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When Did The Comunity Start Calling Them Pinkies?

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Just curious... Demon is just such an extremely generic name, many of us just call the enemies pinkies. But when did this habit begun, exactly? What was the first time someone called them that?

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That's almost impossible to say.

It's like asking when people first referred to firearms as guns.

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1 minute ago, Mengo said:

That's almost impossible to say.

It's like asking when people first referred to firearms as guns.

Man... Is the name really that old? I knew we had been using it for quite some time, but for so long that no one even remembers how it started? Well, you learn something new everyday...

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As one of the more widely recognized Doom monsters, the demon has accumulated many notable nicknames. In the Doom Bible it was originally called the "demon sergeant," while id Software staff have often since referred to the monster as pinky, in reference to its coloration. This was especially true during the development of Doom 3, when a new version of the monster was designed and still called by this name, despite no longer being pink. Demons and spectres also are sometimes referred to in the community as "pigs"; though without an official precedent, this name is used in more than 100 Compet-n submissions.

 

Source: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Demon

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I'd say you'd have to go back to the days where discussing over the internet was less of a thing. Like some people in their friends group figured out the name and it spread from there to within the community. Then by the point that forums, conventions and general discussion of Doom itself was widespread amongst non-reviewers/journalists/non-community faucets, it just stuck for them and eventually made its way up the food chain.

 

It's practically impossible to carbon date the very point at which the community started calling them pinkies, but it is possible to find when exactly the name started catching on outside of the community and leaking to more official places.

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@boris, wait, what? It was id itself who started using the name? That was quite the surprise to me...

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Just now, DSC said:

@boris, wait, what? It was id itself who started using the name? That was quite the surprise to me...

 

That's what the wiki says, doesn't give a source, though.

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It is really old. Search tracks down 1994 instances on Usenet's alt.games.doom. Here is one. Numerous Doomworld results turn up from 1999-2001. A prevalence comparison of pinky vs. demon would be illuminating, although that might remain purely theoretical, since I imagine no one wants to manually sift out demon's broader usages and references to, uh, the fifth human finger. 

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5 minutes ago, DSC said:

Man... Is the name really that old? I knew we had been using it for quite some time, but for so long that no one even remembers how it started? Well, you learn something new everyday...

I assume it might be as old as the game itself as players might not know the names of the monsters for some reason, so they came up with something else, not to mention all enemies are of a demonic nature. There's a bunch of possibilities

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3 minutes ago, rdwpa said:

It is really old. Search tracks down 1994 instances on Usenet's alt.games.doom. Here is one. Numerous Doomworld results turn up from 1999-2001. A prevalence comparison of pinky vs. demon would be illuminating, although that might remain purely theoretical, since I imagine no one wants to manually sift out demon's broader usages and references to, uh, the fifth human finger. 

Not related to this discussion at all, but the idea mentioned in that post is pretty funny, I wonder there is an actual map that uses it.

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29 minutes ago, DSC said:

Not related to this discussion at all, but the idea mentioned in that post is pretty funny, I wonder there is an actual map that uses it.

Yeah, kinda. In Ashes 2063 there's a mall in which you find a video game store, and in that store?
 

Spoiler

You're attacked by a cardboard mancubus. Even though you don't meet any regular Doom enemy in that TC, seeing the manc can still trigger your shoot-first instinct and get you to waste ammo on a harmless texture.

 

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The batteries are pretty good, it still plays the attack sound, followed by the eyes and cannons blinking red thrice while going "clic-clic-clic".

 

 

I remember also seeing the same trick done with a BFG sprite. Not in Ashes, in some random map, that was posted way back when in the first "post your Doom picture" thread.

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@Gez  The post was there but the images are gone. The WAD is "131.wad" at DSDA, it's on MAP05. The WAD was in progress so it was changing the name (number) as it was being developed.

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48 minutes ago, DSC said:

Not related to this discussion at all, but the idea mentioned in that post is pretty funny, I wonder there is an actual map that uses it.

 

Play Nuts 2. It had some of that kind of trolling.

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3 hours ago, rdwpa said:

It is really old. Search tracks down 1994 instances on Usenet's alt.games.doom. Here is one. Numerous Doomworld results turn up from 1999-2001. A prevalence comparison of pinky vs. demon would be illuminating, although that might remain purely theoretical, since I imagine no one wants to manually sift out demon's broader usages and references to, uh, the fifth human finger. 

Interesting to see that it goes back that far. I didn't start calling it a Pinky until I registered on Doomworld back in 2001 and saw that Pinky was the common name for it. So the name was definitely in common usage by 2001. I didn't really think it went back to 1994 though; I had always just called it the demon, or bull demon. But I think Pinky, or Pinky Demon fits it perfectly. 

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I called them pinkies before seeing the term online because of the books. I always assumed that was where the name came from, didn't realize id called them that too.

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My dad, brother and I always called them pigs, they do look very pig like after all. It wasn’t until I started interacting with other Doomers online that I started calling them pinkies. I wonder what name was most common in the pre-widespread internet era? Surely it’s gotta be pinkies these days.

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Calling them pigs was common, I remember my older brother calling them that. I can say for sure I heard the term pinkie around Doom 3 in 2005, probably before then though, by that time I'm sure it was a well established thing. Media on games was scarce especially in the early 90's but my first guess would be that the name would've been spread over the internet by talking with id themselves on usenet when the game was released etc. By Doom 2/Doom 95 I'm sure it would've been widespread enough for anyone that knew where to look.

 

I used to draw maps on graph paper around the time Doom came out, and I would draw symbol keys for all the items and enemies. I didn't have the manuals so I had to name them off what was in the game or just something random. I just had a look at some of them - Former Human was "Normal Zombie", Sergeant was "Shotgun Zombie", Imp was "Spiky Guy" and Pinkie was "Big Mouth Demon". Demons are mentioned in-game of course, the main reason I mentioned the big mouth, I think, is so I could make sense of looking at the graph paper list much later. I also labelled Cyberdemon as "Cyclops Demon", I think that's probably a mix of low resolution and the fact that, back then, I never got too close to him lol. 

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yeah, i always called them "pigs" too. or even "piggy", this is slightly better translation of the word to English. never "pinky" before internets (maybe because my mother tongue is not English? ;-)

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Called 'em pinkies ever since I got into the franchise back in 2007.

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1 hour ago, ketmar said:

yeah, i always called them "pigs" too. or even "piggy", this is slightly better translation of the word to English. never "pinky" before internets (maybe because my mother tongue is not English? ;-)

I heard a friend once refer to them as "Those pink pig things".

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6 hours ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

I heard a friend once refer to them as "Those pink pig things".

 

Yeah man , when I first started playing doom in the 90's I called them pigs due to colour and the noise they make when they drop.

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Pigs, goats, spiders and tomatoes, those were my names for the doom 1 enemies in the 90s. Of course, I started playing doom before I could read any English so I wouldn't even have been able to gain any info from the intermission screens if there was any. 

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i was sure that caco is a flying peeled watermelon. prolly because i love tomatoes too much to kill them (and don't eat the body afterwards).

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Because of the manual referring to them as "like a shaved gorilla", I called them gorilla-bulls for a time.

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It was definitely common when I started loitering around the community back in around 1997 or thereabouts. Interesting to see the reference dating back to 1994 and that id supposedly used it. I do not remember hearing the term prior to getting online though, and I read more than a few articles about Doom in magazines including interviews with the id crew. I think I heard pig and bull demon at different times. So I wonder if it originated in the early days on Usenet, and then id started using it after that based on what the fans were saying rather than vice versa?

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Around six years ago when I first played DOOM I remember not really referring to pinkies and prolly just said something like "The melee demons". I do remember calling caco demons tomatoes lmao. I can't really remember when I started calling the demons the correct names, but it would have had to have been when I started playing DOOM on the PC

 

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As mentioned passim I remember playing the shareware version of Doom when it was released on a bunch of machines in college circa March 1994 - the game was reviewed in the magazines around that time - and although our college machines could run Doom none of them had the internet, so we weren't exposed to the big wide world.

 

Nonetheless I distinctly remember everybody calling the demons "pink piggies", and making references to Deliverance, e.g. "here piggy piggy piggy", "squeal like a pig" etc. This was in Salisbury, in rural England, where we actually have real pigs. The resemblance is uncanny.

 

In real life it takes fewer shotgun shells to kill a pig. So anyway it must be an example of parallel evolution. Off the top of my head none of the other baddies had nicknames. There was something about the piggies that stood out. I think it's because (a) the former humans are a bit dull (b) the imps are just people with spikes (c) the cacodemons look cartoonish and don't seem to fit the rest of the game's look (e) the other monsters are rare in E1 (f) the piggy is sort-of cool-looking and also sort-of ridiculous.

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My older brother and I used to call them "bull dog demons," "bull demons," or "dog demons" interchangeably. 

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