doom at its release

[Sephiroth]

back in late 1993, december's end my mother and boyfriend of the time purchased a dell computer, it arrived on january 5th (i think). I was 10 at the time. this would replace the tandy 1000TL they had. she also ordered a pack of games, there was one that stood out, but i ignored it at first. a few days later my mother showed me the game i ignored. it was doom. i was amazed.
however the game had no instructions at all. other than how to run the game, and we ran it from the CD. we had no sound, but it didnt matter. i was still amazed. with out instructions i knew the basic movements and funtcions. infact i didn't even know how to strafe or switch weapons. so i played thru the game useing what weapon i was given. i later discovered pressing 5 on the keypad gave me rocket launch and a few minutes later pressing any number gave me weapons that i had picked up. i beat the game the first few times playing that way. later in a few months a tech friend of my mother installed the game on the hard drive, and to my amazment we had sound.
this new game took metroid II's spot of #1 game from me.

however i look back on that oldschool comedy of not changing weapons and strafeing. try playing that way for a challenge.

what stupid doom related things have you done?

[Bashe]

One time, I didn't like to look at the Cyberdemon, so I turned on the map and tried to kill him.

[wildweasel]

I was a cheater at heart. I couldn't stand to get killed, even on skill 1. I didn't think much of strafing because I'd never heard of circle-strafing before (until I saw my dad play Mechwarrior 2). I gave up when I saw my (cheating) dad die on the Icon of Sin.

[Chris Hansen]

This is about to get ugly: I didn't have a soundcard on the 486 I played Doom on for the first time, so I played with pc-speaker sounds on!

[Relica Religia]

Ditto, Chris. I feel your pain.

[Melfice]

Chris Hansen said:

This is about to get ugly: I didn't have a soundcard on the 486 I played Doom on for the first time, so I played with pc-speaker sounds on!

I feel your pain as well. But I also didn't discover the "strafing" ability for quite some time. Why? I never read instructiom manuals. I figure everything out myself. I also remember playing it for the first time, which was on the SNES. I couldn't get past E1M2 and died at the hands of the Imp in the toxin room on E1M1 several times trying to shoot it down with my pistol. I was too used to play Sonic the Hedgehog all damn day long, too much of a change for me at the time :P

[Chris Hansen]

Thank God, I'm not alone here! All those *bleeps* and *rings* still make me twitch when I think about it...! Let's make an AA for people who played Doom with pc speaker sounds... we need help.

But to stay on topic: I can't believe how much I stunk at Doom when I tried it the first time! Could hardly orientate my view and press fire at the same time! I believe I thought E1M1 was tough to get through on HMP...

[Bashe]

Hey, my friend was the only one in the neighborhood that had Doom2 (I had Doom) and we had to play with PC Speaker on his PC for a while. Whenever I hear PC Speaker, it reminds of those days. It's quite nostalgic to me, actually.

[Oh No Its Kyle]

Oh man, I remember those days. My dad was like "Dude, you have to check out this game." And so I went with him to play Doom for the first time, right after it came out back in 93. Holy shit, was I hooked. Just the fact it wasn't Megaman or Mario where I'm stuck running side to side amazed me. Then I got a game that beat Doom in the fact it was full 3D and had jumping and free look and missions and oh everything else that. It came out the exact same time too, just not on CD. (The game was Cyclones, and I got the CD version six months after I got Doom. To get an idea of what Cyclones was like, play RTC-3075 or whatever its called, but use Scuba Steve's weapons instead cause Cyclones used the right hand thing) But it just didn't have the same feel as Doom, and this is shareware 1 episode compared to a full 30 level game! Just those nine episodes beat a full game that had red book audio and everything! Doom had that much of an impact on me. Then I discovered cheating. My dad showed me IDKFA and IDDQD and that was it, I was done, Doom was mine. I would play without strafing cause who needs strafing when you can't be hurt?

So when I moved to Doom 2 I just cheated some more. Unfortuntly I got Doom 2 before I got the full version of Doom 1 so when I first met the Cyberdemon on Tricks And Traps I was surprised. I wasn't cheating at the time so when I saw the rockets... So then right after that I bought The Ultimate Doom and played every level without cheating (except for the secret levels cause I couldn't find them.)

Anyway, I finally got to play Doom online for the first time, using Doom Legacy no less (thanks to Doomworld) and tried to beat these guys without strafing because I didn't know what that was. These guys I was playing were hardened players of other FPS like Quake 2 and such so that sucked. I quickly learned strafe was my friend and replayed Doom and Doom 2 with strafing and my life was much easier. To this day I'm a mouse jockey. I tried playing Doom again the old school way without strafing and couldn't do it.

Anyway, those are my stories about my first times playing Doom. :/

[Sephiroth]

yea i had cyclones too. however it never got much play from me. i didnt like the controls that much and also at the time i couldnt get sound to work. maybe i should give it a try now days

however if i do remember correctly it did have room over room, or a fake ROR. its been too long, i would have to check it out.

anyways i thought doom was far better

[Oh No Its Kyle]

It did. It also had really nice looking bridges that far surpassed Doom and some other full 3-d elements along with redbook audio and one of the coolest soundtracks ever. It was really a lot like many Zdoom games are now.

Also I loved the character design. Big Humungus (Mad Max II) looking guys with giant claws. :) Anyway I remember reading somewhere that Cyclones was made on the engine originaly created for Doom. and came out right after Doom did on floppy disk.
I'd love to get some rips from that game

[stoned]

Tell me about it. I had Amiga and i had to buy a pc, just because i wanted to play Doom so bad... Damn, i wish it was december -93 again. It would be so cool to feel that first time Doom experience again... you have kind of gotten too used to it in these 10 years. :)

[fraggle]

When I first played Doom I thought that the imp in the last room of E1M1 was a boss monster.

[Mogul]

Bashe said:

One time, I didn't like to look at the Cyberdemon, so I turned on the map and tried to kill him.

:D

That's cool.

[Linguica]

fraggle said:

When I first played Doom I thought that the imp in the last room of E1M1 was a boss monster.

You mean it's not???

[Ichor]

No it's not. The real boss is behind that silver door where you start from.

[Grazza]

John Romero explained how to open that door here.

[chilvence]

Stupid Doom stories? Whats stupid is I had this game on 4 floppies for about two years before I actually installed it and gave it a go. Back then though, I was young and ignorant, and the PC was just the evil homework machine...

[InfraRed]

Chris Hansen said:

This is about to get ugly: I didn't have a soundcard on the 486 I played Doom on for the first time, so I played with pc-speaker sounds on!

wow....i knew there was sounds, but i thought i was the only one playing PC speaker...i had my top of the line PS1/386 that required a boot disk so windows would not start up, thus, giving me enough ram to run the shareware on low res

[toxicfluff]

I liked Cyclones a lot, although I only played it 2 years ago (too scary and I couldn't manage the controls when I was younger). It did have slopes and room over room, but all the walls were orthagonal.

[Disorder]

Heh, I was amazed by the 'wobbling' effect. I kept yelling at people how incredibly cool it was that walking was done in such a cool way. I couldn't keep my mouth shut about it.

[Chris Hansen]

Disorder said:

Heh, I was amazed by the 'wobbling' effect. I kept yelling at people how incredibly cool it was that walking was done in such a cool way. I couldn't keep my mouth shut about it.

I couldn't keep my mouth shut about either: I was throwing up over said effect! Made me sick as Hell!

/above post mildly exaggerated/

[Jehar]

what about all those people i keep hearing about talking about "motion sickness"?
did that actually happen?

(btw i am a total doom baby. played snes doom on an emulator, thought "damn its too dark" got shareware, went "whoah" and that was it. then i brought it to school and got suspended for a couple of days.)

[insertwackynamehere]

I played it when I was little, and like most little kids I thought anything could happen. I would noclip everywhere searching for secrets and easter eggs, thought there were probably hidden lost episodes and weapons, and whole lot of other stuff. That's one of the reasons I like Doom so much; to me it was a world. Now when I pop a new game in, I know that I can only play what the programmers gave me, but everytime I play Doom, even though I know better, I still get the feeling that I'm in another world, and not just a computer program.

[Oh No Its Kyle]

Jehar said:

what about all those people i keep hearing about talking about "motion sickness"?
did that actually happen?

My dad loved Doom. He also loved Quake and other such games to death. In fact he can't get enough of GTA or Gran Turismo. But he can't handle FPS for too long so our deathmatch games always get cut short. For some reason, he has motion sickness.

[Darkhaven3]

Here comes the huge LOLs and ROFLMAOs...

I made a map with a Wolfenstein 3D editor and tried to play it in Doom.

[SunlapseVertigo]

back in 5th grade when just about every guy in school was playing Doom shareware (except for me, i ordered the FULL GAME MUAHAHAHA), EVERYONE, and i mean EVERYONE, including myself, only "played" the game using cheats.... iddqd, idkfa, you name it... so in other words, none of us even tried without cheats, only now i realize how retarded that is.

[Chris Hansen]

Darkhaven3 said:

Here comes the huge LOLs and ROFLMAOs...

I made a map with a Wolfenstein 3D editor and tried to play it in Doom.

No, because that's just plain stupid. ;)

[Sephiroth]

my brother never really liked doom because you couldn't look in it. when i got duke3d there was a file in the directory called lookup.dat. i later found that same file in my doom dir. come to find out he was thinking that was what allowed you to look in duke. and would try to do this
doom -file lookup.dat. oviously it didnt work. this was a year before zdoom.

more funny than that fact is that now he plays doom useing zdoom, but doesn't use the look feature.

[dsm]

Chris Hansen said:

This is about to get ugly: I didn't have a soundcard on the 486 I played Doom on for the first time, so I played with pc-speaker sounds on!

My very first Doom experience was like that. I first played Doom on my older brother's computer and he had no sound card (neither had I) - but it didn't matter to me because I was already used to playing Wolfenstein 3d with only PC speaker sounds and compared to those, Doom's PC speaker noises had different, cooler characteristics to them.

Anyway, when I first played DOOM, I kept hitting the 'pageup'/'pagedown' keys whenever I faced a monster above/below me, constantly asking my brother: "How do you aim up and down in this game!?"

I had unwittingly imagined how you looked up and down in later DOOM clones until mouselook became the standard in FPSs :-P