Your first Doom experience..

[Avoozl]

PseudoGold said:

Eventully I stopped just saying Doom is the grandaddy of FPS and tried it.

Wolf 3D is more like the granddad of FPS games since it came before Doom.

[june gloom]

There's actually predecessors to the both of them!

I mean I'm sure everyone knows about Maze War at this point, and Battlezone (which was really the Doom of 1980) but there was also Driller, The Colony, and MIDI Maze.

And we shouldn't forget the likes of Ultima Underworld, Pathways Into Darkness, and Shadowcaster as well as id's own Hovertank 3D and Catacombs 3D. :)

[NeedHealth]

See the screenshot of MIDI Maze kinda gave me flashback of playing smiley wars on the old-old-OLD shockwave.com website. Holy Chesseus.... Anyone remember tankwars? e: This was like in, eh... 2003-2004? but the graphics(not smiley wars, though - which had more like hovertank3d graphics) due to these being flash games was like in the quality of 97-99 approx. Sorta like the first turok3d game but this was like 5-6 years later.

[t3hPoundcake]

Doom64. Maybe 7 or 8 years old. I instantly wanted more, and I got it with my cousin's collection of floppy disks with Doom II and a bunch of extra maps he had, for some reason I remember it to be called "Doom 3000 Levels" but all my googling over the years and I can't find that to be a thing.


Doom 64 was terrifying as a kid, literally gave me nightmares, wicked stuff. I played it nonstop though. Between that and Ocarina of Time I'm not sure how I managed to make time for dinner or school. I can't put into words the memories I have sitting in the dark on weekends playing it, over and over, with and without cheats, admiring the amazing detail. SUCH RESOLUTION! God what good times.

[roadworx]

my first experience with DOOM was when i was 10 or 11, so that'd make it 2010-2011. i played through doom 1 & 2 on my dad's old laptop when i was staying at my uncle's.
sadly, i played it with cheats, so that kinda ruined it. it was still really fun though!

[MistAche]

About 11 years old, parents were at a computer shop looking at Hewlett Packard PCs. I saw a bunch of kids huddled around a test PC shooting monsters with guns on the screen. I walked over, waited until it was the smaller kids turn, and promptly elbowed him in the face and went on to play Doom 1. It changed my life forever...

[Deleted_Account]

I was eight years old when Doom first came out in 1993. My older brother got me hooked on it. Been a fan ever since. Time sure does fly!

[Optimus]

I remember someone showed me Wolfenstein and I wasn't impressed. But maybe my eyes/brain hadn't been familiarized with 3D (or the blocky confusing vines coming into view, maybe this was Spear of Destiny). Then someone showed me Doom, my brain couldn't get the 3D and shit,. I mean I don't remember being impressed like OMG best thing ever. It didn't grow on me instantly, I wasn't like OMG graphics, maybe I was used to very nicely drawn pixelated graphics in old adventure games. But I got a copy of the game and tried it later on 386. Where I remember I went up to get the green armor and I could see some sergeant below in the distance and shoot him with shotgun and I felt like OMG, I shoot those two patches of pixel (because I was playing lowres and smaller window) far away in the distance and then I shoot some other brown guy from the window ledge all over. That was the point I was like, amazing the game has depth(?), like 3d gives another dimension. I definitelly had played some 3d games before that (some flight simulator with flat polygons) but I am not sure why I don't have a recollection of instantly being impressed when friends showed me their gameplay, maybe my brain wasn't hardwired for this amazing experience yet? ;)

Another experience is when I found from a computer magazine, that you can make your own maps, so there where some annoying user maps (either too hard or setting even a 486sx at crawling speeds). And then there was DEU inside. I put it as a purpose of my life to learn this tool and make my maps. I kinda understood how to make doors, maybe looking at other maps. It's strange for me, I was 16, I could manage learning such tedious tools then without assistant. I remember I talked to some classmates about these tools and they where dreaming what kind of things to do with them. I gave them discs with the tools but warned them it's not easy to get into. One dude was like "Don't worry, I am good at that, it will be fine". Next day he came back dissapointed, handed me the disks, he couldn't make sense of the editor and quit. I told ya!

And the 3rd experience was using dmgraph, making something I considered cool but loosing the files all together :(
I modelled a UFO in 3D studio v.4 which I was also learning at the time. I replaced most Cacodemon sprites with it, because when it rotates it's the same. And then some death animations, UFO crumbling to ground and a Roswell sign appearing on the debris, also made sound "Die earthling", maybe it was cheesy. But I put so much work, made a batch file to replace, zipped the file and delete the old files since now I zipped it and it was in the Zip. But later on noticed the Zip file was something like 600 bytes maybe. Something went wrong, it was an empty Zip file. The files where nowhere else. Damn!

Then we made funny sounds with Dmmaud. That was the period 1995-1997

[Maes]

Imagine if someone's first experience with Doom was with Sadhus Chauffer Trio...

[Koko Ricky]

My old man had been playing Wolf 3D incessantly, while I would watch, and on occasion I was shocked by the violence, particularly the bloody animation of a fallen SS. This was around '93. He installed shareware Doom a year later and for whatever reason, it was now ok for me to play. I had become intimately familiar with Wolf and instantly saw the difference in the two games. Doom wasn't just gorier and prettier, it was astoundingly complex and realistic. The gritty lighting in particular left a major impression on me.

It's funny that it left such an impression on me, because the game was running on a 386SX with a whopping 20MHZ clock speed, which for you younger folks means low detail mode, small window size and a cruddy framerate. No sound card either, so those scratchy PC internal speaker bloops have been burned into my mind. In particular I like the item pickup noise.

Around 1995, my dad received a company laptop which, while still lacking a sound card, was fast enough to run Doom (and Doom 2, which I only had because "Don't copy that floppy" was an unfamiliar concept at the time) at the proper 35 frames per second. The mouse was of the trackball variety and was surprisingly effective!

[Spectre01]

Played it at a friend's house back in '98. He showed me the fun of iddqd and punching barrels. Few years later played through all of Doom 2 at another friend's place. It had no sound and only ran at the lowest resolution. Played through the whole thing keyboard only with no strafing and eating every single projectile.

[RyoAsuka]

My first foray into Doom territory was playing Doom RPG on my symbian phone. It was fun as hell! (pun intended).

I just wish there's a Doom RPG TC for PC so I can relieve those moments again!

[Du Mhan Yhu]

I played Doom 2 back in summer 1995, before I was aware of Doom 1. I've been hooked every since.

[RobbingSnake]

The first DOOM game I played was DOOM 3, when really young. (5/6 or something along those lines) I saw my dad playing it and begged him to let me play. He refused until he got so fed up he let me play it. The farthest I got in the game was when you reentered the airlock and saw the guard's corpse being dragged past. Quit it and deleted it. Had a lot of nightmares after that.

[Lt. Shrub]

I first played a flash shareware version of Doom 1 on Kongregate and I was immediately hooked.

[Voros]

2014 when I actually played Doom.

All on Dosbox. Played through Doom 2, then went to finish Ultimate Doom (never happened, because I didn't know I had to sprint across the gap!)

Then in late 2015's, I discovered a video on Brutal Doom. Which indirectly led me to all the custom wads and mods I never knew existed, and the sourceports which I never heard of and regret that Inever knew about them. Thanks Brutal Doon!

[Tracer]

I was six. My dad was letting me try Doom95 deathmatch with my Uncle in 1996. I remember my dad typing, "Bill I'm gonna let Trace give it a go. He's never played so go easy on him."

I sucked, naturally. So my dad took over and started playing like shit, playing slightly better as minutes went on. Then he started kicking my uncle's ass and he types in, "Okay Bill I'm back...damn, looks like Trace learned quick."

My uncle then rage quit.

This was before my first "true" attempt when I was like seven. That was DoomII single player. Couldn't get beyond the gantlet because I was too scared.

[Tritnew]

This was my first DOOM experience, I was 9 years old and thought "This is pretty cool!", then I later found out it was DOOM when I researched it.

And thus, here I am now.

[Gifty]

I played Doom64 on my cousin's machine, not knowing it was totally different from the PC version. I had this sense that Doom was a huge cultural touchstone even when I was young, so it felt exciting to play. I remembered finding the 2d sprites awkward and charming at the same time.

[untilitdies]

It's been a really, really long time for me. I think I was in middle school, or maybe JUST starting high school. I had just gotten an Xbox 360, and had some points to redeem, so I bought the port of DOOM for it. I loved it, but it gave me nightmares the first few times I played it. Lots of sleeping with the lights on.

[Swine & Roses]

My first Doom experience was with Doom II when I was around 4, I think.
Like most games from that time, I know it mostly from watching my older brother play.
It was so different from all the platformers and beat 'em ups we used to play at that time, I was immediately hooked.

[ptoing]

Sometime in early 1994 (13 at the time) at a friends place. And funny enough I played Inferno first. I remember that at the place where you are in the thin hallway with the pinkies, I got freaked out a bit by the pinky, walked back, and then tried to physically look around the corner. Good times.

[DMPhobos]

I've already shared this, but here it goes again.

When i was around five years old, we had a CD that had a lot of demos and sharewares, among them there was Doom 95 with the E1 shareware. The installer terrified me, it featured the spider mastermind walking while E2M6 playing in the background. When the game finally installed, and i got to play the game, i was already shitting my pants. I got past E1M1, and by the time i got to the next level, my legs were shaking in fear.

After that i can't remember too much, except for some vague memories of exploring E1M9 without any monsters (Doom 95 launcher had allowed that if i recall correctly). Since that day, i didn't played doom until somewhere around late 2002 when i got interested in the ghostbusters doom mod.

[InfernalManiac]

My mother was a fan of Doom, so she downloaded the first game for me to play, and i loved it.

[SavageCorona]

I was sat on my dad's lap when I was 3 and he let me press the shoot button and open doors button when we played Doom 95 and Doom 2 in DOS on Windows 95. Oddly we never figured out how to get Doom 2 to run in Doom 95 because neither of us knew how WADs worked. Then there was DoomGL later on which is some archaeic OpenGL version that uses 3D models for enemies and pickups but nothing else.

[TheNerdTurtle2]

I was a hugeee fan of Quake 2 and I searched in stores forever for the original Quake because my dad said it was an amazing game, so I played through that and did some internet research that led to me realizing there was a game before Quake called Doom. I couldn't find a copy in stores anywhere (keep in mind this was like 2009). And finally I found this: http://www.gamepost.com/games/doom_hexen_heretic_triple_pack

After I beat this I knew I hadddd to buy it so my mom bought me the Doom triple pack that came with Doom, Doom 2, and the master levels for Doom 2 plus Maximum Doom all for windows 95 (I forget the name so please tell me if you know).

I feel in love

[Kurashiki]

dived into nukage and died in DOOMII when I was 4 or 5.

[Havoc Crow]

Back when I was a very young kid. I ran around Entryway a bit, then I reached the imp cage and nearly died of fright because there was a horrific MONSTER on my screen. I think I hadn't had glasses yet back then (I'm short-sighted) so I couldn't even clearly see what it was, and I didn't know how to quit the game either.

[NorkasAradel]

while technically it was when i played a little bit of doom 3 with my dad when i was really little, i only first played the original (and the best) comparatively recently
about two-three years ago, i simply decided one day to play doom
so i did some research, grabbed chocolate doom and the iwads, and was promptly surprised by the keyboard controls
while i did get the hang of them, i later learned about more modern sourceports, and i've been using those ever since

[LittleInferno]

I think I found it randomly on an abandonware site. This was on Windows XP, so I could play it without DOSBOX or some sort. I started it up and... Got mad because I was trying to control the demo.. I also managed to accidentally hit ESC, and somehow got to an actual game, given how retarded I was. I quit very quickly, perhaps spooked/disinterested.