Is Doom still nostalgic for you, or is it more "Modern" now?

I have never really realized it before, but my perception of Doom has changed ever since discovering the mapping and modding community. it's no longer a nostalgic game for me, which is really weird for some reason. I guess it's because Doom was such a huge video game in my early life. My childhood is filled with memories of playing Doom, Hexen and Heretic with my family and absolutely blasting monsters away on one of those old CRT monitors. I've always kind of thought of Doom as a really goofy and lighthearted game, but now that I'm getting into more modern content the game is kind of losing that old nostalgic feel for me. Most of the wads released now are way more detailed, sophisticated and with more lore/ story elements to them. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I dunno. I feel like Doom was more wholesome when it was just this goofy, outdated game that was really nostalgic and reminded me of being a kid. Does anyone else feel me on this/get what I'm saying or am I alone here? 

As far as I'm aware people still make vanilla maps. But yes I understand what you mean as I started back in the 90's aswell.

For what it's worth, my advice is to take a break from the modern stuff if you want to recapture that feeling. There's plenty of good vanilla maps still being made I bet. Personally I'm easy either way, I enjoy both.

I forgot to add: I will admit that some of the charm gets lost under all the new detail/textures. But I try to take it 'as is' instead of comparing the new to the old. It's a lot easier to enjoy both then in my opinion.

DOOM will always be nostalgic. Some of the mods and WADs aren't. but the main game will always be. 

I dislike shooters but I discovered Doom some 3 months ago and it feels modern for me in a positive sense. I'm dig those new games that are retro on purpose and I can get that feel out of gzdoom. Moreover Doom has a lot of stuff that hasn't been replicated by other shooters - iconic 2D monsters, that fast and fluid movement, no vertical aiming, or being segmented into levels that you can beat as quickly as you can. When a new Doom mod comes out it feels like a new game release. I'm expecting Age Of Hell and BTSX3 with as much hype as I have for Prodeus.

I get what you're saying, as someone who likes to dwell in the past and occasionally revisiting old versions of Doom, and I also played Doom as a kid, however, it is a game I am no longer nostalgic for, maybe because the community is still so active and moving it forward that Doom has become something that belongs in the present and the future, and not a relic of the good ol' days, like some of the Build engine games are.

Doom could've been temporary, but Doom is now Eternal.

I fall in the same boat as seed. I first played Doom as a kid in early 2000s but I stopped playing it after some years and didn't return to Doom until around 2014 or 2015. My return was due to me being extremely impressed with the mapping and modding scene of the game, not much due to nostalgia. It's probably why I find modern wads more appealing than the 90's wads like Memento Mori, Requiem or Icarus.

I feel nostalgic when I play old (or old style) wads in Choco or DosBox, or when I DM on ZDaemon and Odamex. I get that modern, refined ‘Doom modding as a science’ feel from highly detailed wads, GZDoom specific mods/maps, and when DMing on Zandronum with mapsets that use newschool features and sensibilities.

They’re different experiences, but of course both require mostly the same skills to play well at. I enjoy both experiences equally, all depends on my Dooming mood that day.

I never felt much nostalgia because I always played the games how I first started out. I always discover something new when playing the game and that is what motivates me to play more. It takes me quite some time to prefect a UV Max play-through before I move on to something else. I started off really young playing Doom and it was the exact same procedure, get through knee deep in the dead with as many new discoveries as possible and move on once that is perfected. I don't know if I'm missing out on the nostalgia trip or something because I wasn't even around in the 90's. I have some great memories on zanondrum servers though but thats the closest it will get to nostalgia because some of those servers are dead now.

I don't feel nostalgic when I play Doom at all.  Not even a little bit.  It's my method of blowing off steam, and it made me want to go to college to learn how to write code.  It got me involved in music and sound design.

Doom is a creative outlet for me - a canvas.  I don't reminisce about how it was growing up playing it, I dream about what I'm going to do with it next.  It's not just my past, it's also my present, and possibly my future.

I agree with most people here. Doom never gets old and I play it very often. I tend to feel nostalgic towards games I haven't played since my childhood, but doom? Not at all, despite me playing it for many years. Seed said it better, the new content constantly coming out, the old content that I haven't got through yet, it is always moving forward.

I got into classic Doom when I was pretty much an adult, having somehow missed it all those previous years. So it's not really the game itself that's nostalgic for me. I do find the graphics and aesthetics of the game itself to be sort of nostalgic, as the pixelated graphics and the use of sprites remind me a bit of Duke Nukem 3D and other early 3D games that I did play back in the day.

A well-crafted and labyrinthine Doom level produces for me an experience that may or may not count as nostalgia, depending on the definition. There's a certain dungeon-esque quality to many WADs, which often combine dark fantasy trappings such as blackened ironwork, onyx halls and demonic carvings with a monolithic industrial aesthetic that speaks of a heavily used future. These days science fiction aesthetics trend towards the shiny white iPod look with touchscreens everywhere, which to be honest I personally find rather insipid and sterile. I guess that's one reason why I like Doom; there's a certain brutal honesty to the mechanised bases and processing facilities, contrasting with the twisting duplicity of the organically invasive hellscapes.

Because there are so many creative people out there still creating mods and WADs for this beautiful game, there's always going to be something new, so as far as I'm concerned the nostalgia is more notional than actual. I never played PSX Doom until a couple of years ago, but playing it now, I can understand why some people might have a soft spot for it.

No, Doom never felt nostalgic to me, however i felt very nostalgic towards the shareware episode, Knee Deep in the Dead. I used to play the shit out of that episode when i was a kid, then when i got to experience the full game, it never felt as nostalgic and awesome as the first episode, even when i was still a kid at the time though.

As other people had said, Doom itself is an alltime classic with an endless supply of content that's still being pumped out by a still thriving comunity, it's very hard to feel nostalgia towards something like that.

It hadn't felt truly "nostalgic" for a long time, probably because I have played so many custom WADs and replayed the original maps so often they have a worn familiarity.

But, that changed recently. I had a strong feeling of "original Doom" nostalgia playing Doom E1 in Virtual Reality using the GZ3Doom mod. I'm not sure why, but being visually immersed in the original environment felt exactly like it did long ago.

I get a sense of nostalgia more when playing PSX Doom or Doom 64, as those two games were my first experiences with Doom in the 90s. It was only 2-3 years later when I got into PC gaming and Doom on PC but it feels a lot longer, like at least 10 years later somehow.

I think Doom is one of the few games that can still be played today and enjoyed just as much as when it was first released, maybe even more so, due to custom WADs that remove the limits of hardware of the 1990s.

A lot of games from yesteryear are okay to revisit for nostalgic reasons but I find a lot of them are just relics and quite a few are bettered remembered how you remember them, not necessarily the way they actually are. Sometimes you go back to a game you remember from your childhood and it's like, wow, this is not as good as I remember it to be. I never find myself feeling that way about Doom.

Doom is mostly nostalgic for me, but never grow old. I am definitely not the same guy i was when i sat in front of my tv, a copy of 32X Doom running, while got that feeling being sucked into my tv the moment i moved forward the first time. But i got flashbacks of memories like that from time to time. For example, when i played a bit of Doom on my newly bought Switch, when i heard the random pitch of monster sounds. A sound i haven't heard for ages, because i am using source ports, mostly (G)ZDoom since years, and never activated that in the options. So, Doom sometimes is pure nostalgia, and modern, whenever it shows again how sophisticated the game mechanic, the movement, the weapon balancing is in comparsion to so much other, even recent games.

Doom feels nostalgic to me to this day, but I'm also the kind of person that sometimes gets nostalgic feelings at seemingly random times, usually when I'm looking deep into the metaphysical background of the universe... But anyway, once in a while I go back and play through the IWADs, after enough time away. Whether it's Doom 1 or 2, or offshoot games like Heretic and Hexen, I always get that fuzzy feeling of meeting up with an old friend. Probably similar to how Quentin Tarantino feels about the movie Dazed and Confused. I do play the modern mods as well, but even then there's usually enough of an undercurrent of the original game that it feels more like a new coat of paint on an old reliable vehicle, than an entirely new whip. Even the most flashy mods have at least some old-school sensibility to them, which pales in comparison to the overproduced assault on the senses that contemporary titles usually offer. That's enough for me to feel comfortable in a way that I generally don't get from games that have billions of polygons on the screen and thirty HUD elements and an hour long tutorial before you actually get to do anything. I'm totally fine with being a crotchety 31 year old gamer who complains when the resolution is too high, and Doom always soothes that tired brain muscle in me.

When I use to go to these video game rental stores back in the 90s (they had movies here too for rent) with my dad I would see this game alongside with the others, offcourse the ones I really wanted where ALWAYS gone.  I would either get this game which was RED or this other game which was black (killer instinct) why where the cartridges colored for these games?

I think I only got DOOM rented for snes once or twice and all it did was made me run in the backyard and wait untill I was brave enough to get past the title screen.  This is my nostalgia moment, not only that but they don't have these places here anymore where you can rent video games/movies anymore.

Blockbuster, hollywood video, payless video.. DOOM makes me think of the good ol days going out with my dad to rent games at these places and returning them again and renting them. 

Nostalgic? definitely not. As I have said elsewhere, I got Doom as the original shareware on a magazine (PC Zone probably) and was hooked pretty much instantly. I always liked the enhanced engines as I have always liked the higher resolutions etc. that they provide. I probably used Doom95 more than the original exe and when I discovered ZDoom, I pretty much used that exclusively and still use GZDoom now. And I have to admit  that Brutal certainly invigorated my interest when I discovered that controversial little mod...

Also, because I was always aware of the modding possibilities (though never really made anything back then) I have seen my Doom journey as a kind of evolution of both the engine used and the ever expanding library of custom WADs.

So specifically addressing this question - it's definitely more modern, in no small part as a result of all the amazing work the Doom community as a whole has put in over the years. My interest in playing Doom has been fuelled by this enormously and it has always been part of my life. 

It was nostalgic, but now I play because the game is good and definitely because of the newer mapsets which are a big step-up from early-2000 stuff, although the first Scythe probably was the reason why I joined the community

The original Doom series will always keep that nostalgic feel to me no matter how many wads with modern contents appear. There are too many key moments attached to its era. I don't know what I'd say if I hadn't played it 25 years ago. It could be much more different if I played it the very first time today. But whatever it is,- I'd never wanted to change THAT experience, that's for sure. 

I feel nostalgic only playing the original doom and doom2, and also with some of the oldest wads like smiley head's safari because I played those when they came out but besides that I feel doom like a very present and ongoing game because of the new mapsets and how they evolve.

There is a learning history in the community about how a map can be made /optimized and a rich inventory of gameplay techniques and set ups, I'm playing Akeldama and it feels very 2020 to me, I think doom is something that surpases its age.

    Well, I did not play it as a kid but I remember being so immersed when playing it for the first time 4 years ago. It definitely lost that magic of the first couple of playtroughs. Enemies reduced to mere mechanics and the ever-increasing repertoir of predictable tropes can kind of make even the best of high quality WADs predictable (NOT EASY, mind you!). I cherish those WADs that surprise me with new twists or takes, rarer these days.

I'm more nostalgic towards GBA Doom II considering it was my first true Doom experience

Doom is just a constant thing in my life. I haven't stopped playing for well over 20+ years, and don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

I can still feel nostalgia towards some 90's and early/mid 00's era pwads I haven't played in a while. But Doom as a whole isn't a case of Nostalgia for me.

I can't really say doom makes me feel nostalgic for my *own* past, since I only started playing the game back in 2015. So I can't really feel the same way towards it as the people here who experienced it when it was new, running it on their blazing fast ms-dos or win95 era computers.

However, even though I mostly play modern megawads with some light graphics mods, doom kinda does feel like a time machine of sorts. It's still got the same essence and charm, just with a modern twist, with all these complex maps, more experimental music and whatnot. In a way, I like thinking of it as retrowave: bringing the past's style into the present, but playing around with it as well.

Doom is neither nostalgic nor modern, but one of those rare pieces of culture that transcends its initial circumstances and becomes timeless, a classic in the truest sense of the word.