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Brandon D. Lade

What were you doing 15 years ago?

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Not everyone, me included, was so anxious to get Doom on their hands immediately on that historic day 15 years ago, December 10, 1993, undoubtedly a day that would forever change the then rather young FPS world. However, over the years, I have heard stories of just how anxious some were to buy this eventual megahit. So, time to ask a question: Just how anxious were you to have Doom on your hand, and if you were, what were you doing in the hours leading up to and following it's release?

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My dad downloaded the demo when it first came out and showed it to me not long after. I was 5 at the time, so needless to say, the game scared me half to death and I was afraid to even look at it for quite a while. I don't know at what point exactly I started actually playing the game, but I remember getting Doom 2 as a Christmas present from my parents the next year. It wasn't until after the retail version of Ultimate Doom hit stores that I managed to get a full copy of the original Doom.

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My brother had brought the full version home a few months after release as a pirated copy on floppy disks. I didn't even know the game existed until that point.

Once I had found out about level design for Doom, I scrimped for a full copy of the game and bought it. Doom II, Heretic and Hexen eventually followed. :)

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Those look to be some good comments. Keep posting, and not to forget, now that Doom has made it to 15 without being forgotten, let's hope that the same can be said when it reaches 20 - for it would almost be a crime IMO to EVET forget the day that changed the gaming industry.

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I didn't actually know about it, or played it, until the year later. I'm not sure exactly what day, but it was probably summer or fall of 1994.

I was six years old when I played it, got it from a friend actually (copying over floppy disks, fun!). It was the shareware version, but boy it was fun.

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Fifteen years ago, my Dad was playing Doom Shareware. And I was sitting right behind him watching him play. I was eight years old and after my experience with Wolfenstein the year before, I was absolutely terrified to play. I would always be "backseat playing", shouting "Omg there's a monster!" or "wait go back i think i saw a secret!"

Needless to say, I think I pissed him off at times because there was usually nothing there. ^_^

I actually got to revisit this experience when he played Doom 3. This time I didn't point out stuff every time I "saw a secret".

Man, if only I knew how much influence this game would have on my life, I would have got started level editing earlier, and done something more with my Doom life. Now I have so little time to work on stuff.

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sgtcrispy said:

Probably playing Doom shareware on my 386 20mhz(?), 4MB ram, no sound card.

I can one-up you. I played the shareware on a 486 dx2 100mhz with 64mb ram and a genuine sb16. aww yeah.

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Looking at screenshots of Doom in a Gamepro magazine because I was too damn poor to afford a PC back in the day. I didn't get to play Doom until it was ported to the SNES..

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I was being 12 years old. I can't remember when I played Doom the first time, but it was on my friend's computer. It was one of the reasons why I started bugging my parents to buy a computer, which we got a couple of years later.

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I was an Amiga fanboy back then so Doom's release - if I'd heard about it - wouldn't have meant much to me until people started cranking out source ports.

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I was very busy having fun with my Commodore 64 computer (I just had the thing, nearly 10 years after its release, for my 15th birthday).

It wasn't until fall 1994 that I played DOOM over a school network (I clearly remember playing a map of episode 3, so obviously that wasn't the shareware version, but I forgot who brought it in).

I didn't have my own game, or started mapping, until DOOM 2 was released (because that was around the time that I had a PC - 486 DX4, 100MHz and 8MBs of RAM, woohoo). I played it without sound card, and I will be unable to forget those PC speaker sounds for the rest of my life.

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When Doom came out, I was still playing Wolf3D and lamenting that I only had a rusty old 286. Our next PC was a 486DX100 though, so I had my day.

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I wasn't hyped about it at all but that all changed when I played it at a friends house a few weeks after the release. After that I was hooked for life.

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My 16mhz (20 with the turbo button on!!) 386 computer simply couldn't handle it. It was too choppy to play. I watched helplessly as the world went DOOM and I was left out.

Sob.

A couple of years later I picked it up again on my 120mhz Pentium! BOOYAH.

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I first saw doom sometime in early 94, I was like, 15. It was running on a 33mhz laptop, if anyone remember laptops from those days they kinda sucked bigtime for games, especially ones with any kind of speed or graphical detail. My friend was playing e1m4. Needless to say I wasn't very impressed.

Later that year, around late spring my brother's best friend was having his highschool graduation party. I tagged along, I knew this guy and would play his Genesis sometimes so I figured why not.

I didn't know anyone at the party, so I asked to go downstairs and play with his rippin' 486 DX2. He was like 'sure, you wanna check out Doom?' Having played a lot of Wolf3d (which is what I wanted to play) I gave it a shot. Soon I was alone, in that dark basement room, with nothing but a shotgun and god-knows what chasing me around these amazing, expansive worlds. I was completely blown away. It would still be several months before my home got a computer that would touch the game, luckily my school friends had computers. Despite that, my teenage years were spent in pretty much total obsession.

Around early '95 my older sister bought herself a Pentium, and the rest is history. Doom2 had come out, I first played it at home on that machine, and she was nice enough to put up with my whining and monopolizing the computer. She even let me install my first Doom editor on it. Eventually I got a hold of that computer as a hand-me-down, and I was able to Doom myself into oblivion whenever I wanted.

So happy birthday Doom, I have no idea what kinda person I'd be without ya, and frankly I don't wanna know. :)

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I was certainly anxious to get it. I'd followed some of the adverts and teaser articles for it. I was still playing Wolf 3D at the time and this "Doom" seemed to be planned have so many things that just seemed impossible - different heights, non 90 degree walls, moving floors etc. The screenshots that I'd seen just looked to have so much more to them than the cartoony Wolfenstein.

However, I had no way to get it online back then so I had to wait for a magazine to stick it on a cover disk. Fortunately, that was very soon after the game was released and I still remember getting a call from one of my friends. I don't think he said much more than "I've got it" and I was round at his house almost before he'd hung up the 'phone. ;)

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I think I spent most of 1993 playing Wolf 3D, and although I had heard about Doom's upcoming release I didn't even play the shareware until early summer, 1994. (It was after 1.2 was released, but I'm thinking I somehow ended up with 1.1. I still have the disks somewhere but I have no idea if they're still readable.)

I remember a friend and I played it through to E1M8 but got hosed by the barons there. He checked one of the strategy guides at a bookstore but poor memory led him to think it was a couple of cyberdemons that we ran into. We didn't realize our mistake until Christmas, 1994, when I got Doom 2 as a gift. (I wouldn't get a full copy of Doom until I received Ultimate Doom a year later.)

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CODOR said:
I remember a friend and I played it through to E1M8 but got hosed by the barons there.


Dude. When I was little, I used to think the barons were really hard. I thought I was badass when I finally beat them, and I couldn't believe it at first when I heard that e2m8 had a much harder monster (THE CYBERDEMON). I also thought it was unfair that they didn't have a rocket launcher on e1m8 and you had to play through e1m7 first to get one - when I was little it was a lot easier for me to beat them with the rocket launcher than the chaingun or shotgun.

A few weeks ago, I relived feeling spooked when I recompiled ZDoom with 70 tics per second and skipped to e2m8. Not quite as spooked, but still.. my heartrate went up a lot when I fought that Cyberdemon that moves twice as quickly and fires rockets twice as often which travel twice as fast. But I beat it :D

Who else here played tried playing DOOM with twice the tickrate? I think it really makes you relive the experience over again. Something awesome to do to celebrate the anniversary 8-).

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I was 3 years old, eagerly anticipating Christmas. I started playing Doom when I was 9, about mid-December interestingly enough. My friend had an N64, we would steal Doom 64 from his older brother, turn off the lights and play it in the basement. This was '99. The pink demons scared me shitless and gave me nightmares.

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