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DoomSpud

Doom's charm...

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So, I've noticed over the years there's a distinct correlation between Doom players and metal...

I first played Doom in 1994, when I was 8 and I fell in love with it immediately... particularly the soundtrack. When I was 13 and picked up the guitar, I gravitated towards metal and have played metal and been a metalhead ever since. Over the years I discovered that a lot of my favourite metal songs and bands were sampled by Bobby Prince in the Doom soundtrack (which is still my no.1 game soundtrack of ALL TIME closely followed by Final Fantasy VIII) and I've always wondered if Doom in some way or another had a part in my lifepath of a musician and metalhead because I was so entranced by Doom's atmosphere as a child? Doom has certain charm that no other game has EVER been able to replicate (which is the whole reason why after 26 years we're all still here) and it's the ONLY game that has EVER made me flinch or dodge in my chair... (except for Doom '16 which blew my fucking mind (and nutsack) all over again like the second cumming of... whatever you people believe in...).
 

What is it about Doom that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside even after all these years? The sprites? The sounds? Music? Gameplay? Art style? Nostalgia? The game's engine with all it's beautiful advantages and flaws?

Why are you forever Doomed?

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I was *sort of* into Doom before this but what made it click was when I was stuck with a shovelware map CD (before I'd ever been on the internet) and I played masses of Doom 1 maps and manually installed lots of bad graphic replacements, read a bunch of text files by weirdos and checked out lots of suspicious mapping software before settling on deu 5.21 and it just occurred to me that Doom was equally what everyone made it as what it started as.

 

I think a lot of metal is really bad but I have Meshuggah "Destroy Erase Improve" on CD twice. the original soundtrack of Doom leaves me cold, but Doom's music has still influenced me cos of the frequent use of Tubular Bells and Oxygene midis in user-made maps :)))

Nothing about the gameplay or presentation particularly sparks nostalgia with me either. Doom could be clunky and dated like Witchaven for all I care - the fact that so much energy has gone into the transformation of the original game would still make it special to me.

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4 hours ago, DoomSpud said:

What is it about Doom that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside even after all these years? The sprites? The sounds? Music? Gameplay? Art style? Nostalgia? The game's engine with all it's beautiful advantages and flaws?

Why are you forever Doomed?

 

Interesting question. For me it can't be the music, because since the early days I mostly play without it. That doesn't mean I don't like game-music - in reality I love soundtracks in general and game-music in special (my favourite game-score of all time is Chris Hülsbeck's TurricanII and Chris even scored one of my movies). But especially when playing a Doom-level for longer times (Hey, I co-created Eternal Doom) the music tends to work against the immersive feeling of the game.

And speaking of games, I'm old enough to have lived and played through each and every computer- and console-game-generation (I was the first in my circle of friends to own a Pong-Console back then and just recently switched to a PS4) but no game ever had the lasting impact of Doom.

 

Probably Doom is the perfect game, because - even if it was a revolution back then - it never tried more than to be entertainment. Even the shareware-version of "Knee Deep..." had everything I ever wanted from a game. Fast paced gameplay, great graphics, perfectly balanced gameplay, great atmosphere and - best of all - you could start it and were in the game in a few seconds without having to play through long tutorials, read a manual or train for hours to progress.

After downloading the shareware-version back then through a friends BBS, we played it for weeks in row while waiting for the parcel from the US with the full version (because over here in Germany it wasn't officially available for a long time). 

 

But that's not all. The ability to create your own levels - well, we also had this in Wolffenstein, but this was nothing compared to what Doom had to offer - was a way to live out my creativity. Also this happened when the internet was young and the World-wide-web something only Nerds used on a daily base. Doom brought me together with people around the world, the compuserve-forums and the newsnet became my second home - so in a way Doom made the world small and taught me english in a way never before possible (and I'm a Star Wars-Fan from day one and already had a lot of world-wide contacts via snail-mail). 

 

Lastly Doom gave me a job for a year and even after this went down the drain, because the company went bancrupt prior to the release, this experience helped me a lot.

 

So Doom was in my live since my early 30ies and I can definatly put a marker there. There was a live before Doom and a live after, but there will never be a life after Doom - at least for me. :)

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I found out about doom in mid 00s when my dad brought home a cd containing doom and showed to me and let me play (i was only 11 back then)

I found it difficult at first but I was hooked and would play it after school on the windows xp computer

He also later bought me a collection CD with Doom, Doom 2, TNT, and Plutonia on it for my birthday i think

and that's how I got into doom.

and i still play doom to this day as a 23 year old.

 

I really love the fast paced gameplay, the variety of unique demons to face, and the variety of weapons to slay those demons with, maps with many paths and secrets... there are even entire secret levels which are cool. 

 

Doom music actually made me interested in midis more than metal personally (though i do love power metal, speed metal, and thrash metal)

Midis have a unique sound and charm to them.

 

I actually love the graphics even though they are simple, doom textures and sprites seems to have alot more color and noticability than modern fps games,

its alot easier to tell what is what which is something modern fps seem to not often have being way too cluttered with shading and detail and a muted pallete

 

Doom modding and Doom wads is another reason doom is so amazing, Its the most moddable game ever made in history of video gaming. 

some mods even like adventures of square and sonic robo blast 2 look like entirely different games from doom.   

There are tons of content being produced for it, you will never run out new stuff to play.

doom modding / wad making is also very easy to learn especially nowadays with out better tools and developed community.

 

Doom is one of the few games/game series I always keep coming back to, and probably will play eternally because its so great.

(the only other games/series I can think of right now that I often come back to is Minecraft)

 

I hope doom and the doom community last forever.

 

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I think you hit the nail on the head with...

 

7 hours ago, DoomSpud said:

The sprites? The sounds? Music? Gameplay? Art style? Nostalgia? The game's engine with all it's beautiful advantages and flaws?

 

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There's something about the smoothness of the strafing and the satisfying gunplay that remains just as exciting now as it was the first time I played it. Another gem passed down to me by my dad. But there's also something to be said about the future, rather than just the past, and that's that the Doom community is constantly tweaking and experimenting with the old content and making new content out of it. The community will always be the same and their creations never will.

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For me what makes it a good game is the gameplay, the music and the modding. The modding is something that makes it so when I get tired of the vanilla maps that the game came with I can download a random wad and try something new. The music for Doom is what made me get into metal music as well.

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Doom still looks cool, sounds great and still plays as well as it did in the 90's. It's a desert island game for me especially with all the community content available, keeping it going forever.

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I've been playing Doom since it released / since I was 5 and at this point it feels so comforting, like 'home'. I remember a few years ago I ate a solid amount of psilocybin active mushrooms when my mates decided to watch The Mist. It was fucking horrible and I could see/feel the monsters coming in through my windows.. After feeling like shit for ~45 minutes I jumped on my second PC and started playing Doom and all the anxiety instantly washed away, it was awesome.


The sprites also play a big part in why I love it so much, every monster and prop is so recognizable and laden with memories.

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11 hours ago, yakfak said:

... I played masses of Doom 1 maps ..., read a bunch of text files by weirdos and checked out lots of suspicious mapping software before settling on …. and it just occurred to me that Doom was equally what everyone made it as what it started as.

 

 

This resonates with me so much, as the more I think about my Doom experience; it's more about the thousands of user-made levels I've played through over the years, than the original games.   

 

As to the OP's questions at the end, I would say my answer is simply "Yes".

 

A more serious answer would be that Doom has transcended being just a game and has become more of a hobby, in that the more you put into it; the more you get out of it.   I feel like I'm just getting good at level design after all the years I've put into it (still a mediocre player, so I have something to aspire to  ;)

Edited by joepallai : grammer

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For me Doom's charm stems from its simplicity and the overall presentation. There's just something about the mood of the original maps, along with the music and especially sound effects and textures. I fell in love with all this right from the beginning. I didn't play user made maps way into the 2010s, though, so my fondest memories of Doom are the original Doom 1 maps, sometimes even played on my Amiga, once the source code was released and source ports for the Amiga started showing up.

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Pretty much all of the above. There's a rhythm to the game. I can not play for ages, jump back into it, and still be able to instinctively manage any situation pretty effective. If that Imp launches a fireball at me from that distance, I know I have enough to time shoot these two dickheads close to me before I need to dodge. That kind of thing. It's like an old friend.

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I grew up roughly around the 6th to 8th generation of consoles but I've always had an eye for older PC games, and DooM was no exception. I think the biggest reason I love DooM/DooM 2 so much is A: how easy it is to mod; B: How well it holds up, even nowadays; C: The fact that none of the guns feel worthless. Even the pistol has its uses. D: Very memorable music and E: The game is quite rewarding if you went out of your way to find secrets but never punished you greatly for skipping them. (though there ARE a few exceptions).

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I first played DOOM back in 2009. At the time, I loved it mainly because of the soundtrack, but besides that, it didn't really impress me. Until I discovered the WADs. Hundreds of thousands of, hell, maybe even millions of WADs all over the internet. I don't remember how I found my first WAD, I think it was on a forum or a P2P client. But after that, I couldn't get enough of it. Now even the originals (obviously) grew on me. 

What it comes down to is the customization, the player base, the music, the weapons which set the bar for all FPS games coming after it. So much of DOOM is just likable. You can pick it up now for the first time, play it, and still be impressed with it 26 years later. That's the magic of DOOM, a straight-forward, well designed FPS. 

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On 7/17/2019 at 1:06 PM, joepallai said:

This resonates with me so much, as the more I think about my Doom experience; it's more about the thousands of user-made levels I've played through over the years, than the original games.   

Which of course begs the question: Is Maximum Doom the most historically significant release from ID Software? The answer to many may be, well, no, of course not, idiot, what are you on crack, but I feel that it shows a huge variety of mapping styles that were emerging even back then ('94-'95).  Seeing the Doom engine being stretched to the limit and beyond by mappers of variable skill and/or sanity must've been an inspiration to those that witnessed it back then - to understand the infinite possibilities of creating your own map, possibly could be just as important to Doom's legacy as deathmatching. 

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On 7/16/2019 at 5:23 PM, DoomSpud said:

What is it about Doom that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside even after all these years? The sprites? The sounds? Music? Gameplay? Art style? Nostalgia? The game's engine with all it's beautiful advantages and flaws?

Why are you forever Doomed?

 

"...for I am the damned!!"

 

On a serious note, it's probably because of the solid, fun, and fast paced combat of the game, in addition to the aesthetics and sound design, especially in Doom 1's E3 and E1 and the console games. Contrary to popular belief, me enjoying Doom has nothing to do with being a metalhead - in fact I very much prefer a dark ambient soundtrack a la Doom 64 and PSX Doom when playing instead of a metal one.

 

I dunno how much longer I can keep playing though, I've played games that I never thought I'd stop playing in the past, but now I can't imagine revisiting them anymore since there's nothing left for me to see. Playing Doom as a 5-6yrs old kid (early 2000s) surely was an experience since certain enemies made me shit myself and thus I never finished any installment in the series at the time.

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It’s really everything about the games from the art style to the music and sounds to the fun level design and excellent game feel/controls. People who don’t like Doom have something wrong with them and they’re really different and strange.

 

Doom would be right alongside other games I love but only play like once a year if not for the user made content as yakfak and joepallai basically said. Doom and Wolf3D are of course awesome in their own right, but when I was like 6-7 and my dad downloaded dmd2die.wad (Doomed 2 Die) it changed everything. I obviously couldn’t tell they were generic subpar 1994/1995 maps at the time, all my brain took in was “wow, custom levels, sound effects, graphics and music!!”

 

After that I managed to find more awesome wads (doomcity, area51, Bermuda, hellrun2, dropdead) and they showed me all I needed to know to get hooked: A lot of people were making really awesome maps and custom enemies and stuff, and I really really wanted to do that. Not much later Doom Connector became a thing and through that I really got into the community and began mapping properly and stuff.

 

It was just the perfect game for me between all the factors that just happened to align - introduced at an impressionable age, lucky enough to have net as a kid, and obsessed with playing and making mods since I was knee high to a pissant. I’ve never seen a reason not to play, when I think “gee Ive got free time and want to play a game” there’s like a 70% chance I’m gonna pick Doom just because I somehow never get tired of the damn thing.

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Doom is what happens when you combine technically and artistically capable people, ample motivation, and free reign to build from the heart. Being able to put all of your energy into something you love doing is the best thing ever.

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