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

[big smoke]

i actually started getting into doom mods when i saw the vargskelethor doom contest 
after playing some of the mods, i decided to make some mods for myself 
so i began making some maps, but then i lost motivation because i got no feedback for my maps and putting so much work into them felt pointless
i left doom mapping but months later i saw a doom contest i was interested in (from br0legs)
then i started working on the contest mod and improved a lot it

and yeah thats how i went to playing doom and making maps and mods for it

[DoomBoomer]

I got used 486 sometime in 1996. I was 7 at the time. I can't remember the exact date. One of games that were shipped with it was shareware version of Doom, version 1.2. That was how I was introduced to Doom. In June 1998, when I was 9, my parents bought Depths of Doom for me. I still miss those times.

[Hitboi]

I remember being 10 years old, the Doom GBA port introduced me, then I found the unofficial Flash port of the game (Doom Triple Pack), then I used my dad's computer to play Doom (it wasn't a DOS though, I used Dosbox then moved to ZDoom). Found out about custom maps/mods later because the streamer Vargskelethor made a mapping contest. About multiplayer some day I told two of my old friends about Doom and they weren't very interested in it, so it was hard for me to play with someone. I miss those days.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Hitboi

[Arrowhead]

I was first exposed to Doom 1+2 in 1995 as an infant - my dad played the hell out of the id games, and would always have me watch.

 

First time I actually played was probably in 2000/2001.

[maxmanium]

I don't remember much other than that I started playing around January 2018. I believe it was after I had finished Quake -- I just wanted to have played some of the classics of the genre, but Doom stuck with me.

[Quill]

Surprisingly, I got into Doom thru Doom Eternal. I learnt about the secret Doom 1 and 2 modes, yoinked the IWADS from its directory, and played 'em for hours on end. Sure, the Nahtzees were nonexistent, and the medkits look wrong, but it's gibbin' fraggin' shootin' explodin' fun! That was until I pirated ethically sourced the classic Doom anthology.

^{Disclaimer: I now own the games on Steam. Me pirating the games was a thing of the past. todd plz dont shoot me}

[Mr Masker]

I remember playing Doom on Xbox 360 back when and I found it alright, never finished it though. I also played through Doom 2016 and found that pretty fun.

 

However my first intro to Doom modding and the community was from watching doom mod videos from MrIcarus and other people, fasinated by what I saw. Then I got a crappy blue laptop that could also run GZDoom ok-ish, and then little Masker's life was never the same again, and now he owns all doom games on Steam...

 

Oh yeah then I played Eternal and that was alright too, Still haven't played 3 tho.

[dei_eldren]

First i skipped high school afternoon classes with a friend to play Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny, and were very disappointed to reach the end.  Then i found Doom for us to play, and we again skipped classes to play it, and next Doom II.  Never did anything with my high school diploma (literally), but here i am playing Doom still.

[Murdoch]

Wait a minute, let me get my rocking chair and old timey smokin' pipe....

 

Waaaaay back in the dim distant past just after release in December 1993, I was visiting a friend's place to... er... "long term borrow" his full copy of Wolfenstein 3D (which I later purchased legitimately twice to repent for my sins). He was like "There's this new game out..." and I watched Doom for the first time over his shoulder. It made quite an impression but I was mostly excited to finally have the full version of Wolf3D which I first played the shareware version of on my Mum's newly acquired computer probably earlier that year, it being preinstalled with several other shareware titles. Not long after, I saw the Doom shareware version on a dual coverdisc set for PC Review UK magazine, and I knew I had to have it. I bought it not long after, installed it on my family's cutting edge 486DLC 40mhz (think 386SX with delusions of grandeur) with 4MB RAM and no sound card and... nothing. Insufficient memory. I was confused, as the machine had 4MB RAM and to my inexperienced mind, it should have worked. Dismayed, I gave up and returned to Wolfenstein. Then later I discovered the miracle of the F5 trick, which bypassed the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT and the things they loaded into memory. My cry of joy when Doom Shareware 0.99 first loaded on our piece of shit computer nearly gave our dog (who was recovering from being hit by a car) a heart attack I am reliably informed. Sorry Ralph :(

[MoreMending]

My older brother introduced me to a roblox doom game called RooM (it's extremely different now than how it was back then), and then I forgot about it. This was like 3 years ago.

 

TL;DR I was introduced to Doom via a Roblox knockoff

 

 

Looking at the rest of these it feels like I'm a bit late to getting into Doom

Edited February 25, 2022 by MoreMending

[Btyb88]

My dad got it when it came out. I was about to turn 5 (my birthday is 2 days after doom's). 

 

He would always use the keyboard and I would use the mouse when we played together.

 

The main reason I got my tattoo of the doomguy is for his memory.

[Dark Pulse]

I actually remember seeing video footage of it on some show that I can't even really remember much about. This would've been about 1993.

 

A year or two later, one of the computers at my school had the Shareware installed. Played it a bit on that. I think I got stuck around E1M5, E1M6.

 

Then a year or so after that, I found the SNES version on sale at a flea market (new) for $30. I had $27. The guy took it. Got up to E3M3, which considering you can't even do stuff like circlestrafing on that port, is more impressive than it sounds.

 

Then a couple years after that, got a copy of the Greatest Hits version of the PS1 game. Played the hell out of that.

 

It'd ironically take me until about 2003-2004 to get a copy of the PC Doom games. I finally made good on owning them all when I bought the old id Super Pack on sale for $35 in 2011.

[Doomlover77]

I was introduced to doom in June 1995 by my dad. Just turned 18. We had our very first PC. It was the doom 1.666 shareware version. Came on a PC format CD. I Played it and absolutely loved it. I also had Doom on the Sega Megadrive 32x in August. 

 

I had the doom editor DEU only to find it wouldn’t work on the shareware version. So my dad got me the Ultimate Doom in September. Excellent game.
 

I Had Doom2 v1.666 in September along with my first Doom addons CD entitled the Doom Toolkit Volume 2. At Christmas 1996 I had final doom. Excellent game! Played it. Tnt excellent, Plutonia rock hard.  Christmas 1997 I received the Depths of Doom trilogy which included the Doom2 master levels which I’ve STILL not completed yet. 

Edited February 25, 2022 by Doomlover77

[BigBoy91]

My grandma. She sucked balls at it, but she loved struggling through the first map of Doom 2. My aunt got me into the Build engine games once she saw how much I loved the FPS genre. I just used God mode and looked at pixelated tits in Duke 3D after that. Skipped a lot of school just to use cheat codes and exercise my power fantasy. I never really took any of these games seriously until a few years ago once I realized how well they stood the test of time.

[Gregor]

8 hours ago, Werge said:

On both the Xbox 360 and PC I became amazing at Doom and dominated in Deathmatch.

 

A word to the wise, whenever you use "amazing" unironically to describe yourself, true or not, it makes you sound like an immature farthead.

[horselessheadsman]

I can't remember how I got my hands on the Doom 1 Shareware, but I played it repeatedly until my brother bought Doom 2 not long after it

came out. New maps for Doom, of any quality level, seemed so incredible back then and I tried anything I could find for a few years until I

got my hands on a Final Doom bundle that included Ultimate Doom.

I got swept away by newer games after that, and it wasn't until the late 2000s' I started paying attention to Doom again.

 

[Nikku4211]

As a young kid, I saw Doom in this clickbait-y article and fell in love with the engine.

 

Of course, back in 2012 when I read this then-1-year-old article, I had no idea that version of Doom actually used a completely different engine entirely, only chalking the differences up to the limitations of the cartridge and RAM.

 

I ended up downloading ZDoom and playing with it a bit, appreciating the engine for its column-based charm. At the time I had yet to learn that there were many other source ports.

 

I also watched an infamous YouTuber I won't even bother to say the name of who played several Doom WADs. He often used Skulltag, another source port based on ZDoom, so I often used Skulltag for a few years.

I still tended to use a software renderer out of preference, but wads like ZanZan which had a GZDoom version required the hardware renderer, so I was able to play them properly, the models of ZanZan fitting the polygonal hardware renderer more than the sprites most Doom WADs stuck to.

 

I even tried to make my levels at this point in time, but my old computer had issues installing Microsoft .NET 4.0, so it couldn't run Doom Builder 2 on it, and GZDoom Builder felt too complicated for me at the time, so I ended up using DeePsea and later WadAuthor.

 

I made some crap levels that are mostly lost to time(fortunately), but I never knew how to make ZDoom maps with DeePsea or WadAuthor at the time. My maps ended up being single boxes in vanilla format that just happened to require ZDoom's jumping. During this time, I also never knew you could not jump or crouch in the original Doom, so I often broke the progression of a lot of vanilla maps by jumping and the progression of a lot of older ZDoom maps by crouching.

 

During this time I also used XWE to experiment with ZDoom's Decorate. It was tedious to insert my custom mobs in the levels since WadAuthor didn't recognise them, and it was also tedious to draw every rotation of each sprite, so I ended up making mobs that did nothing but stand. I also tended to insert MIDI conversions of tracker modules into my WADs, not knowing at the time that ZDoom could just directly play the original tracker modules as-is, so I had some good music that ended up a complete mess due to me not knowing how to use 2MIDI to change the instruments.

 

A few years later I got a different computer and started to accept that different WADs were made for different source ports, and had several different source ports to play different WADs. I got into PrBoom+ for running Boom and MBF maps directly in Windows without needing DOSBox, and I even tried making vanilla WADs using Chocolate Doom to play them.

 

And then I fell in love with the limitations of Boom, MBF, and vanilla.

 

That's how I got into Doom. I was never interested in Doom 3 or later games that didn't even use the Doom engine, only occasionally interested in playing otherwise unrelated games that happened to use a modified Doom engine.

[Archanhell]

I think I am a relatively recent player, having started around 2012 when I met DooM through Newgrounds, although I am sure I knew about it before, I loved it so so much that I instantly got ZDaemon and it was a biiiig part of my life, with the LA Space Station servers where I was rather popular and a good player, Deathmatch, Teh_Base.wad, Invasions, etc.

 

I recently got Zandronum like, around 2018 or 2019 maybe, but before that ZDaemon was deader than dead.

But I am here and used to have an account on ZDoom Forums (But I hate the reactivation thing so I stick around here), playing mods and with friends.

Thanks for coming to my DW Talk.

[Higo Doragon]

i used to download chocolate-doom from the ubuntu repository then i was really young. in 2018 (probably earlier) i got curious and decided i wanted to play the game again and learn a bit more about it.
nowdays it's a big part of my life! ^^

[Fluuschoen]

Hmm, I think it was in '94 in a gamer magazine (576 KByte), when I first saw it, but if you mean on a first hand level, I guess it was in '96. In the upper grades of primary school, we often stayed after classes ended, and went to the computer lab to play some games. If I remember correctly, my first ever FPS was the Doom shareware on a 4 player LAN, on E1M1, with keyboard only (this, or either Blake Stone shareware at home, don't remember precisely). We had quite a few of these LANs, but later migrated to Quake shareware, and soon came the mouse era.

Regarding Doom, it always had its special place in my heart (together with Build engine and id Tech 3 stuff), but aside from playing it every now and then in suboptimal ways, and finishing Doom, Doom 2, The Ultimate Doom, Doom 3 + expansion, Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal on UV (the latter two on Nightmare as well), I haven't really put hours in it. But I always knew it's there, it's the daddy, I just sank the time (roughly 8000 hours) in the Quake franchise during the two+ decades – but I played a shitton of other FPS (and other genre) titles as well. Meanwhile I reached a highly competitive level in Quake Live, but I stopped fragging in mid-2018; got a new job and didn't need the stress that organized high-level games bring (expectations towards me by other people and by myself as well). My tendonitis also worsened during the years, so it got more and more uncomfortable to use my old sens, and since I was an aim whore, this bugged me greatly. 

I always loved old school games, so I figured that Doom would be a nice haven for me, way more relaxed, no strings attached, the community is thriving, there are a shitton of custom content, you can record demos, write a cfg (I was notorious for writing QL cfgs and experimenting with them; later on I could write a complete config by heart, starting from a blank text file – yeah, I was THAT fucked up : D), and there's also an active speedrunning scene (I love competition), so I picked it up again in early 2020, but this time "seriously"  – had some LAN DM fun with Zandronum in the summer of 2016, on my shitty, half-done first level though –, and since November of 2020, I basically haven't played anything else aside from a few LANs. I have to admit that KingDime's 2014 AGDQ attendance also had an effect on me, as it basically crystallized what I want from the game, and made me aware of how active the scene still is. So cheers, Dime, I love you, man! <3 

The main sex appeal of Doom for me (aside from the aesthetics and sounds) is the advanced movement, the speed and the way of how fast the bobbing PoV fluidly changes constantly. It's just a joy to look at and to feel it (I guess this is what quite a few people describe as literally nauseating/dizzying experience : D), but I guess this doesn't come off as odd from an absolute Quake geek with DeFRaG background. : D

Edited February 26, 2022 by Fluuschoen : Typo.

[crusty_charlie]

I was six years old and just freshly getting into videogames through PS2 and an Atari my dad had set up in the bedroom my brother and I shared. I was always fond of watching my dad play various games on his PC like Heroes of Might and Magic III, Fallout (the original), Star Control, and of course, Doom. It scared the living shit out of me then, but at the same time I couldn't help but be fascinated with it. I'd spent endless hours watching various Youtube videos and stupid NG flash cartoons about the games until I got over my fears and started playing it relentlessly after installing it on my PC in 8th grade. Since then, I've been nonstop hooked. It's one of my favorite games of all time and I still have loads of fun playing it to this day. And thanks to modding, there's no shortage of insane things you can turn the game into.

[Fluuschoen]

5 minutes ago, Thirteened_Candles said:

watching my dad play various games on his PC like Heroes of Might and Magic III, Fallout (the original), Star Control, and of course, Doom. 

Your father has a good taste in video games.

[Hawk of The Crystals]

The playstation port that my older sister handed down to me when I was like, 12 or something. I was never the same after that day.

 

 

[Captain Ventris]

Back in 96’, my mom brought home a box of Chex cereal with a game in it. From there I was hooked, and a few years later made the jump to Doom proper.

[xScavengerWolfx]

How i got introduced to doom? Hmmm i guess through Doom 2016. Now hear me out before i get thrown in a room with flame boi's and burn to a crispy wolf.

 

When i was growing up i've never heard of doom.....expect doom 3 of chores but i didn't like doom 3 because at the time i was more into halo and call of duty (i know edgy now a days).  Well when my 360 finally died on me on 2015 (rip) i saved up money got me a xbox one S, i saw promos for doom 4 or 2016 give or take, so i went to find doom on the arcade section and i found both Doom 1 and 2 there for like i think $10 for both in a bundle i don't remember.

 

Anyways bought it, played it and got hooked. Now as far as the mapping goes i blame Snapmapping for me getting into doom mapping and also watching youtubers like Civvie 11 (still one of my favorites by the way), JP Lebration (i'm so sorry if i butcher that man's last name) and everyone else i can't think of on top of my head.

 

Then i got into mapping which i'm still green at it but i'm learning.

 

That's my story.

[Agent Slacker]

Now that I think about it, I couldn't tell you exactly what sparked my interest in DOOM. I'd heard the name thrown around when I was younger. I called any shooter I saw a DOOM game. But I think the first time I sat down and actually played DOOM was probably more than a decade ago. I remember back in high school I had a copy of DOOM and DOOM II for the GBA that I used to carry around. That might have actually been my first experience playing those games from start to finish. When I graduated around 2012 was probably when I was introduced to DOOM proper when I was given a laptop for college. I've been a fan ever since.

[Kuro_mahoh]

BigMacDavis is the youtuber that introduced me to doom right after I saw him play Half-Life, I watched the videos and I was immediately hooked by how it looked and played. I then got DOOM 1, 2, Final DOOM, and the master levels. Now I make maps for the game. 
 

[The BMFG]

playing the Xbox 360 version backwards compatible on my Xbox one. (this was before the Bethesda ports)

[jval]

In December 1993, someone had installed the shareware version in one of the university's lab PCs. I remember I took a backup in 1.44 disks with arj (legacy compress utility which allowed multiple volumes) to get it home.

[ducon]

Same than jval.