port. It was the most realistic game I played until then as I played NES games on a clone system before.

Never finished it at the time however as the Mancubi on MAP07 frightened me. I managed to reach MAP08 at some point as I remember the Barons room with the Cyberdemon, but that's about it. The Underhalls remains the most iconic map from the IWADs up to this day for me.

I convinced my dad to upgrade from a 286 to a 386 so I could play it. Played episode 1 for a few months straight before we got the full game, E1 is still my favourite set of levels from both Doom 1 and 2.

I thought the levels themselves looked amazing, still think most of them aged well compared to other games.

Once I got one of those level compilation cds it was on 😂 I remember beavis and Butthead and a star wars conversion that blew my mind.

I also messed around with WadEd trying to build my house but instead made a corridor with too many monsters for my poor friends pc to handle.

I'd played the shareware version that had come with a software package my uncle had bought for his 486, and it was absolutely amazing. I had never played a game quite so realized, even in the arcade. Muted tones, varying levels of lighting, all of it was immensely different from the offerings on consoles and in the arcade. I had only gotten to play Wolfenstein 3D a few months earlier, but the concept of the "3D" shooter was still new to me. In the one high school computer class I was permitted to take, we were assigned to draw something in Paintbrush (Windows 95 wasn't out yet). I doodled the plasma gun, and in art class, when tasked to make a wire figure and cover it with plaster, I made the DooM marine with a BFG-9000, standing amidst piles of gore. It was about fourteen inches tall, on a 1 square foot base, propped up by a wire. It was set up in the school display case at the front entrance. Yeah, this was in the mid-nineties, so DooM wasn't a big deal then. Alas, everything I had back then is dust now. Needless to say, DooM had made a big impression on me, and had inspired me to no small degree. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to experience it when it was still new.

I've already posted this a few times but here goes...

My first impression was watching my Dad play Doom 2 back in the nineties -- I was like 4 or 5 at the time. I was short-sighted and didn't have glasses yet, so I couldn't really see what was happening on screen but I strived to see something anyway. When I finally got to play the game, I managed to get through Entryway until I reached the imp cage and got transfixed with fear, because there was an aggressive monster on the screen and I didn't even know how to turn off the game.

That wasn't the first person shooter I'd seen (I'd already seen Heretic and Wolfenstein before that) but it still impressed me a lot.

Someone left the shareware Doom running on a 90s computer on god mode with a pinkie demon chewing at the player in a dark office room with door open at my grandparent's house when I was a toddler. I have this vivid image inprinted in my memory forever from the flashes of my childhood. I was too scared to play. Until it began. I was fortunate to be born in the 93. If only to experience the era briefly.

Christmas 1994. I was eleven. Dad bought a top-of-the-range 486 with a whopping 4MB of RAM. He'd pre-installed the Shareware copy of Doom. Over two days, a friend and I played through Episode one on HNTR. There aren't quite words to explain the excitement I felt to have it.

I still have vivid memories of the first time I saw a pinkie on E1M7 (he had played a section or so without me). "What the hell was that?" "I dunno, but I seriously messed it up." And of the bruiser brothers. "I was shooting it! I kept shooting it and it wouldn't die!"

We found barely any of the secrets. Romero really nailed it with his maps. We never found our way to a single Soul Sphere, but to see them looking so ethereal and weird, tantalisingly out of reach, gave the experience so much mystery.

I still wonder how we managed to get through the episode. I think we barely used the run and strafe modifiers. I'm kinda tempted to fire it up on HNTR, disable strafe and always-run, and play with keyboard-only arrow keys to see how I fare.

Was offered a gaming magazine that had a Lion King watch in it for my birthday, and it had a review of the 32X version. I thought that was the best concept ever for a video game. Little did I know that I'd wait until the early 2000's to finally play the game, but I was basically paying attention to anything id software from that point onward. Needless to say having my own computer and having access to so many wads at once was a lot to take in.

My first impression of Doom was playing it on my 386DX40 (if i remember correctly) with no soundcard and a monochrome monitor. So levels for me looked quite dark and the sound effects were ... more amusing than anything else.

I loved that game nonetheless. The immersion was still really good for the twelve year old me.

I first played it at a friend's house on his computer. I didn't know anything about the plot other than you were on Mars and that one of the moons had disappeared. I immediately started to scan the environment for clues as if I thought that would reveal more of the story. Who or what was UAC and why were these letters everywhere? What happened to the other moon? I wonder if I'll ever get to go there? What are these weird giant gray mountains that make up the outside background and can I get over to them? Eventually I wised up, but those moments of wonder still stick with me to this day.

'Oh, is this the sequel of WOLF3D? It does look cooler, and that gun looks even more realistic than before!! I like this game already.'

- antares031, watching Doom for the first time from uncle's house, circa 1995

Believe it or not, but chaingun was my #1 favorite weapon on Doom, when I was a child, just because it brought the good-old memories with Wolfenstein 3D. And yes, I didn't know the details about rocket launcher, plasma rifle, and BFG, back then. So I just called them fireball gun, gem gun, and camera gun.

I first played Doom on my dad's computer when I was 3. I just thought it was a cool building simulator where you shoot things.

My first experience with Doom started on the Xbox Live Arcade ports when I was around 12 or so years old. I don't remember that much, but eventually when I finished both Doom 1 and 2 on ITYTD difficulty (lol I sucked at games), I got hooked to the series and it became one of my all-time favorites. Yeah, I'm that young. 17 currently.

"wow! someday i would be as great as John Carmack!" now i am maintaining doom sourceport virtually nobody else cares about, and Carmack launches real rockets. something's gone very wrong here...

On 2/14/2019 at 10:37 PM, pc234 said:

I just thought it was a cool building simulator where you shoot things.

"Wait a second!!! Are you telling me this is not a cool building simulator where you shoot things?", said a random mapper.

First time I touched Doom was in 98, me and my mom were living with a friend of hers during my parents divorce and they had a pc with Doom on it, played it for a bit before we moved to another state.
Fast forward to 05 or 06, I got an og Xbox and Doom 3 (still have the disk) and in 2015 I finally bought a pc and Dooms 1&2, been playing since.