Origins

[Kid Airbag]

Just out of curiosity, how did you all exactly come across Doomworld?

Back in the day, like in 1998, I was a frequent visitor to Dukeworld.com, for Duke Nukem 3d news. After DoomGate wasn't updated anymore, I needed a new Doom site, so just for the hell of it I typed in Doomworld.com and wow, lookie what I found.

[Lüt]

I first got the internet around early 1997 (for myself that is, not borrowing my brother's). I didn't know what to do with it, so I went looking for Doom stuff on WebCrawler. I found Mr. DooM's page, an excellent resource for it's time, which had a link to some source ports and stuff. At that time I didn't know the source to Doom had been released. I tried a few ports and didn't like many, except for Legacy, which I loved.

One of the pages I found in my searches was the old Team Insanity website. I saw they had a total conversion they were working on called Doom Millennium which they needed help with, but they didn't have screenshots or story or anything, so I passed it off for a while.

I found TeamTNT's website and saw they were accepting applications, so I applied, but I never got a response to the application. They asked for sample maps, so I sent the only full WAD I had complete (a Heretic episode). My email server had broken that attached ZIP into two parts due to server size limits, so I assumed they either 1)couldn't piece the ZIP together or 2) didn't care to check out Heretic maps. I asked them what the situation was, but of course you couldn't actually ask things to the address listed or they wouldn't reply, so to hell with them.

I went back to the Team Insanity page and asked to be let in on Millennium. I was asked for sample levels, which I sent (they were Doom2 maps this time) and then was immediately accepted onto the team. I was introduced to the members page, which had some screenshots, member info and other plans. I wasn't too impressed at first, but it had a lot of potential so I stuck with it.

One day Chief (the project leader at the time) announced we would be getting special hosting on a yet-to-be-specified site which was under construction and would be opened within a month. He wouldn't give us a name because it was supposed to be a secret, but he gave the initials DN.

That site turned out to be DoomNation, which I thought was a pretty cool setup. I eventually got involved in the actual DoomNation site when they opened the forums, which were an entirely new concept to me and I found them to be a good place to share opinions and have arguments that I could actually win. I've never been much of an in-person talker because I'm too absent-minded to make coherent sentences, but being able to proofread all my stuff before I ranted myself into a corner was an assett I found exceptionally useful and enjoyable. Plus, the variety of people and views there was always an experience compared to most of the boring cliche real-life people I knew back then.

I had heard of this other site that was similar to DN but had no interactivity and boring, non-personal news updates as if they were trying to be professional. That site turned out to be DoomWorld. I never went there much, until they added the comments threads later on. I used them until I found out this Mordeth guy would delete comments, so I boycotted them along with some other people.

When DoomNation went down and Cyb (the webmaster) announced it was never coming back, the old DN crowd and I were spitefully forced over to DoomWorld. My transition was necessary because Team Insanity and Doom Millennium had been accepted as hosted sites.

Shortly thereafter, the DW forums opened. I enjoyed them for a while until I found some of my posts lost in a deletion spree, after which I got even more pissed and decided to give them something to delete, but never got around to it.

Over the next year I grew into the DW habit and eventually got to like it a lot, even moreso than DN.

Anyway, that's going a bit beyond how I first came across it, but that's how I got involved in the site.

[deathz0r]

found doomworld around jan-march 1999. i saw it in the Telenation list.

[Baron-Of-Hell]

I found Doomworld when I was searching the net for all the most popular Doom sites, I found alot of other cool sites for doom aswell...

[Linguica]

I created it.

[Baron-Of-Hell]

Originally posted by Linguica
I created it.

Sure you did! How come I don't believe you?

[Kid Airbag]

Originally posted by Baron-Of-Hell
Sure you did! How come I don't believe you?

You had better be being sarcastic...

[Dark-tenshi]

back in 2000,after carmack's plan about DOOM3.i did seach for more info about doom3.i randomly trid "www.doom3.com" ,"www.doom2000.com".and finally i tried "www.doomworld.com" and found this place.

[deathz0r]

Originally posted by Baron-Of-Hell
Sure you did! How come I don't believe you?

Post of the week.

[Fredrik]

Heh I first found a link to a site about Doom on an Internet CD that came with a comp. magazine. The site was called Headache's Doom site or something, I don't remember. There was a link that lead to some site that lead to Doomworld... something like that.

[dsm]

Well, back in 1998, I was curious to see if I could get a bot for Doom so I did a search - one of the pages I found had a link to DW, and after downloading Legacy (which was required) and a bot (I think it was called Cajun or something), I browsed around checking out some of the pages - including DW.

...

In spring 2000 I rediscovered Doomword, because I had stumbled upon a Doom 3 forum on Stomped in my search for Doom 3 info. I found that it was rather interesting to read people's speculations about the new Doom game on a forum, but the Stomped forum was rather dead. One of the days I saw a thread pointing to the DW forums (the author wrote that the DW forums were a lot more lively) and I took a look there.

My first meeting with the forums left a pretty bad impression on me (it was in the middle of a major flamewar period); People didn't do a whole lot more than swearing and insulting each other (the word 'retard' was overused) and they generally didn't seem particularly serious.
But two days later, I returned to DW (I was bored) and saw that an intelligent person had posted the thread "Attention: The flamewars end!" and after that the quality of the posts increased and I stayed at DW as a passive observer.

[Captain Red]

hmm... I typed in "doom wads" into google once and the 10sectors contest came up. for some resion I read the fourms (wich i don't usually do) diced that it looked fun and registerd. and this is about the only site i post at.

[fodders]

I came on to uphold the good name of Doomserv, from the bad boys of #doomroom(spit)

[Zaldron]

Not sure, when Doom 3 was announced I got this urge to play the old games. I remembered Carmack released the source code awhile ago, so I thought "cool, there's gotta be some new games using the Doom engine then". I did not know where to look for them, but since I was an avid fan of Hexenworld I thought there had to be a Doomworld.

I recognized the site, apparently I had visited it a while ago, not sure why. So I made a little search and found all about source ports and stuff. I was impressed by them, but at the same time I couldn't believe there was no "new game" attempt like HACX or something.

I used to get my Doom 3 dose from the news comments at the Shack, Stomped and Voodooextreme. When those died, I started visiting DW's forums in a daily basis. I spent a couple of months reading without registering, and eventually felt I needed to post something so I did. Now I'm the moderator down there, cool :)

After months of playing with sourceports and wads and stuff, I ventured into General, and you all know the rest, I suppose.

[Cranium]

It seems to me that good Doom news on the net was almost extinct by 97, when Quake was hot & new and Doom hadn't quite become the vintage it is now. I can't remember if it was Romero or me that bumped across the ID4 (Satan's own movie) TC site, which was a helluvalot more interesting for its Doom news than the project that was running at the time. All the Doom freaks at Ion ended up bookmarking it. It was pretty much the only site that took pride in being up-to-date at the time. Eventually, after extended inactivity on the ID4 project (thank God) Ling changed the site to Doomworld and the world was a better place.

Or maybe my hazy memory banks are raping the whole chain of events. Wasn't there an article on this subject a while back, an interview about Doomworld's roots? How'd it go Ling, care to share if you recall or post some link'age? :)

[Linguica]

Originally posted by Cranium
the ID4 (Satan's own movie) TC site, which was a helluvalot more interesting for its Doom news than the project that was running at the time.

Eventually, after extended inactivity on the ID4 project (thank God)

Die.

[Linguica]

IcarusWeb: How did you get involved in running Doomworld?

Linguica: Well, as you may or may not know, before I ran Doomworld I, along with my friend Dukrous, ran a site called Functional Entropy. It originally started out as a website about our Doom 2 TC entitled ID4DOOM but slowly morphed into a Doom news site. It sort of happened gradually and without any real idea of what we were doing, but we noticed that we were getting more hits, so we kept it up. In November 1997, FuncE (my clever nickname for the site) was one of two Doom sites mentioned in a John Romero .plan update about how the Doom community was still thriving. It was then that I sort of realized that Dukrous and I were in charge of a site which at the time was one of the hubs of the Doom community.

To digress a little, although the Doom internet community has been around since 1993, for much of the time it wasn't really focused anywhere. Nowadays, new games more or less get prepackaged communities made for them. Anyone interested in Anachranox or Duke Nukem Forever can go to planetanachronox.com or planetduke.com and get involved, despite the game not even being released yet. There's a "news site" mentality nowadays that wasn't even beginning to have been formed back when Doom was first came out. I guess the Place To Be for a lot of that time was the Doom Usenet newsgroups. Everyone really involved in Doom hung out there. I remember how projects were formed and released solely over the newsgroups -- a lot of them didn't even have websites, something which would practically be unthinkable nowadays. There weren't really any Doom mega-sites -- the closest things I could think of would have to have been Mr. DooM and Doomgate (both of which still exist BTW) but even those mostly consisted of links and some reviews.

Anyways... so on January 1, 1998, I was contacted by Marv of Telefragged, who told me that he predicted a resurgence in Doom popularity due to the release of the source code a week earlier (good call BTW, Marv). Basically he asked Dukrous and I if we would be interested in running it. We said yes, and we recruited Mordeth (who had also turned his TC's news page into a general news page, the copying bastard), Sir Alien (who was running Doom Central, probably the first webpage solely dedicated to Doom news), Covaro (who had run a Doom webpage for not very long but my intuition told me he'd be a good addition), the dude who ran the Doomoscope (which used to be a kickass, often-updated WAD review site), Superfly (who used to run a pretty damn popular Doom-related page), and Ricrob (you know who he is). It took us a while to make the webpage and get some content together, and we opened on March 13, 1998, with myself, Mordeth, Covaro, Dukrous, and Ricrob as the staff. Ricrob quite after one day if I remember right, and Dukrous left later that year after the whole Prower incident.

[Kid Airbag]

Heh, Functional Entropy! I used to visit that site all the time because I wanted the damn TC to come out (and occaisionally looking at the Doom news).

[IMJack]

I had a lot of fun with Final Doom when I bought it. I was looking around the CD (I don't think I had enough HD space to fully install) and opened up the readme for TNT.wad. There was a URL in there for TeamTNT's site at the time, so I checked it out. I started checking that site every so often (they must update every 18 months :P ) and I noticed at one point they had linked to a site called "DoomWorld". I ignored the link the first time I saw it (I was on a 28.8 dial-up, and couldn't be on long at all), but then a few months later id released the source and TeamTNT.com went ape-shit with activity on their new project, Boom. I started chasing the news of other source ports, and took TeamTNT's link to this page.

I checked DW daily for about a year, then kinda drifted off, only checking every few days to a week. I'd seen the forums a few times and read some posts, and probably registered at one point without posting anything worthwhile. Then there was the UTD Game Developer's Conference last October, and Paul J gave a little speil on Quake 3 mapping and a few worthless comments on Doom 3's maps. I decided to register on the DW forums and stick those comments on the Doom 3 forum, and I kinda got sucked in.

[Prime]

I was desperately searching the internet for info on Doom 3.

I found Doomworld.

I monitored Doomworld because there were interesting people here who constantly discussed one of my favorite games.

I joined Doomworld.

[Sharessa]

I remember I got the actual internet (as opposed to Prodigy or BBS, which we used to have) in 1996. I remember my dad standing over my shoulder (i was 11 or 12 at the time) as I visited pages about Civ 2 (I was hyped about that) and wizards.com (back then all it was was a big magic symbol on a white background as opposed to the massive beast it is today) which took about 5 minutes to load. That was about the time my dad actualy let me start playing Doom, so naturaly, I looked it up and found all sorts of great wads (my favorite being raven.wad), which I used with this program my dad had obtained called D!.

And so I played Doom...a lot. Eventualy, I grew tired of it and stoped playing for a couple years. Then, in 1998, I got interested in it once more, and went searching the web for it (now that I had a shiny new 56k modem). Sadly, I couldn't find many high quality wads such as Raven anymore, but I did find some other thing of interest. One being the '5 Years of Doom' event here on Doomworld. This was very interesting and exciting to me because I thought I was the last Doomer on the face of the Earth, but finding a megasite such as this reassured me that that was not at all the case.

I didn't pay much attention to the site though, and didn't go back to the internet for my Dooming needs very often. Eventualy, in 2000 or 2001 I found this weird program that claimed to make random Doom levels called 'Slige'. I couldn't figure out how to work it if my life depended on it though, so I just hid the file away somewhere and forgot about it for a few months. One day I decided to get it to work no matter what and ended up asking my dad how to make it work. He showed me the marvoulous 'Run...' feature on Win98 which I had failed to notice before, and I got the thing running.

It was pretty damn fun, being able to play a new level each time. I went to the Slige site and downloaded the latest patch for it. I played around with it and actualy ended up sending Dave Chess a few feedback e-mails, which to my surprise he responded to. I eventualy ended up exploring his site, and found links to both Doomnation and Doomworld. I looked around both sites and found some cool stuff, and finaly late in 2001, I ran across the Doomworld forums. I just read the discussions for a while without posting, but after a couple months, I decided to register. It was a bitch, because for some reason my access code had a space as the last digit, but I was able to register eventualy.

I think the first post the really got me into the forums was the 'username' thing which cracked me up like nothing else (I think I almost pissed my pants once or twice). After that, I'd post now and again until the week of Feb. 25 - Mar. 3, which included no less than my birthday, my birtday party, my obtaining of a bike, plus both a 6.8 earthquake and a local porn store robbery (resulting in a lockdown) in one schoolday. Combine this with the fact that I hadn't checked in to Doomworld once in the preceding week, and I found myself lacking motivation to keep up with the local banter. So I decided to stop visiting this site.

Eventualy, by the end of this last summer, I grew very bored and decided to start visiting the forums once more. I did, and found a warm reception. And the rest is history...

[Baron-Of-Hell]

Originally posted by Archvile64
You had better be being sarcastic...

OK ok I believe it now!

[læmænt]

Heh, I don't remember...

[nxn]

nab send me here, and him I met through arkisk, and him I met through napster, and napster I met through metallica-online (ironic isn't it?), and metallica online was like one of the first pages I ever loaded on my pc after getting an isp for the first time.

[Crendowing]

I commented about how I discovered DW in the thread entitled "share your doom newbie experiences" or whatever it's called in the general forum, but I'll say it again here.

I was bored in my computer class in 8th grade one time. I decidedt to look for DOOM music, and I came upon this at the time kinda ugly site known as Doomworld. Man...was I hooked! Other than hotmail, that was the only other site that I found at school that I surfed on at home as well.

[Fredrik]

Originally posted by Lament
Heh, I don't remember...

Impossibility.

Wonderful avatar, btw.