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Spase

Doom disturbed me.

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I was around five years old when Doom came out so it has left an indelable mark on my psyche that I am only now starting to reconcile with. My brothers were old enough to play the game when it came out, so I would always sit by the computer and watch them play, and when they left and I got a chance to play I considered it to be a chance to access a Holy Grail of "Big Boy" experience that was titillating, exciting, and a bit disturbing. There was even a bit of guilt associated with playing it because if my Mom happened to walk by she would scold me for playing such a disgusting game. "You will get nightmares!" And I did. Not all at once, but every now and then I would have a nasty dream that somehow involved Doom. I remember specifically the ending of episode 3 frightening me so badly, that whenever I played any non-shareware episode I would frantically turn the game off before the text melted away revealing some ill-concieved horror. The ending of Heretic episode 3 instilled a similar reaction, and didn't help my condition concerning episode epilogues. Only recently, upon rediscovering Heretic did I look fully upon the horror that ended up being the Heresiarch, or did I wait a couple minutes after the text ended on episodes 4 and 5 only to discover there wasn't any epilogue picture at all for those episodes. A recurring nightmare involved a similar experience to the melting away of the text at the end of an episode. In the dream I would be playing Doom and was unable to turn off the game before the epilogue picture revealed itself. In the dream it would be some sort of demon skull with the words "Damn! That is ugly!!" underneath it, then I would wake up soaked in sweat.

Does anybody else have similar stories? Or has a thread like this already been made?

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Wolfenstein almost made my cry when I was 7. One look at the bloody deadened mugshot on the statusbar after dying, and I was running up the basement stairs.

But that didn't stop me from playing it.

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Whenever I think of playing Doom and Wolfenstein back in the early 90's, I wanna cry. Because life was so much funner back then with no real worries. But Doom never really scared me to the point of having nightmares, just provided some really tense moments and becoming glued to the computer.

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I had a similar experience -- older brothers who played Doom and occasionally playing myself. We only had the shareware, though, and while I played it when I was 6 or 7, I never even got close to the end until I was a couple years older. But yes, I did find it pretty terrifying, and that's probably I was so drawn to it. I remember specifically the music in E1M3 getting to me quite quickly, and that being the first level with the frighteningly fast Demons in it didn't help. The narrow maze-like part of E1M4 was the worst, though. The few times I had the courage to go in, there was something I found horrifying about the part when the walls started turning green, and I never made it further than that until I was older.

I don't know why now, but the Doomguy's eyes when he was invulnerable always made me cry. My brother actually put a card over the mugshot while he was playing once so he could play and use the iddqd cheat while I was watching.

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Nothing too bad for me. Doom 1 & 2 made me jump a lot when I was younger, but I found any dreams I had of it were boring.

RoneKyakone said:

The narrow maze-like part of E1M4 was the worst, though. The few times I had the courage to go in, there was something I found horrifying about the part when the walls started turning green, and I never made it further than that until I was older.

Nowadays, I always skip that part, both for speedrunning reasons, and because I'm not a big fan of that, or most super narrow corridors.

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I don't remember having any Doom related dreams or nightmares, but in Playstation Doom, the Pain Elemental on E1M1 scared the heck out of me.

I first played Doom at age 11 so nothing really gave me nightmares or anything.

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I started playing doom when I was a 3 or 4 year old at my uncle's house lol :P but i never had nightmares, just dreams which twisted Doom into a surreal world (like dreams do to every familiar setting :P) or dreams where I was the protagonist, but they felt like action movies, not horror movies and gave me adrenaline rushes (if thats possible in a dream state).. so in short I enjoyed them, they were like VR doom :P

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Me and my brother went out of our way to see as much gore and violence as possible when a friend had Doom and we went around his to play it (all we had was a megadrive). We usually played with all the cheats on and BFG'd everybody to watch them splatter and come apart. Later on Doom 2 we where mucking about with the cheats and my friend said that "The last level is 30", so being little fucking shits like kids are, we immidiatley tried to warp to level 31, and where rather confused at the result, we forgot to re-apply the invincibility cheat but went around BFG'ing everybody. We then tried level 32, and walked around without any cheats at all, as the level appeared to be empty, until i walked to the door at the end anyway!, then i went into a blind panic and reached for key 7, but was dead before i realised i had forgotten to put the cheats in. Much later we had PSX Doom and my brother used to scream in a really high pitched voice while watching me play and i came up against anything from a hellknight upwards. Can't say we where ever properly scared by doom though... until certian Pwads later on, and Doom 3 of course

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leileilol said:

my blood pressure went nuts when i neared girly areas in duke


My Dad bought me all of these games when I was young, and I remember getting really embarrassed and red-faced when I came upon the girly section in E1M2 with my Dad watching over my shoulder. I would make sure that noone was in the house before playing that map...

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leileilol said:

my blood pressure went nuts when i neared girly areas in duke


I had the N64 version before the PC and guess what I wasn't expecting when I got it the following year for pc.

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Ditto to E1M4's maze. And I used to hate the end of E1M5 because of the creepy lighting effects (It took me a while to discover the alternate entrance and the nearby light-amp goggles). Doom 2 didn't do much for me, although Map 27's "corpse room" is kind of chilling.

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I did find "rabbit-on-a-pike" a bit disturbing and this was when I was 14, but it was because I had a compilation CD w/ shareware Doom and was browsing a screenshots folder when it came up. Completely out of the blue and it kinda spoiled the Episode 3 ending when I got the full version.

When I entered E2M8 for the first time, I knew I was gonna face the Cyberdemon because of the Doom FAQ that was on the compilation CD. I knew he fired rockets and had the highest health of all the hellspawn. What I didn't expect to see were four eviscerated Barons hanging by the horns on their heads. That rather unnerved me to the point where I just skipped to Episode 3.

I just had a romp through Episode 2 last night and noticed one wall texture that made me feel uneasy. It's the one where there's a green demon face with red eyes and blunt-looking horns that curved downward. Something about making eye contact with it doesn't sit right with me, probably because it keeps staring at me without blinking.

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RoneKyakone said:

The Doomguy's eyes when he was invulnerable always made me cry.


Me too! It didn't come to that, but I did always find it unnerving if I stared at it too long. Maybe it is because it doesn't move?

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EarthQuake said:

Wolfenstein almost made my cry when I was 7. One look at the bloody deadened mugshot on the statusbar after dying, and I was running up the basement stairs.


That is priceless.

I mentioned how Doom freaked me out in the Why Are You Still Playing Doom? thread; from age five to twelve I had recurring nightmares about hard-to-describe monsters chasing me around twisted landscapes strikingly similar to Doom's, and they left more than a little impression on me. Then, just when I'd gotten over this long string of night terrors, along comes this video game that hands me a shotgun and pitches me right back into them.

It was pretty neat.

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Eternal Doom disturbed me a little bit. :p It was the first wad I played with really good design and all the editing hacks and stuff together made for a very strange and bizarre experience... But what disturbed me the most were the HUD face in Eternal Doom, after you died. :p

While doom had a gripping and dense atmosphere, it never really disturbed me. It was just wonderful. :)

Someone mentioned Doom3, and I must say that the heavy and dense atmosphere in it made it feel like it was harder to breathe as I were playing it. Of course I made the most out of it, making sure that all lights were out and all that shit. But it took me quite a while to finish Doom3 cause I would get so exhausted by playing it that I had to stop after a little bit each time.

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leileilol said:

my blood pressure went nuts when i neared girly areas in duke


Heh oh duke.... how I remember those prepubescent days

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One thing I found very disturbing was when Doom II came out (I was 7) I would always cheat and stuff back then, so I went to MAP30 to see the boss. [After playing for weeks-months] I had got the gist of the level and would try to see how many enemies I could kill in god mode.
When I died, I was shocked because I didn't understand the concept (of telefragging, this time by the spawn cubes) and I seriously thought the Icon was disturbing, because I had the feeling that it was out to get me or something.
I mean, it didn't help that it had a freakish smile, spoke in demonic gibberish, and had a guy's head on a stick behind it. Not to mention the most evil music ever.

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DeumReaper said:

I had the feeling that it was out to get me or something.


Well, it is... hence the constant spawning of demons that try to kill you...

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When I was six and had Doom one... let me tell you a very disturbing dream I had with a doomish element.

I thought I woke up in the middle of the night, so I got out of bed and was walking towards the upstairs bathroom, everthing was pitch black, I dont know why I didnt trun on the lights. I realize I am walking the wrong direction in the hall way so I turn around and..Holy Shit! I see that danm bunny head from episode three with its expressionless, bloody, dead bunny face. except this time instead of being on a pike, it is floating in mid-air with a severed bunny foot beneath it on the floor, than it started moving toward me , I heard a shrill scream (It wasn't my own like I thought it should be), felt my limbs being torn open, and woke up.

Scared the living shit out of me, for a long time after that I skipped the end of episode 3.

Heh, funny times.

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lupinx-Kassman said:

this time instead of being on a pike, it is floating in mid-air


I don't think it was on a pike, it looks more like Doomguy's arm. Of course this is hindsight after having seen the episode 4 ending which shows Doomguy with daisy's head in his hand, so... I don't know. Just a thought.

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Spase said:

I don't think it was on a pike, it looks more like Doomguy's arm. Of course this is hindsight after having seen the episode 4 ending which shows Doomguy with daisy's head in his hand, so... I don't know. Just a thought.

To me it looks like a tree stump, like those in episode 3 and beyond. Also, due to his bad looks, I thought the fatso after episode 4 is an evil ordinary Former Sergeant who kidnapped/collected your bunny as a trophy, to spite you.

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I don't know how I first found Doom, but I'm sure I played it at a relatively early age. I only had access to the shareware episode, though, and I always went through it with iddqd and idkfa. I felt pretty safe that way, so I don't remember feeling particularly scared of anything. Though I know that the end of the first episode confused me terribly.

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remembert said:

Though I know that the end of the first episode confused me terribly.

Same for that and for episode 3.
Episode 1 because I thought I should've won the blackout battle, to unlock a proper episode ending.
Episode 3 because the spiderdemon died too easily and the endpic showed a strange building on fire and a dead rabbit. I thought the rabbit had been trapped into spider's body and I killed it accidentally. I thought the strange building was the same as the seclusion in the center with blue armor and plasma gun, and I had to protect it somehow, by flinging a switch or airing it by opening the doors. Even now, no clue.

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printz said:

Even now, no clue.


That building on fire was supposed to be a city back on Earth ravaged by the armies of Hell. The rabbit was explained in the episode 4 ending as being Doomguy's pet rabbit Daisy, who was decapitated by the demons.

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printz said:

To me it looks like a tree stump, like those in episode 3 and beyond. Also, due to his bad looks, I thought the fatso after episode 4 is an evil ordinary Former Sergeant who kidnapped/collected your bunny as a trophy, to spite you.


I just watched it again and I changed my mind. It does look more like a tree, or stick.

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Doom on PS1 scared the crap out of me when I was young, the soundtrack and constant groans of the monsters did it for me.

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I thought Doom64 was pretty scary, since the monsters looked darker and more grim compared to the other versions.

Plus the environment was difficult to navigate if the brightness was low, because all the rooms were just so dark!

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