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Van Daemon

\\ Your First Doom Experience //

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We all got into DOOM in a different way and it's always nice to know them all. Thanks to that we all are here so...
Share your first experience, WHEN and HOW ! 

 

 

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my earliest memory of doom is my dad setting it up and showing me how to play back when i was just old enough to grasp the controls, been playing it ever since

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SNES Doom, around the age of 10, so circa 1995. It couldn't have been all that long after the port came out. (Doom Wiki says September 1, 1995, so it actually must've been really damn new.)

 

I was at a flea market with my dad, and had some money given to me by my mom to buy stuff if I felt it was interesting. That flea market is now gone - the building was absolutely infested with vermin. (Ask any Buffalonian around at least the age of 30 about the "Super Flea" and they'll know exactly what you are talking about.)

 

Anyway, a guy there was selling the SNES version of Doom, new in-box, shrinkwrapped and all, for $30. I had $22; dad gave me $5 more. He agreed to $27, and so my first FPS of my own was mine. And so my first Doom experience was arguably one of the worst ways to play the game, but this was as the Playstation was *JUST* coming out (and so too expensive, as my family was quite poor); while I was a Sega kid through-and-through I had no 32X, either. A couple years later, though, I did get a PlayStation - and with it, a copy of PSX Doom, going from one of the worst contemporary console ports to the absolute best.

 

Yours truly actually got up to Pandemonium on the SNES version of the game as a kid before meeting his match, which was actually only four maps from the end (five if you count Warrens), thanks to a few cuts. (Namely: E1M6, E2M2, E2M5, E2M7, and E3M5 - the secret exit in E2M5 was moved to E2M2, which was E2M3 in PC Doom.) This was made even harder by this version having a difficulty system - if you played on I'm Too Young To Die, it'd dump you right after completing Phobos Anomaly, but if you played on Hey, Not Too Rough you could also do The Shores of Hell. But you could only start on The Shores of Hell and progress to Inferno if you played on at least Hurt Me Plenty - and you could only START on Inferno on Ultra-Violence or Nightmare!. (Nightmare on SNES Doom is basically UV -fast on PC.) Try toughening up your Doom skills on a platform with clunky framerate *AND* no ability to properly circle-strafe due to one-sided monsters!

 

Ironically enough years later I learned this crappy version actually had geometry more comparable to the PC version compared to the trimmed Jaguar mapset geometry, and until the perfect XBox ports, it was the only port to actually include Slough of Despair.

 

Also thanks to my experience with this version, I've always had my automap rotate around the player when playing in source ports if they've got the option - something that was unique to the SNES port (aside from, I believe, Doom 64).

 

By the way, the manual for the SNES version was actually really fucking good. It deserves more creative credit than the PC version, that's for sure! Albeit it does spoil the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind, so I was actually deprived of that little surprise. Still got wasted by the Cyberdemon my first time, and of course, never fought the Spider Mastermind until PSX Doom.

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It's 2008. I'm a sophomore in high school. I'm in my computer class and the person next to me asked for my help installing Doom onto the school computer. I managed to get it onto 99% of all computers in the school, become a legendary hero, and fell in love with this wonderful game.

Edited by LadyVader1138

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May 1995: My aunt brought my parents and me along to CompUSA to purchase our first computer. The first thing that caught my eye was a cardboard display of a Cyberdemon with copies of Doom II nestled within. While my parents haggled with my aunt over what to buy, I futzed around with the store computers, ineptly playing Doom II and another FPS on Mac (Marathon). As I left the store, I looked back at the Doom II display and wondered if I'll ever get that game.

 

December 1995: I got bored with the shareware Descent that came with the computer (Quadruple-fuck you, yellow cyclopean bastard and your entourage of the toughest bots at that point!). I visited some cousins in SoCal and during a visit to a nearby mall, I bought a copy of the Doom Companion CD from a kiosk for 10 bucks (was that even legal given all of the content can be downloaded for free online? I didn't have internet til much later.) As soon as I got home, I installed the shareware Doom and played it til 2 AM. I found the cheat codes in the Doom FAQ and spent the next day and night getting enemies to infight, with me as the unkillable ghostly spectator.

 

December 1997: During a stayover at my aunt's place, I saw a lone copy of Ultimate Doom in a Babbage's at the mall. I bought it as a present for myself. I got slightly traumatized by E3's ending. I got over it by E4's ending.

 

April 2001: Counter-Strike kept crashing for no apparent reason on my POS WinMe computer, and I'm itching to get my FPS fix. I remembered Doom but not where I put the CD. I downloaded t3h 1337 w@r3z from a French abandonware site, but became disappointed that it didn't work on WinME. I looked for a way around this when I learned about Skulltag and downloaded that. Since Skulltag was hosted on Doomworld, I checked that out and signed up.

 

Early 2003: I started learning more about computer parts and went to that CompUSA to buy some. I happened to spy a jewel case of Doom II and bought it to repent for my earlier sin.

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The game was out but nobody was talking about it in elementary school (around 1995 i think) they where busy talking about mortal kombat and even most of them dressed up as somebody in mortal kombat for halloween.

 

I wasnt talking about the game either, i was into mortal kombat, super mario...... golden eye.

 

I remember going to this video game store to rent a game... i kept calling them to see if they had MORTAL KOMBAT 3 for rent and they told me it was out... over and over, the same with MORTAL KOMBAT II

 

So i went with my dad to that place & scanned around the snes games.... and this one stood out, it was RED!  DOOM FOR SNES!

 

I had played killer instinct and the cartridge was black, this "RED" one really stood out on the shelf!

 

As soon as i powered up the game though on my SNES.... i couldn't play it, it was to scary.

 

I remember going in & out in the backyard at night trying to gain some bravery, i must of gone out somany times untill it got to late to even press a button on the controller.

 

I remember I did play it once the next day in the morning... i was brave.   Played the first level got pwned.

 

 

What scared me was the way the monsters move in the SNES version, they only look straight... they never turn and move really strange.

 

And I just turned it off..... waited so bad untill the day i can return it, and when i returned it I felt much better :)

 

Years later I got the N64 version and the psx version early 2000 and played it.... went through motion sickness and couldnt finish either game.

 

 

Years later  I get doom on playstation 3 (doom classic complete) but the motion sickness is REALLY bad on that one.

 

I then get doom C.E with doom95.... found a way to make it work with Prboom+ then put a cap on the FPS

 

no more motion sickness and now i can play DOOM FOR PC instead of 3 minutes (mess around in hangar and turn off game... did this for a long time and now my hangar days are over!  But the music kicks ass though!)

 

 

And thats it.... I can finally play doom now because PrBOOM+       

 

Thanks,

 

Edited by vanilla_d00m

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This subject seems to pop up periodically. Very well, I'll repeat my story for the millionth time :D .

 

Back in late 2002 or early 2003 on a Windows 98 machine given to me by a family friend, I was only 5 or 6 at the time. I started with Doom 2 since that's what was installed on it. I've never had a console so I have not played the console versions on the real hardware (and only played PSX Doom through GEC, and Doom 64 through Doom 64 EX).

 

Doom made me shit bricks at the time so I never made it past Dead Simple, or in very few instances, the very beginning of the next map. After that, when I got a more modern PC I learned that Doom did not work on it, but didn't know about the existence of source ports, thus Doom getting relegated to the status of childhood memory. I've only learned about them around 2015, until then I barely even thought about the franchise anymore, and used GZDoom initially. Still using it when needed, but I personally prefer more vanilla accurate ports like Eternity and PrBoom+ .

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One of my earliest Doom experiences was when I was 5 years old and was watching my brother screw around the later maps of Doom 2 with God Mode on and No Clip. He got to the Icon of Sin and walked straight to the wall and in the room with Romero's head and started shooting it, but man, seeing John Romero's severed head for the first time yelling freaked me out! Hahaha.

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June 1994: At the time, I was in high school. I got shareware Doom (v. 1.2) bundled with Wolfenstein 3D. I never actually played Wolf3D due to corrupted 3.5" disks, but I played a lot of Knee Deep in the Dead.

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I'd actually never even been into PC Gaming but over the summer before my first semester of college my good friend James gave me a graphics card and showed me the magic of PC Gaming and mods. 

Fast forward to Fall and I get my grant money. I waste it on video games. Among the many games I purchase upon discovery of Steam is the Doom Bundle. I'd heard of Doom but never played it nor seen gameplay.

I wound up playing all the way through Episode 1 of The Ultimate Doom in DOS-BOX using classic controls and the rest is history. Now I play Doom nearly every other day or some version of Doom.

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Very early 1994 at a friends house sat in his mothers home office we played shareware Doom on a black & white CRT monitor with no sound card, I was hooked!

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Summer of 1997 playing at my grandma's. My mom would clean there as a side job and I'd post up in my aunt's pigsty of an office and play all day.

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On SNES, couldn't figure out how to open the door in E1M1 (or even had a concept of what a door was in an FPS) and so never got very far.

I remember that staircase up to the armor also being hard to navigate. It being my first FPS ever made it hard to figure the game out.

 

Also, I thought the pistol was a third person view of someone with no shirt wearing a helmet.

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I was mainly a console gamer growing up but my family did own a PC in the later 90's/early 2000's. The games i played on them were either children's games (due to having a younger sister) or racing games (such as Midtown Madness). Oh, the original Sims was played often too ;)

Spoiler

s-l1600.jpg

 

As for Doom I don't recall if i played Doom64 first or not but i'm pretty sure i did. I don't think i owned it until later though, as i do own it now. I probably just rented it back in the day if anything as i used to rent games a lot. 

Spoiler

n64-doom_64_01.jpg

 

My first foray into gaming was on my SNES so i either didn't know about Doom or i wasn't allowed to play it since i was pretty young (unlike most people around here who still got to play it anyways; and yes i'm jealous ;)

 

Anyways, i remember playing Doom 3 around 2005/2006 on Xbox and since i had the Collector's Edition i also played Doom and II. I never did get the expansion though (i had no idea that it had "classic" Doom on it as well as the Master Levels). So that would of been my first time playing the original Doom games.

Spoiler

s-l640.jpg

 

Oddly enough i played Duke Nukem 3D (briefly; PC version) before i had played Doom. This was around 2000/2001 at a friends house while watching his older brother play it (he let us try it). I also remember seeing a Hexen box on there moms shelf above her PC. She also played PC games (such as C&C: Red Alert) but i don't remember seeing her ever play it.

 

I remember trying out Doom (or maybe Doom II) on my buddies GBA around 2006 (he had every console that generation and the GBA was "old"). I remember playing Duke Nukem GBA as well. He let me borrow them for a short time. I wish i would of had a job and bought them off of him. I really liked the GBA and i never did get my own (he had the red limited edition Target GBA).

Spoiler

gameboy-advance-konsole-rot-limited-red-

 

Anyway's a few years later (maybe 2008) i remember messing around with Doom via ZDoom for the first time on my old "handmedown" Pentium III laptop (yeah in 2008) that i used for itune's with my then new I-pod and what ever else i could do with it (it actually had Win XP on it). This would be the first time that i remember playing Doom on a computer.

Spoiler

latest?cb=20180521161609

 

Thanks for reading all of this, if you did read it all. It brought back a few memories hence why it's so long. I added some pictures that relate to what i was saying as well. ;)

 

Edited by CyberDreams : update

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34 minutes ago, CyberDreams said:

My first foray into gaming was on my SNES so i either didn't know about Doom or i wasn't allowed to play it since i was pretty young (unlike most people around here who still got to play it anyways; and yes i'm jealous ;)

 

Eh, some of us did face opposition when we were younger, you can be sure of that.

 

I for one was banned from playing certain games for a few years way back when I was in my early teens, and so was a friend of mine. Both parents believed the generic rubbish spread by so-called "psychologists" that video games "mAkE yOu vIoLenT aNd dArK", in addition to believing that they were the reason why my results at school became worse for a period of time. They've pretty much always had a problem with what I liked and what I was (or am) interested in/into for all sorts of strange "reasons". Seriously, we're so different on a fundamental level it's hard to believe we share the same blood lol.

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My dad let me rent games like Duke Nukem 64 without a care in the world when I was still a single digit age

*puts on cool guy glasses*

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43 minutes ago, wheresthebeef said:

My dad let me rent games like Duke Nukem 64 without a care in the world when I was still a single digit age

*puts on cool guy glasses*

AKA the wussiest version of Duke.

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As I've said previously it was some time in the mid 90's and I was going through one of those however-many-in-one shovelware shareware disks at a cousin's house, I didn't have a PC yet at the time. I knew of Doom and had played Wolfenstein-3D previously but playing Doom for the first time was a crazy experience, especially compared to all the other shareware games I'd been playing. When I did get a computer I installed the shareware from that disk on it and played Knee Deep in the Dead over and over.

23 hours ago, beastbludd said:

Very early 1994 at a friends house sat in his mothers home office we played shareware Doom on a black & white CRT monitor with no sound card, I was hooked!

 

Ha, I had a similar experience at a friend's place. We played lots of old DOS games that way like the Space Quest games, OMF 2097 and of course, Doom.

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April 95, age 13 - we just bought a brand new 486 DX2 80MHz 8MB RAM - our first PC, Sound Blaster 16 wasn't due to arrive for another 2-3 weeks. This was after playing on ZX Spectrum 48K for about 7 years, mostly stopped playing during the last couple of years due to it being slow to load games from cassettes and me growing up and realizing the futility of it. Only games I played on PC thus far were Lion King and Goblins 3, both getting too hard very soon so I couldn't progress very far in either of them. And watching dad playing Dune, which I couldn't get interested in due to being dialogue heavy and my English at a time was in its infancy. Years later I completed Dune and it remains in very fond memory!

 

The stage was set for the biggest yaw dropping moment in my life when dad fired up Doom for the first time... The graphic was photo-realistic and the PC speaker sounds were out of this world (they sure beat custom speaker dad built into our special wooden Speccy case) and it loaded instantly in comparison to what I got used to. The fluidity of movement (80 MHz baby!) and the FPS feeling were an absolute novelty, it completely dumbfounded me - love at first sight. Luckily for me parents weren't too strict about the violence in the game which was great. The very next morning dad was at work and I fired up some Doom before school but... the main menu presented a challenge because even it was a novelty to my young self and I was afraid to select anything in fear to destroying new PC. Besides I didn't even know Enter was the key to make the selection with. Good'ol days, hehe. So I just watched recorded demos that auto played in that first morning. After that it was a long while before I played Lion King again I can tell you that :)

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Early 1994, a friend installed the game on my PC over my complaints that "I don't like action games".

I didn't even have a soundcard at the time - ended up buying one because of Doom.

 

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On ‎4‎/‎30‎/‎2019 at 10:38 AM, Dark Pulse said:

SNES Doom, around the age of 10, so circa 1995. It couldn't have been all that long after the port came out.

Same here, I would've been 12-13.  However I definitely recall seeing Doom in action in a computer store before that, running the demo loop with the keyboard unplugged.  I can never forget observing how colorful E3M6 was, and understanding when you picked up the green sphere and everything went all white, this is invincibility mode. But I rented out Doom multiple times back when I borrowed/stole my cousin's SNES and played it until I bled from the eyeballs, good times.  

So when we later got a PC and my brother's friend installed UDoom on it my mind was blown once again as I appreciated the superior smoothness, textured ceilings and floors (can clearly recall our friend demonstrating noclip by running around the periphery of E3M8), and the concept of enemies fighting each other, and how you could use that to your advantage.  Feeling special that we had the 'bonus' forth episode (which of course caused the obligatory nightmares). 

Then seeing Doom II demos again at the computer stores and being fascinated by the newer enemies, strange new levels and of course, the iconic click-clack-clock of the mighty SSG after killing eight imps with a single blast.  I used to live in Barrels 'O' Fun.  I knew where the secrets were the first time I played the Wolf3d tribute maps.  There was talk of a Doom movie in computer magazines even back then.  Good goddamn times.  

Plutonia/TNT kept the passion alive and fresh even as I was getting into Quake, Quake II, Unreal and even Half-Life.  There are certain maps that everyone hates that I honestly still think are great, simply because I played them so much.  (Hunted can still go f*** itself though.)

Watching my friend playing Doom 3 in a darkened room for the first time, I flinched several times when the enemies leaped at the screen.  Too dark?  Damn right.  The Hell Knights shaking the ground with every step and their deceptive speed always put dread in me.  They seriously should've just recorded a playthough and released it on the big screen.  That would've at least been cheaper than hiring Dwayne.  

Edited by Maximum Matt

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My father's friend had an Ultimate Doom CD and installed it on our computer. I thought I remembered Doom 2 and Final Doom coming out, but clearly not the case. Based on knowing what house I lived in and how briefly I now know that residence was, and based on being disappointed a friend only had shareware in late summer '97, I must have first played Doom in latter '96 or early 97. It was a nice break from Super Mario World and Jetpack, but I didn't get really into it until I started cheating a few months later. Then I had a renewed zeal for the game about '02 when I bought Collector's Edition and realized I could customize controls. 

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In early January 2017, (Zoomer alert!!!) I was first introduced to GTA London 1969. From watching gameplay, listening to the soundtrack and had a liking to the 60s era of the game I thought it looked fun regardless of how old it looked, so given a link to the download from the video description I played it by setting it up with Dos Box which was pain in the ass. Months later I was board with the game and wondered to myself if there are more games that would require Dos Box so, I would go to a particular website that allowed me to download free dos games, that website being myabandonware.

When looking at the most downloaded list, doom was on that list, never knowing what Doom was my curiosity

peaked. So I decided to go in blind. When I started E1M1 at the Hurt-Me-Plenty difficulty and E1M2 I was hooked. The music, the look, the satisfying sounds of the shotgun and the death animations for the imps and possessed marines, every aspect of Doom, I loved.

With ZERO nostalgia for the game and growing up with mostly modern games I manage to get addicted to a fucking 25 (as of right now) year old game. A game older than me.

I would use a USB stick and plug it into a laptop, or desktop within my high school. Whenever me and the boys ever talk about games I would

mention Doom in the conversation, I lived and breathed Doom.

 

I actually have two short stories/experiences with Doom & Doom II, in December of 2017 My cousins, and brothers would go to L.A for the first time, while on the roads to L.A I would use my laptop from school and play Doom & Doom II as we arrived to L.A with the sun peaking out on the horizon. My second story was in early 2018 when I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the hospital, fortunately, I was stricken with minor effects such as drinking lots of water, lose wight, and so on. At the hospital I was learning how to use insulin, and forever being on a low carb diet (unless injecting insulin) and all that shit. Again, I would use my school laptop and play Doom, Doom II, Quake, and a little bit of strafe While hospitalized. Ironically now, I drink diet beverages due to my type 1 diabetes, a true boomer lifestyle.

Edited by PinataMeme

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My first Doom experience... You see, in my country, after we left the Soviet Union, it was near to impossible to get a good PC or any good gaming system. Doom was a legend. Everyone knew it, just a handful played it. I knew Doom from gaming magazines and saw like 3 screenshots and one artwork (the doomguy). I stared at them for hours. Years later, I got PlayStation 1, yay, my first good system. And somehow I got Doom's demo.

I think I've finished it 1000 times.

 

I played the full version of Doom first on some console (probably SNES) emulator in the early 2000s, and it didn't blow me away as it barely worked.


My first TRUE Doom experience would have to take place... around 2010. Late, I know, but I had a bad taste after the SNES or whatever port and emulation. The true game blew my mind and to this day remains one of the all time favourites.

Edited by Szuran

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On 5/1/2019 at 4:57 AM, CyberDreams said:

Anyways, i remember playing Doom 3 around 2005/2006 on Xbox and since i had the Collector's Edition i also played Doom and II. I never did get the expansion though (i had no idea that it had "classic" Doom on it as well as the Master Levels). So that would of been my first time playing the original Doom games. 

 

I can't remember when I first played Doom because it was before this particular experience. I know a couple of years prior to this I had found a shady copy of brutal doom somebody bundled with Ultimate Doom's wad file, but memories of this are kind of gone probably because I didn't play much Doom in one sitting yet. I had played Doom 3 as a kid and got a little ways into it, but the game was way too scary for childhood me. However, I eventually did buy the collector's edition knowing the game contained the true god-tier gameplay experience: Doom's I & II

It was around Winter, 2014. Outside was freezing and the ground was cloaked in snow. I popped three bags of popcorn and grabbed a couple of cartons of ice cream. My friend and I had decided to play Doom 1 on my original Xbox. It was a two-hour late start and I believe it was either this morning or a nearby day that we had finished Knee Deep in the Dead for the first time. I loved the Xbox version, but it quickly lead me to discover source ports and the modding scene. Only a yearish later and I basically had all the Wad files for the various Doom installments and spin-offs legally purchased.

I saw in another thread someone lamenting the newer generations not playing Doom, but I can guarantee y'all that this game is still fresh. Doom has a very unique style of gameplay that, to me, feels even lost when compared to Blood or Duke 3D.  There's just something about the fast-paced and simple design that makes this game easy to like even for someone not born in the era of when Doom was bigger than big.

 

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I have mentioned my story somewhere else too but I'll mention it again.

 

My story is somewhat similar to seed's story. I first started playing doom around 2001 or 2002 when I was 6-7 years old and played till 2004-ish. At that time I only played the original maps (aka the iwads) using the original exes and had no idea that source ports or megawads existed. I always played on the easiest difficulty and I think I was only able to beat the original game. I never managed to beat doom 2 because of the IoS. I found TNT Evilution to hard for me to handle back then and never even dared touch Plutonia. After around 2004, I just lost interest in doom and started playing newer games.

 

I didn't come back to doom until around 2014-15. Around 2012-13 I started taking interest in modding scene and started visiting moddb quite often. One day I stumbled upon "Brutal Doom" and from my first glance, I was like "Holy God!! This is a mod of a game I played in my childhood?". Needless to say I decided to obtain doom again and check out this mod. From here on I realized that BD couldn't run on original exe and it required a "source port" called "GZdoom". Thus I learned what is a source port and learned about various doom ports.

 

When I finally got BD to run on GZdoom, I noticed that it was very laggy (I had a potato pc). I then decided to play doom on GZdoom without BD. I managed to complete all the iwads on UV this time. However I played them on non-authentic compatibility settings (I used default compatibility + jumping and freelook). I didn't learn about complevel and authentic settings until I started using PrBoom+. And I only started using PrBoom+ because of someone's suggestion when I was having framerate issues due to playing Valiant on GZdoom.

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Late 1999 at age 11 from a shareware CD although it wasn't til 2003 when my mother bought me Ultimate Doom and Final Doom that gave me complete interest :)

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Interestingly I first got into it through the XBLA version, when I was like 9. I think a friend had it or something so I tried the Doom 2 demo. The demo only had MAP01 and the first NRFTL map, but even with those two maps I would play that demo nonstop. Compared to the other games I was playing on the XBox at the time (COD, Halo, typical stuff) that NRFTL map felt huge because of all the secrets and stuff that were in it. I played that map over and over and felt like I could always find new stuff. I remember seeing the "Cyberdemon" mentioned in the achievements and thinking that the Hell Knight was actually the Cyberdemon, haha.

 

Later, coincidentally, I found MM8BDM, then learned that it was a Doom mod. That introduced me to source ports and after playing Freedoom 0.7 for ages I eventually got the Doom games for PC.

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My first Doom experience looked sort of like this.

 

Hey, not too rough. 

 

4ezIzWF.jpg

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