Anticipation For DooM (nostalgia)

I remember reading this over 10 years ago when people were in anticipation for the original DooM. I figured it would be fitting to bring it back for others to see (who may have never seen it), as it's a bit fitting in light of the DooM 3 anticipation.

DooM Insanity. It features some classics like "top 10 things to do while waiting for DooM" and the original "Twas the night before DooM." Classic stuff!

-Jomero

I was introduced to DOOM somewhere around five years ago... so I guess this goes back too far for me.

Heh, I never thought about that before now. Wow. :)

While we (me, my brother, and my dad) were still happily cheating through the 6 episodes of Wolfenstein 3D, Dad decided to log on to his favorite BBS and search the newstuff directory (no, I can't remember what BBS it was). He saw a file called DOOMPIX, and it was labelled "Doom: Evil Unleashed, 10 pre-release screenshots from the makers of Wolfenstein 3D". Soon enough we were staring at these screenshots.

At first I was thinking, WOW! Wolfenstein with better graphics! Old-style weapons! (The screenshots only showed a "machine gun" and a "chaingun".) A sweet HUD! (Must have been from Alpha 0.2, with the helmet-HUD.) I was a bit confused - the HUDs were different in every screenshot, it seemed.

Needless to say, I was hyped. A month after this, Computer Gaming World ran a preview article on this "Doom". They were playing on the press-release beta. I thought the shotgun graphics kicked butt.

And soon after that, Shareware 0.99 was released to the world, and Dad played it day and night.

doom just happened to leap out of a CD book of shareware games and grab my nuts. last week of december 1993

no really, up until that point we had been useing a tandy 1000TX. i believe doom, along with keen. came with the dell we had bought

Heh, time for some SPISPOPD.

good times...

Oh no, I can't access the file. Someone please send it to me at grimmssac@yahoo.com !! I gotta play this!

Well, I didn't even know about Doom until we had the shareware version of Doom,then later on when Doom was avaliable in stores he had come to our house with 6 disks of Doom. My dad decided as a little kid I wouldn't get addicted or anything and let me play E2m1 on Hurt me plenty but I said I want to play on nightmare. He said fine and i died 5 seconds later so i went down to ultra violence. Soon enough they dropped there jaws by the way i was playing. Good times....good times.

I didnt experience any anticipation since I didnt own a PC at the time. I'd read about it in magazines but I had no idea what a "first person shooter" was. To be frank, I didnt think the screenshots looked that great compared to screenshots of console games at the time. Then I finally played it at a friends house on his computer sometime in early 1994.

Man, I still remember how blown away I was. The incredible sounds, the massive environments. Heh, memories.

Heh, i remember reading that textfile a long ass time ago.

Anyway, my dad had gotten Wolfenstein and it was this big thing for my family and my friend's family. We played it all the tiem and compared scores. I remember thinking "man, if they do a sequel to this, they should put in stairs and multiple levels and stuff. Oh, and more monster type things!"

Then one day my dad downloaded the Doom shareware and I was like O_O. They fuckign read my mind, I swear. Anyway yeah, I remember watchign my dad play through all of Doom then later on, Doom 2.

I remember going to a local software store and they let me play the newly released DooM II on their brand spanking new and uber fast Pentium 66! It was a smooth as silk on these new processors called Pentiums.

They didn't mind me playing in front of all the guests on their demo PC because A: I didn't suck. And B: It intrigued most of the guests. Anyone who didn't know what DooM was stopped, their jaw dropped, and just watched and admired.

One guy said, "It's too bad I don't have a cd-rom." I said, "This isn't a CD-rom game." He was in total shock. "REALLY?!?!" Then I told him he could get the shareware version of DooM 1 up at the counter for like 5 bucks.

Yeah, I converted a lot of people to DooM back in those days. :-) And I owe it all to being selfish and wanting to find ways of playing DooM on fast computers! Heh.

-Jomero

Mmm, around the time Doom came out I was given a gaming magazine that had an article on Doom with tips on how to defeat the creatures and such... I read over the article a lot and tried to imagine what the game would be like, I thought it sounded really cool... I had a lot of wrong ideas too, such as:

- Spectres being like imps, but near invisible and without fireballs
- Cacodemons being really tough (like a Baron really is)
- 8 Barons in Phobos Anomaly
- Cyberdemon lives in a huge maze full of monsters, with a "safe room" where you can hide from it (The article mentioned somewhere you could hide where it couldn't hit you, but you could hit it)
- Spiderdemon has lots of enemies along with it also

It was a long time after that before I got the shareware version, and still longer before I got the full version.

Sometimes I wish I could read that article again. The only identifying thing I recall about it was that it called the Cyberdemon "Cyberdemon (Greater Baron of Hell)".

I remember a magazine review of Doom1 that came out in Nov 1993. I got excited over it, but how they'd managed to publish early was they'd taken the public release beta, reviewed it, and pretended it was the full game. So the review text's talking some nonsense about there being three levels in the 'Shareware version', which you could upgrade to nine (!) by registering. And of course no mention is ever made of the sound, because the beta didn't have any.

Naturally, when all the real computer magazines published their reviews a month later, the guys at this computer magazine looked like a bunch of retards. I'm pretty sure the mag folded sometime in the next year...