LAN play back in the day.

[mdmenzel]

Back when Doom 2 came out, our middle school had just gotten a lab of "state of the art" PCs during the previous year (iirc late model 486/DX2-66's). A group of us kids would be let in by the janitor after school to play Doom 2 deathmatch. We especially played the hell out of MAP 07. In this day and age of internet gaming, multiplayer seems less personal and less social to me than it did back then (Now get off my lawn! ;-) ). Does anybody else have similar memories of LAN play on the sly at school or elsewhere? If so, which maps made the fondest memories?

[Doomkid]

When I was a young kid, my dad and brother got a LAN game set up between 3 PC's using doom95, just a few days after he had bought me The Ultimate Doom pack (iirc). I remember some frustration getting all 3 computers to talk with eachother, but once they were on the same network, we went crazy.

My brother and dad outlasted me actually, they got all the way to the end of E2 before wrapping things up. Good memories, I remember watching over my dads shoulder and actually being kinda scared of the "hanging baron" texture - I was shocked that some other demon could be tough enough to gore up a baron like that. Good ol' childhood innocence!

[snapshot]

i only started playing DOOM 2 back to 2007 after i bought it from steam,so i don't have many memories with DOOM Series
* Actually i remember when i started playing Half-Life GOTY edition Back to 2002,the GUI for CD Retail was better then how it is today from Steam Version ...

* The first time i played it on LAN was with my Brother,he was connecting through a Laptop Wireless lan,we had some fun on few maps like Stalkyard/Bootcamp/Crossfire,and played few other Popular Half-Life maps like Sven Coop 3.0 (Older version)
Christmas is coming :D

[scifista42]

I've been playing Doom 2 coop with my father over LAN since my very childhood, repeatedly going through the first 6 maps again and again using almost the same routes, as we couldn't save or warp to a further map for some reason (probably we just didn't know how to).

[ASD]

Wish I had been there in the 90s. Started ZDaemon multiplayer in 2009 and below is my first Doom LAN from 2011:

[durian]

For a couple of years from 96-98, my school friends and I would have regular LAN events ('parties' is definitely the wrong word). In the early days, we'd hook-up 2-4 PCs, make quick maps, and then DM with them long into the night. Alas, by the second year, it was all about Quake/Quake 2, and I still wanted to play DOOM. And yeah, it also took me a while to come around to the idea that it might be fun to play against people that I didn't know and who weren't in the same room as me.

[Pirx]

mdmenzel said:

Back when Doom 2 came out, our middle school had just gotten a lab of "state of the art" PCs during the previous year (iirc late model 486/DX2-66's). A group of us kids would be let in by the janitor after school to play Doom 2 deathmatch. We especially played the hell out of MAP 07. In this day and age of internet gaming, multiplayer seems less personal and less social to me than it did back then (Now get off my lawn! ;-) ). Does anybody else have similar memories of LAN play on the sly at school or elsewhere? If so, which maps made the fondest memories?

lol. my memories were exactly like this, i and a few other guys staying over night in the school's lab playing. i have posted about this a few years ago, probably at one of doom's anniversaries: my first deathmatch ever was on e3m2, hell knows why we chose that map because it's not made for dm at all, but what did we know. so i stumbled upon the rocket launcher hidden between those rocks and stayed there, afraid to lose my precious toy. until some other guy found me, i shot, and there were two bloody lumps of pixels on the floor.

later when doom2 was out the school got some of those dx2/66 which were pretty beastly in the day, with T-connectors for lan, and we used to play dm on map 07, the only really good map for 4 players from the original game, and on map 18, where everyone would run like a fool out in the courtyard and around the pillar.

quake came and i got my pentium 166 pc, got destroyed by the first guy i saw using a mouse, i didn't even know that was possible. i had planned buying one of those flight sim sticks with a hat switch thinking i could aim faster that way. so i switched to the mouse, a logitech mouseman96 (which was released again around 1999 as the logitech wingman) and liked the shape so much that i stuck with it later when optical mice took over, and had one with an ms 3.0 optical sensor built into it. i'm still using one, now with a deathadder sensor inside.

i played a lot of the 3 quakes and unreal on lan, but doom was still my favorite. most dooming was around 1996-2002, up to 4 guys in a friend's cellar, mostly using doom legacy and the dwango maps, especially dwango5 map01. i still have a few demos from that time, many ending with one of our guys ragequitting, like this: he shoots a rocket at me, i drop him with the ssg, he respawns right in this rocket's path... rraaaaah (quit).
we had a guest who thought he's the boss and then ate a bfg every couple seconds (because most spawns on d5m1 are outside, duh) and kept yelling at us "get off me with that fucking green blowtorch!"

the cellar dwellers broke up later, because of work, newer games, moving away, whatever. at least, one friend (and arch-nemesis from those days) is still in town, and we celebrated christmas last year the old way, an evening of doom.

[7hm]

Not of Doom, but me and my brother played a heck of a lot of Heretic over the LAN network (two computers next to one another) my stepdad set up for us.

[Magnusblitz]

Too young to have played Doom multiplayer, but my friends and I played the fuck outta Half-Life 1 and Unreal Tournament on LAN back in the day. I was lucky enough to have multiple computers at my house, so we were able to play there all the time (when we weren't at the local LAN cafe). Good times... definitely feels a bit today that when I want to play a game with a friend who lives in the same city as me, that we still go to our separate computers and play...

[Yuki Senmatsu]

I don't think I do have one maybe. WAY too young back in 94'. I was like 4.

Didn't play it until I was 6 (I know I've said that numerous times, but still)

[LogicDeLuxe]

mdmenzel said:

In this day and age of internet gaming, multiplayer seems less personal and less social to me than it did back then

My feelings exactly. I used to carry my computer to friends when we had our private LAN party. The good thing about it, we also could talk (without the use of annoying devices) and drink some tea together.
The internet killed that pretty much. Almost no one plays on LAN parties nowadays, and if they do, they usually play Counter Strike. I don't like that game, though. And I don't like playing games over internet either.

[Nomad]

Only thing I ever really played LAN back in the day was ROTT. I'm still super disappointed that they didn't add the wacky game modes to the remake. :(

[geekmarine]

In 8th and 9th grade, I lived in a really dinky little town. However, for some reason our school actually had a pretty decent computer lab at the time - don't recall specifically what we had, but the point was they were just perfect for playing the original Quake. And luckily, the computer teacher would let us have free computer time before and after school, so we'd get these big 16-player LAN deathmatch games going. Oh man, it was glorious.

[wesleyjohnson]

Some years back I was contracting near my brothers place, so I was staying there 3 days a week. He had three computers networked, and we would Doom for a few hours about twice a week, coop mode.

This Thanksgiving I set up a Linux network with DoomLegacy. We tried coop on one of the maps I made, FreeDoom Map09. Died about five times each, and never did finish the thing. We totally ran out of ammo and health. It did not help that we also had the solid corpses on. Those things block doorways, and you have to jump over them, or shoot them into giblets. Things kept happening to me, like when I am yelling at him that there are Barons in the river, so watch out, and about that time a green fireball comes out of the water and drops my health to about 12%.