How you discovered the Doom series? / Your first time playing Doom?

Playing it through a Nintendo DS homebrew port early last year at <20FPS.

Peak Dooming right there.

11 hours ago, Senor Cacodemon said:

Is it on a good'ol dos computer in 93,

It was more like run c:\doom2 if I'm recalling it right. And on Windows ME too.

Playing Doom II on my Uncle's PC back in 1995. It hadn't been long before that I had been playing Blake Stone. Even that game blew my mind as I was like, 6 at the time. The jump then to Doom? Holy crap!

The earliest Doom experience I can remember was my Dad telling me stories when I was younger about how he modded Doom 3 to make zombies respawn if you didn't gib their corpses, and how he scared the crap out of my uncle by not telling him about it so when they played he got jump scared by a zombie coming up behind him.

Then, a few years ago, my dad and I were in a hotel room on vacation, and he booted up Doom 2016 on his laptop to show it to me, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I remember telling him that I wanted to play it, and he told me that he wouldn't allow me to play it unless I played the rest of the games in order, because he wanted me to experience the games that he enjoyed from back in the day (for reference, my dad was born in 1962 and was kind of a computer geek).

Finally, around mid to late 2019, my dad gifted me Doom 3: BFG Edition on Steam, and I played through Doom, Doom 2, Doom 3 and Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil. Then, for Hanukkah that year, he gifted me Doom 2016 and preordered me the deluxe edition of Doom Eternal. I played through Doom 2016, and enjoyed it immensely. Then when Doom Eternal came out I played through it, and it quickly became my favorite game of all time. I was extremely hyped for The Ancient Gods Part 1 and The Ancient Gods Part 2, and also enjoyed those. For my 19th birthday (summer 2021) my dad gifted me Final Doom, because I had realized I had missed it somehow, and had added it to my Steam wish list.

Not only have the Doom games given me many hours of fun, but also sparked lots of enjoyable conversations with my dad. When I played through Doom and Doom 2 for the first time, I remember every time I would encounter a new enemy or pick up a gun for the first time, I would run into the other room to tell my dad about it, and we would just talk about the games for a while before I would go back to my computer to continue playing. And when I played Doom Eternal for the first time I would tell my dad (who hadn't played Doom Eternal yet) about the lore I was discovering, and we would talk and speculate about things in the "Doomverse".

I have to say, I'm glad my dad made me play the games in order, because finding out that the Doom Slayer is the same person as Doomguy from the classic games wouldn't have had the same impact, and I wouldn't have appreciated the more recent games as much if I hadn't played the classics. I also probably would have never bothered to go back and play the classics if my dad hadn't forced me to, and then I would have missed out on the incredible modding and mapping community that has grown and thrived over the past ~30 years.

I know that was a little more that just my first experience with Doom, but I got excited about sharing my experience and went a little overboard.

The time was April 1997. Basically, it was at the house of a friend who was kind of rich in a rather poor area. I can't remember if I bummed the shareware disc off of him or what, or what initially hooked me, but I do know the pick-up-and-play feel got me to play through the shareware episode, though it was on ITYTD. Despite being obviously uglier than Turok, it was just more visually vibrant. Thank god Sandy never made the sharware episode ;P)

I first played doom in December 1993. Was hooked from the first go. 
 

In June 1995 I had shareware doom V1.666 on my first computer. August 1995 had doom on my Sega 32x, Cool game. In September I had the ultimate Doom & Doom2. At Christmas 1996 I had Final Doom. In August 2011 played Doom & Doom2 on my Nintendo DS. 
 

Doom, Doom2 & Final Doom rule. @Doomlover77

Apparently, (according to my mother) when I was a little baby I used to find Doom 'calming'. My mom would bring me down to my dad's office in the basement - and he would sit me in my little 'rocking baby chair' thing - and he would just play Doom1/2 + Wolf3D, w/ me watching - he's still a big id fan, plays a lot of Brutal Doom on the easiest difficulty...

I obviously have no memory of this, being an infant, but yeah apparently Doom used to calm me down when I was upset as an infant/toddler. Still has a similar effect, to a certain extent, haha

First time I actually 'played' the game was either in 2000/2001, when I was 5/6...

So yeah, very first 'experience' would have been back in 1995, but I wouldn't play until I was barely in grade 2.

I've been horribly addicted ever since.

Played it on our brand new Pentium 75 mhz with 8 MB of ram in like 1993? I just remember my uncle brought it over on like 20 diskettes 

It scared the shit out of me as an 8 year old, I had to play with IDDQD on. It felt like I was seeing stuff I shouldn't have been seeing, like the flesh walls moving and the demon faces littered all over.

It all started when I first played the SNES DOOM on a SNES Emulator (Yes, I'm emulating Nintendo games) at the summer of 2019. Later, I decided around October or November to move on to the DOS DOOM and this is when I first beated the game. Good memories

I started to play in '93-94 with my 386, 2MB of RAM in low def. & PC speakers in college. I made it through the game a couple of times before getting Doom2 when I upgraded my PC with a 486 motherboard & 8MB of RAM...DoomEd was a great shareware even if I lost track of the game when the computer burnt out...

I already told the story about E2M4, so I'll tell my first experience with Doom 2.

I remember about one year and three months ago, when my only means of playing Doom still was the old shitty Unity port, as I got to Map 18 (The Courtyard). I remember being stunned by the atmosphere by that map, it was magical and actually surreal when monsters infight and you hear Waiting for Romero to Play in the background.

I would pay to experience that again, I know that sounds silly but I loved those 25 or so minutes of me strolling through Map 18's quiet, yet so filled with life and eerieness maze and the courtyard. Mr. Petersen really knocked that one out of the park with this map!

Like two years ago on dos box

The enemy sounds spooked me whenever I hear them and I was just a kid back then

Back in 2018 I decided I wanted to play half-life 1.

Since I wasn't able to get it at the time, my dad gave me his copy of doom and I played the first episode through dosbox. Making it my first singleplayer FPS. (Unless you count this one doom fangame I found on gamejolt.) I then switched to gzdoom for the other 2 episodes. A few months later I played the original release of doom 2 with infinite ammo because I found it too hard. I later beat them on UV about a year later. I later played doom 3, doom 64, and a few months ago doom 2016. I'm hoping to play eternal soon.

I think my first time playing Doom was around 2011 (I was 9 during that year), so yea, I'm kind of new here.

I played it through a Flash game on a CoolMathGames-esque website. It was called the "Doom Triple Pack", which was a port of the shareware versions of Doom, Heretic and Hexen into Adobe Flash. I barely made it far into the levels though; I think I gave up at E1M4, I think? I never got through E1M1 in Heretic, nor MAP01 in Hexen, however. I remember getting scared at E1M3's blue keycard trap, heh.

Born in 1994, to provide a little bit of context. My earliest Doom memories are being like 4-5 years old and sitting on my grandpa's lap as he played Doom II, he would control movement and I would hit shoot (keyboard only, so basically I just hit the CTRL key).

Later on when I was a bit older my family discovered community made wads and downloaded Cleimos II for me to play, so that was the first PWAD I ever played and I loved it. The family also downloaded a Hellraiser total conversion at some point that I remember playing a bit, but much more vaguely.

Hey Everybody, I'm a major fan of the entire Doom series. From Doom 1 to Doom Eternal, and I just wanted to know how you first started playing Doom. I'm 27, born 1995, so I didn't get a chance to be part of the first generation to play Doom. But when I got my Xbox 360 in 2007 I downloaded Doom 1 and Doom 2, the original ports by Nerve Software, and I immediately fell in love with it. I had already played and excelled at Duke Nukem 3D, so Doom was very familiar to me. I soon installed it on my PC at 13 and downloaded ZDoom/ZDaemon. I also downloaded Heretic in it's expanded form, along with Hexen and it's expansion, and Strife.

On both the Xbox 360 and PC I became amazing at Doom and dominated in Deathmatch. (And the other multiplayer modes in ZDaemon.) Then at 19 I took a break from Doom and video games. I'm just returning now, and I'm really rusty but still competent. I've downloaded ZDaemon, Zandronum, and Odamex. Although, I'm not willing to play multiplayer yet as I still need to practice again.

I'm also a fan of other old-school first-person shooters, like Wolfenstein 3D and it's expansion prequel, Spear Of Destiny. Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood 1 and 2, the entire Quake series, and Unreal Tournament. (The original from 1999.)

So tell me, how were you first introducted to the Doom series, particularly, Doom 1 and Doom II.

My first experience with doom was in a flash game website, where you could play shareware doom (around 2006)  and that was all until i bumped into Hutz Fandango on Youtube a year or two ago with the video "so you want to play some doom?" and was shocked to see what the mods have done to a game from ´93 so i got into more into it. I think the youtube scene alongside Doomworld are creating an enviroment to the community to thrive, and welcoming to new players to the series which is great

Back in the early-mid '90s I was around 9 or 10, and despite being otherwise video-game-less (at least on the console front) my dad bought a PC running IBM DOS, ostensibly for "work" purposes. Like many in a similar position at that time I lived off the shareware scene and most of the games I owned were the first episodes of things. I had multiple friends at school who also had PCs, so we'd be constantly giving each other games, and at some point (although I don't remember specifically when - I would guess some time in 1994) I got the Doom shareware and played the hell out of it. I used to sit around imagining how episodes 2 and 3 looked, and what the plasma rifle and BFG were like, but there was no way my parents would have bought me the full game. Eventually a friend of mine acquired some copied disks of Doom v1.666, and lent them to me. I played that pirated version for a good many years until I eventually acquired that "Depths of Doom Trilogy" boxed set.

So yes, shamefully (like a lot of others) I pirated the game back in the day, but I was a kid with no money and no other chance of playing the full game. Since then I've bought and re-bought Doom about seven times in various guises, so I don't feel too bad about it in retrospect.

Bought Quake on release day, then got curious what else these id guys had made.

I don't actually remember. It was sometime in the mid to late 90s, and I know I got into it after the Descent games, although I do remember how I first got into those. I was a kid and my dad was helping me browse the internet in order to find a game to play (there were many downloadable demos of various games). I remember that Quake was an option but my dad didn't want me to play that because it was too violent, so we decided on Descent 2. We downloaded a demo consisting of the first 3 levels and I played the hell out of it. Eventually my parents bought me the full version of Descent 1 (on floppy disks). I remember wanting the full version of Descent 2 for a long time but not getting it until I got the "Infinite Abyss" expansion CD, with both the original game and the Vertigo expansion pack. Doom 1 and 2 came along sometime during these series of events. I also eventually played Quake, both the shareware episode 1 and the full game, although I never liked it as much as Doom (the color palette was duller, the weapons weren't as interesting, and I found it annoying how the zombies would keep getting back up after you killed them).

So during lockdown in 2020, I was kinda bored shitless and looked at the Nintendo eshop. I found Doom, and said "yeah, why not?" and bought it for a few bucks. I absolutely loved Doom and wanted more, and then got Doom 2 and also loved it as much as Doom. At the same time decino started to blow up with his analysis videos and then I was hooked. And now I'm here and still regularly play Doom and love it.

gba doom2 then I tried to see what doom one was then I found adobe flash doom (less levels then shareware) and eventually pirated it with prboom+ bought tnt and doom2 after a beating doom one 

So i played doom in vr because i could and then i said to myself, wow this is actaully pretty fun and now looks where thats got me

It was either at a Target, Sam’s Club, or Best Buy. I pointed to the Final Doom case and asked if my mom and dad if they could buy it and they said “sure”. They weren’t too happy to see how violent it was, and had the boxart done a better job hinting at that I might not have gotten it then. (They also were cool enough not to take it away, but they were more cautious about violent video games.)

What’s funny is I got into Hexen before anything else from an older brother of a friend of my sister’s.

I just knew about doom since it was one or those culturally important games id here about here and there.

Got more interest in it when i was browsing youtube and saw Decino's video about doom rng, i just like watching those mechanics and code videos about gamea. Im rather very poor so at the time i was only really playing games on snes or gba emulator and i saw that doom had a snes port and so i started from from there. Someone eventually uh gifted me doom 1 and 2 and the rest goes from there

I saw PC Doom in an independent video game shop not long after it came out, and thought it looked cool, so got my parents to buy it for me.

I've known about doom for a while and it always interested me, and when I saw some of Decino's and Karl Jobst's videos on it I eventually picked it up.

Thanks to GarretChan.

More then 20 years ago visiting a toy store during the evening after going to the zoo with my family that sunny day.