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jeroa

reception of doom when it came out

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Was Doom a big deal to popular culture when it came out? irl i know of people who fondly remember the n64 or the ps2 but a couple of relatives who introduced me to the game aside i have never met anyone who grew up with it. Even when the '16 game was released everyone i talked with about it was new to the franchise. How much of a presence did Doom have in the early 90's?

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Yep, it pretty much was. It was a shock in the industry and helped redefining the genre, along with Duke, Quake, and Half-Life, but Doom laid the foundation for pretty much every '90s shooter that followed.

 

Many people were scared by the game at the time as it was the most realistic thing around back then, it was installed on more PCs than Office which made MS briefly consider buying id Software, it was blocked in schools because of students slacking, it stirred plenty of controversy due to its violent and blasphemous nature (Doom was also wrongly blamed for an infamous school shooting), and probably more I can't think of right now. It was so influential the notion of "Doom clone" also became a thing, to describe games that tried to "be like Doom", or borrowed heavy inspiration from it.

 

I wasn't around at the time Doom came out, but I've read plenty about it over the years, and I first played it on Win95/98 machines when I was only 6. As I grew up with NES games almost exclusively, I like to think my experience was accurate to how people felt like when it first came out. Newer generations probably don't have much interest in the classics anymore, but it still very much has an active fanbase and modding community which is, if anything, growing, not shrinking, and is still very popular in retro gaming circles.

Edited by seed

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It was massive, can confirm. I was a toddler when the very first Doom version ever was publicly released but even by 1997/1998 other kids at school who were into video games (fellow nerds) always knew what it was when I talked to them about it. On that note, it's funny to remember that not so long ago even being into video games at all made you a nerd. Culture changes super fast sometimes.

 

This should paint a decent picture of the hype that this game generated back then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Reception

 

One of my favorite bits:

In late 1995, Doom was estimated to be installed on more computers worldwide than Microsoft's new operating system Windows 95 even with its million-dollar advertising campaigns. Microsoft hired id Software to port Doom to Windows with the WinG API, and Bill Gates briefly considered buying the company. Microsoft developed a Windows 95 port of Doom to promote the operating system as a gaming platform. The development team in this effort was led by then-employee Gabe Newell. One Windows 95 promotional video had Bill Gates digitally superimposed into the game.

 

Another thing that really represents it's popularity is that the term "Doom clone" was used to describe essentially the entire FPS genre until bout 1998. You know when your specific brand name becomes a proprietary eponym, even for just a few years, you've made a permanent mark.

 

There are also some old Game Informer magazines and stuff with cool previews of Doom from mid-1993, using screenshots of the Alphas, and just by the language being used in the article I got the impression that the person writing it was genuinely hyped, not just talking it up to make it sound better than it really is which was pretty common in old gaming rags (any old Nintendo Power readers will remember that bullshit). I know it's on idgames but I'm being stupid and can't find it right now..

 

I also don't think it was common for one game to have so many different television commercials back then, even taking all the ports into account - most games, even popular ones, had one, maybe two commercials, and most games didn't have one at all. By contrast there was quite a handful of Doom commercials. Roughly the first half of this video is all the commercials from the 90's. A funny time capsule and one more example of how much selling/staying power the game had:

 

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maybe doom was just not popular in my region. I guess the numerous sequels helped the other controversial game of the time mortal kombat remain in popular conscience. The satanic scares lasted well into the late aughts where i'm at. Preachers would go on about pokemon and yuguio cards but no doom, not even when doom 3 came out

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The rule back in 94-95 was that if you had your own PC or your workplace allowed you to have games on their PCs, then you've played at least Doom 1 shareware, possibly also Doom 1 and/or 2 full version. My IT technician dad was working in USA at the time, came back to Europe and guess what - every single one of his friends that was working with any computer-related stuff was playing Doom. This was probably the case in practically every country with significant cultural connection with USA. I suspect that no other commercial PC game has ever been this successful relative to number of potential PCs it could be installed on at the time.

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From Doom's wikipedia article...

 

"At midnight on December 10, 1993, after working for 30 straight hours, the development team at id uploaded the first episode of the game to the internet, letting interested players distribute it for them. So many users were connected to the first network that they planned to upload the game to—the University of Wisconsin–Parkside FTP network—that even after the network administrator increased the number of connections while on the phone with Wilbur, id was unable to connect, forcing them to kick all other users off to allow id to upload the game. When the upload finished thirty minutes later, 10,000 people attempted to download the game at once, crashing the university's network"

 

Also relevant...

 

 

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i find the Gates ad repulsive but it got me thinking about the copy of doom i played as a kid. When launching the game it would display a doom 2 95 logo and it would show a menu that would let you choose any level. Does that sound like an official release?

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2 minutes ago, jeroa said:

When launching the game it would display a doom 2 95 logo and it would show a menu that would let you choose any level. Does that sound like an official release?

 

Sounds legit cause it sounds like Doom95 which was an official Windows Doom port ported by Gabe Newell and Alex St. John.

 

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom95

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i see. i had asssumed for some reason that only doom 1 had been released with that port. i am not sure how i got that idea

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1 hour ago, seed said:

Yep, it pretty much was. It was a shock in the industry and help redefining the genre, along with Duke, Quake, and Half-Life, but Doom laid the foundation for pretty much every '90s shooter that followed.

 

Many people were scared by the game at the time as it was the most realistic thing around back then, it was installed on more PCs than Office which made MS briefly consider buying id Software, it was blocked in schools because of students slacking, it stirred plenty of controversy due to its violent and blasphemous nature (Doom was also wrongly blamed for an infamous school shooting), and probably more I can't think of right now.

 

There are still American politicians who love to pile on video games in general when someone shoots up his / her school, yet these same politicians have no problem sending young men and women to die off in the Middle East while simultaneously making off like bandits. 

 

Remember, video games are "evil"... [/sarcasm]

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When I was in probably second grade or so I was at a sleepover with some friends watching Congo, sometime in the mid-to-late 90s, and there’s a scene where Doom is playing on some computer and we all were excited. Going into the science museum in Philadelphia, the gift shop had walls of shareware floppies including Doom, which I bought on a field trip with lunch money, since my mom didn’t want to buy it for me lol. That was the time period, a) it was extremely popular and b) a kid could buy a violent video game that was the AAA league of quality for the era with lunch money at a science museum (shareware was in fact free to distribute but the distributor who put it on a floppy got the cash).

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6 hours ago, chowbar said:

 

Sounds legit cause it sounds like Doom95 which was an official Windows Doom port ported by Gabe Newell and Alex St. John.

 

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom95


Gabe Newell and Alex St. John didn‘t port the game. They where the heads of MS Gaming/DirectX Division. It was ported by Fred Hommel.

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Related, check this out lol:

 

 

You know people were excited when being 1 second over the deadline was too much :) also funny how things change but remain the same, those exact posts could be applied to the delay of Doom E we saw recently.

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11 hours ago, seed said:

it was installed on more PCs than Office which made MS briefly consider buying id Software

Correction: Doom had sold more copies and had more installs than Microsoft Windows...

 

I suppose Office is still accurate since it's a bunch of Windows programs, but hey :P

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Indeed it was. I was eight when it was released and a SEGA kid through and through (still am XD) ,so PC gaming wasn't really on my radar but I did read a couple of multi-format mags at the time mostly GamesMaster and I'd first seen it in there.

Though it was when my older brother came home one day in early '94 I think it would have been ,he was absolutely beside himself about this game he'd just played at a friends house that was the best thing he'd ever seen and " you've gotta play it , you've gotta play it" over and over again I thought to myself "Man,this must be good" as my brother isn't easily impressed.

The first time I saw it running was actually on an episode of GamesMaster , pretty sure it wasn't THIS episode as this was the late night one off gore special with swearing and what not, but this does have a DOOM II challenge at around the 37:00 minute mark and this would have been shown around the time of DOOM II's release.

EDIT: They say he's playing the PC port but I'm pretty sure it's the Jaguar version.

 

 

 

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I was 14 at the time, perfect age for Doom marketing.  I had a 486/33 that could run it on high detail, but had to decrease screen size.  My friends and I had gotten deep into Wolf3d and Spear of Destiny when Doom came out.  We were so excited!  The graphics looked just like the magazines!  It was dark, it had floors and ceilings and ran pretty good.  It was so different than wolf3d contextually, got creepier than expected as the world started getting more hellish.  Remember, this was one of the first games to have this level of graphic violence in it, as well as the context of Hell.  It was looked upon as satanic and gross by most people who just passed by, but it was mesmerizing to watch in action, like a good horror movie.  I just started getting good with keyboard only controls, as well as deathmatch, when Doom 2 launched.

 

By then almost everyone had heard of Doom, and if you owned a PC you owned it already in some form.  There are books about how it exploded in pop culture, how it was the push for ESRB, how it was scapegoated.  By the late 90s it was considered somewhat old, new tech had come out that was more impressive, other games got the ire of conservative parents.  Then Columbine brought it back into focus, and to this day the battle against violent video games rages on.

 

It's better told by others for what it did culturally, but for me it was just a cool game with a horror theme.  It was a way to get me interested in computers and networking, it also got me to hate my first politician.

 

 

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i wonder why doom did not get a dedicated action figure line back then. Even now you just get the doom slayer.

 

when other influential 90s fpses came out like quake or half life how much of a splash did they do on the general conscience when compared to doom?

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4 hours ago, jeroa said:

i wonder why doom did not get a dedicated action figure line back then. Even now you just get the doom slayer.

Not quite the same, but I was obsessed with getting my hands on those little reaper miniatures that were available at the time. They’re only about 2 inches tall though

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Videogames back then were not usually associated with toy-lines, unless it was the reverse situation like Ninja Turtles or something like that. There were limited edition runs like the reaper miniatures, but not many games had large quantities of extra merchandise, even less so in actual physical retail outlets.

 

Access to video game media back then was mostly through magazines or BBS pages, or occasionally a TV show that specialized in PC's. I remember seeing segments for Doom and Dark Forces on shows at the time. One of the main things that spread popularity for games in the early 90's was word-of-mouth. A number of games were made known to me only through a friend mentioning it, and who knows where they found out about it. Doom was a shareware product at first, and PC game stores were also a big source of news on games.

 

My friends and I were aware of Wolf3d/Spear of Destiny but none of us knew about Doom really, until shareware had already been released. By then, it was the game that everyone was talking about, people would lend the disk around school. Very quickly it was established as the thing to have if you liked games, especially multiplayer. If you did LAN back then you had at least Doom/Quake, Command and Conquer and GTA or you were a heckin scrub lol.

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I was atoddler like most here were, and got to play it years latter. I would imagine people went nuts about it. Even myself went nuts when i saw this game, years after the release.

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18 hours ago, Eurisko said:

EDIT: They say he's playing the PC port but I'm pretty sure it's the Jaguar version.

 

That's absolutely PC DOOM II.

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With the way gamesmaster challenges were fixed, I assume the PC doom footage was recorded well in advance and (really fucking poorly) cut up and fixed and the kid wasn't actually playing anything.

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3 hours ago, amackert said:

That's absolutely PC DOOM II.

I meant to say this earlier. Also what the hell are they playing on, a 386? Poor dude's getting like 6 frames per second. Finally, what's going on with the reduced damage? It's like he's taking ITYTD levels of damage, where sometimes the marine makes the sound of pain but doesn't even grit his teeth, but it seems to be the UV monster count. What trickery is this?!

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all I can tell you is that I had my first home pc back in '95-96, and got hooked on computers maybe a couple years before, and back in those days, whenever I'd get my hands on somebody's computer to play games, there wasn't a computer that didn't have atleast one game by id installed, and I'm kinda positive they all had Doom on installed.

 

 

@cybdmn I thought Adam Pavlacka did Doom 95, didn't he?

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12 hours ago, amackert said:

 

That's absolutely PC DOOM II.

 

What controller is he holding? At a glance it looked like the Jaguar controller but after having another look I'm not so sure ,and after checking out the Jag version a bit mor Its definitely not that version. 

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On 10/28/2019 at 8:32 AM, CrbnBased said:

I was 14 at the time, perfect age for Doom marketing.  I had a 486/33 that could run it on high detail, but had to decrease screen size.  My friends and I had gotten deep into Wolf3d and Spear of Destiny when Doom came out.  We were so excited!  The graphics looked just like the magazines!  It was dark, it had floors and ceilings and ran pretty good.  It was so different than wolf3d contextually, got creepier than expected as the world started getting more hellish.  Remember, this was one of the first games to have this level of graphic violence in it, as well as the context of Hell.  It was looked upon as satanic and gross by most people who just passed by, but it was mesmerizing to watch in action, like a good horror movie.  I just started getting good with keyboard only controls, as well as deathmatch, when Doom 2 launched.

 

By then almost everyone had heard of Doom, and if you owned a PC you owned it already in some form.  There are books about how it exploded in pop culture, how it was the push for ESRB, how it was scapegoated.  By the late 90s it was considered somewhat old, new tech had come out that was more impressive, other games got the ire of conservative parents.  Then Columbine brought it back into focus, and to this day the battle against violent video games rages on.

 

It's better told by others for what it did culturally, but for me it was just a cool game with a horror theme.  It was a way to get me interested in computers and networking, it also got me to hate my first politician.

 

 

 

If I'm not mistaken, the push for the ESRB was thanks to Mortal Kombat and its use of fatalities to finish off defeated opponents, which was considered "beyond the pale" at that time.  Also, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was especially vocal about it as well, iirc.

 

Again, throughout human history, there have been movies, violent plays, novels, comic books, songs, poems, and other forms of expression, yet video games get singled out for "violence".  It's especially rich coming from Hollywood who's always talking about gun violence, while their own movies have guns being fired like the 4th of July, especially any action movies involving Stallone, Shwartzenegger, Diesel, etc...

 

The US Government always has fits of moral panics while trying to change the subject on their own misbehavior and malfeasance.  It's comical to see them lecture others about morality and violence.

Edited by Master O

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