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HombreSal

Did you find Doom scary when it first came out?

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I could never see Doom as anything else than a ridiculous B movie-esque game (which is great mind you), especially when compared to much scarier horror games from now. I'm wondering however what did the oldest of the oldest here thought of it when it first came out.

 

 

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Of course I did, I am sure of many users in this forum found DooM scray too. When I played DooM for the first time, I was only 6 years old. The scariest part of DooM for me was E1M2's light flicker room which contains chainsaw secret. Most probably the reason is when we were just toddlers, we are not used to see those stuffs, also we have limited life experience and we mostly spend our time with our parents, so we can not describe those stuffs in video games. I still can't get the same taste from games as I used to get when I was younger. Now, I am jealous for my kids when they are playing video-games. They are having so much fun than me.

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To an extent I did find the first episode scary the first time I played it. But I was 7 or 8 years old. Or at least it caused anxiety and stress, because there really was nothing like it at the time. And it really feels like Romero went for the "Aliens" vibe with the first episode, so it was all about tension and build-up.

 

But then Doom 2 came out, and it seemed like they threw that out the window and just went balls to the wall and threw encounters at you non-stop. So it stopped being scary and it was more about the gameplay. I didn't get the full version of Doom until they released Ultimate Doom, and by that point I was pretty much accustomed to Doom. 

 

But yeah, the first time I played it, I was nervous as Hell. Now it seems funny and cartoonish, but in 1994 it really did live up to all the hype around it, simply because there was nothing like it at the time. I mean Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D were amazing, and Doom blew them out of the water.

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I played shareware Doom as a kid but remember it feeling more cool and intense than scary.  I do remember sleeping over at a friend's house and playing SNES Doom late at night--for some reason I think that made it scarier.  SNES Doom actually really frightened this nice, ancient dog my friend had.  Always made me feel bad for it!

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Inferno scared the shit out of me playing it at 6 years old. My dad would only let me play with -nomonsters but honestly I think the empty desolation of everything just made it worse. All those walls of flesh and blood and twitching corpses dangling to the strains of music I found very creepy...after I got to House of Pain it was too much, I shut it off and still had nightmares for days.  Even spaghetti with meatballs reminded me of dead Doomguy’s bloodied face and I couldn’t eat it.  I was a sensitive child

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When I first played it as a 6yrs old wee lad, yes, as until then I played NES games exclusively and it was a huge jump in visual fidelity.

 

Doom was also realistic for its time, so there's that too. But that being said, never dead serious, it had its elements but it was always corny and full of tongue-in-cheek humor.

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Back in the day, yes, pretty scary, specially the PSX version with its eerie environmental sounds. Nowadays (at least to me) it's not scary at all but it retained its incredible gameplay and i keep coming back to it because in all honesty no modern game of the type is as fun as ancient DOOM.

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I was playing it with my Cousin back than, but we weren't scared about that Game.
Was more Action, Puzzling and Discovering.
The Game doesn't seemed as serious to us.

On the other Hand, when we played Tomb Raider we got jump scared a lot by those damn Wolves.

The Game i was scared about to play and still has a really deep Atmosphere is Diablo 1.

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I honestly don't remember. I don't think so except that bit in E1M3 or 4 where you grab the blue key, the lights drop and some bad guys get released. Definitely made me jump a few times and still can though.

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Yeah, I was like 6, though.

First time I saw the Baron of Hell in E1M8 was scary as fuck lol

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Yep, was also like 6ish and Doom gave me nightmares.

 

I was so young that at first I didn't realise it was a pistol you were holding. I thought Doom was a third person game and the pistol was the helmet of a little dwarf character you were controlling, killing people with a magic attack.

 

It took a few minutes for the penny to drop and then it started scaring the shit outta me.

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8-year-old me didn't find it scary (apart from a couple of spots) but I did find it extremely immersive, and very intense, in a "I'm in a horror game - cool!!!" kind of way.

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Absolutely. Played Doom II on release, I was 10 years old for crying out loud. The satanic imagery was one thing (I liked heavy metal, even at 10 years old) but the dismembered but still twitching staked bodies and the like were - and still are - very gruesome to the psyche. Also the use of dark sectors worked and still works on people to set them on edge and make them feel like they're descending into a personal nightmare. 

Doom is very effective as 'scary game' but the offset with the pulpy Army-of-Darkness silliness is powerful in its own right to create a more complex milieu to that of say, most survival horror games. Doom is a power fantasy, but a very fragile one. Armorless, a single unnoticed sargeant can take you from one trip of superpowered zoomy space marine shotgunning everything with a grin on their face to quite another, that of 'I am going to die down here'. It happens in a fraction of a second, and the oscillation back and forth is central to the doom experience.

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I did.

Probably down to Aubry Hodges OST on the PSX port coupled with the fact I was 12.

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I was 14/15 when I first played, so I would not exactly say scary, but I definitely found the sound to be the creepiest part ESPECIALLY the icon of sin noises in Doom2. 

 

The backwards voice and the noise of the spawner were genuinely unsettling.

 

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I never found Doom scary even at 6 years old. I did get freaked out the first time I stumbled across an Ophidian in Heretic though...

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As a 9-year-old in the first half of 1994, absolutely. I didn't even dare to leave the first room of E1M1 until I had IDDQD on my side.

 

Today... I still find a lot of levels to be creepy, but then I don't think I've played the games in their entirety since the 90's, and I'm not sure if I ever finished them without cheating. To this day, Still haven't played Thy Flesh Consumed, but I'm slowly getting there as I've picked up the games on the Switch. (When I'm on my PC, I'm usually mapping rather than playing since I rekindled my DOOM interest.)

 

I guess I'm just the kind of person who gets nervous in general when it comes to games with creepy atmospheres. My imagination and immersion kick into overdrive in a way they just don't do with movies, and that makes it hard for me to play them. I still haven't played past the introductory part of Alien: Isolation.

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I didn't play it that early, but I did play it a couple of years after it came out. As a very young kid, it was pretty scary. Also it looked pretty realistic to me at that time.

 

The first encounter with a Demon in the E1M4 maze (easy difficulty) scared me shitless.

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When I was way younger, I had nightmares about the Icon of Sin - that shit scared me. I still get kinda creeped out by it today as an adult!

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the first version of doom i ever played was the adobe flash port, which didn't have music and iirc made you use keyboard aim, so believe me, doom is a lot scarier without the cheesy heavy metal music, being able to aim that well, or knowing anything specific about the game

 

or maybe i'm just a sissy

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There were loads of bits that scared me when I was younger. I used to wimp out of MAP30 because the music and scrolling face texture creeped me out too much. 

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started playing doom when i was 7 i think

i never found it scary hell at the time i didnt knew how to set up source ports and i ended up playing doom without music like many did and i still didnt found it scary

i always found the horror focus that doom 64 and 3 had a bit misguided

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I would have been 8 when Doom 1 came out and I was terrified of E1M4 where you go through those narrow dark corridors after the blue key. And revenants scared the shit out of me too when I was young. Well not so much as scared as very very tense. Running and screaming and ohnohomingrocketsfuuuuuck

Good times :D

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I didn't play Doom until around 2008 I believe with D3, game no longer scares me because I've 'seen it all already', but back then I remember getting startled by those squeaking babies and that spider with the upside down head that came from behind that monitor Lol.

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PSX Doom felt like a horror game more than anything else first time I played it. Granted I was very young as well, but the really eerie soundtrack, the actual fire-sky in Hell and the sound effects in general really did much. First time I faced the Cyberdemon is something I will never forget either. I didn't even strafe back then and it really became a cat-and-mouse game and his footsteps haunted me for a long time in a good way.

 

PC Doom with its Midi-Metal soundtrack and not as creepy sound effects felt a lot simpler, then again I was a lot older when I played it and was also more accustomed to horror in general.

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I've told this story a million times, but when i first played doom i was 6 years old. The installer for the doom95 shareware had the e2m6 music playing in the background along an animation of the spider mastermind walking (see here) which unsettled me deeply and made me afraid of the game before playing it. When i finally got to play it i was terrified right from the start and when i got to e1m2 and grabbed the green armor, my legs were shaking in fear so i just closed the game since i was too scared to keep going

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i unfortunately never got to play it when it came out, but i will say that when i first played it 10 or so years ago i found it very immersive and atmospheric for a game of its age

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I played it in '94 for the first time when I was in 5th grade.  It wasn't scary at all - it was badass.  It felt very much like a stoic science fiction story with demons added in.

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