Post-Millennials: Why do you play with Doom?

[pritch]

So my question is specifically for those born around about the turn of the century, about 16 or so years old as of right now, give or take a few years either way. I know we have quite a few this age on the forums.

Why do you play or mess around with Doom? I would've thought it would seem really antiquated to you. Is it the game itself, or the open source modding model, or something else, perhaps a family story, that got you into it and has piqued your interest enough to join this forum of mostly older gamers who have been with Doom since the start?

You're very welcome here, by the way, I'm just curious to know what attracts a generation who missed all the original hype, and have had much more competing for their attention growing up...

[Jaxxoon R]

Grew up with a Super Nintendo in the same house as a PS1 and PS2, so I had no issue with games having different levels of graphical fidelity. AVGN mentioned it in an episode, and then I found an old issue of Nintendo Power that hyped it up as the best thing ever, so I had to give it a try. Took me a couple years to finally "get it," though, as for some reason I found the game fatiguing to play. Might have had something to do with playing the awful SNES version. I eventually found out about sourceports.

Before it was Doom it was Mario World hacks. The reason I like modding Doom is due to ZDoom, since you can create any sort of immersive environment or mechanic with relative ease. Once portals are finally in, I probably won't Boom/Vanilla map again.

[AD_79]

I picked up Doom in late 2013 because I wanted a new format to make maps for games in, after getting bored with Portal 2 mapping (though I'd like to get back into that a bit). Turned out, extreme moddability aside, Doom was quite a fun game, especially after discovering all sorts of user-made mapsets.

[Li'l devil]

Ha ha, I was born in '98 and I don't count as a shameful post-millenial!

[AD_79]

ChekaAgent said:

Ha ha, I was born in '98 and I don't count as a shameful post-millenial!

I was born in late '99. Still posting because it might as well count, heh.

[Jaxxoon R]

Oh is that what "post-millennial" means? Good thing all those generation monikers are essentially nonsense anyways. If it means anything, I was born on the last day in January of '98.

[Yuki Senmatsu]

Once my 2nd older brother got the thing from his birthday when I was 6 in either 95' or 96', I was obsessed with it. I did use cheats on the easiest difficulty however. Stupid right? I know. Us kids do the stupidest things sometimes. It was unfortunately, DOOM95.

[Li'l devil]

Omegalore said:

I did use cheats on the easiest difficulty however. Stupid right? I know. Us kids do the stupidest things sometimes.

I think this is normal. Kids love to play with cheats. Tbh, I refused to play any game without God Mode cheat until I turned 11, I think.

[BigDickBzzrak]

I belong to the millenium folks too. I downloaded Doom just to know the classics. No family story and stuff. :] Besides, I used to have a weak-ish computer (a medium 2007 notebook) so I _could_ play only 90's games, haha. And I don't regret it!

[PseudoGold]

I think I just saw a collection on sale on Steam and bought it because of Doom's legacy. After ignoring the IWADs for a bit I found out about BD, played through Doom and Doom 2, then just followed a few threads on other forums.

Just my love of FPS brought me back to the most innovative and satisfying games arounnd, I guess.

EDIT: not sure if I count as post-millennial though as I was born in 1997, so eh.

[TheMightyHeracross]

Born 2000. I play it because I stumbled upon it once, tried it, had fun, and decided to keep playing it. Just like any game.

[gemini09]

Not sure if I count as post-milennia either as I was born in '83, but --- ha! -- I'm just kidding.

I find this very interesting to read, though. Salute, young blood! :-)

[Crapsaccharine]

Late 01 over here. I was introduced to retro games before I could become a complete snob about this stuff, so my standards were lower for graphical quality in gaming than most other people. Hell, I used to play Ultima, sometimes. I think the most tangible thread was roughly:
> Go on vacation
> Play Half-Life while on vacation
> Check out some dude's videos on Half-Life
> Check out that same dude's videos on Wolfenstein and Doom
> Play Wolfenstein
> Play Doom
> Addiction

And I'm still playing it after 6 solid months. It speaks of the game's quality.

[roadworx]

Basically, it's because there's a stream of never-ending content. I'll never get bored of it. Plus, my computer sucks, so it's one of the few games my computer can play perfectly.

Also if helps that I absolutely love retro games, especially PC and Gameboy.

[nxGangrel]

For me, Doom is one of the only First Person shooters I can always go back to and enjoy. It's got loads of content and as Andrew Cochrane (a youtuber) has said (comparing Doom to a cheeseburger) "You can have Doom [1] any way you want. Plain, full of toppings, it's still good. You can change it to suit your tastes". Doom is the only game I've played, that can boast that and be enjoyable.

Another big reason why I play it, everyday, is my passion for level designing. I always wanted to game and level design since I was half a decade old. Doom is where I started designing levels, and I'll probably stick with it for a long while, since it's easy, and great fun.

[Voros]

...IDK.

I tend to lean over towards indie and retro games.

No, BD didn't lead me to Doom (it led me to sourceports!)

Born 2000, still play Doom for two reasons
1- The new and wide range of content.
2- My PC is gone, and my phone sucks.

[pavera]

Great thread. I had no idea we had a generation of "post-millenials" running around, biting our ankles. Glad to see the young people are into Doom though.

[Jimmy]

As someone born in 1991 I'm sorta in the void between the "millennial" and "90s kid" camps and feel like I shouldn't identify with either. :<

[Azuruish]

pritch said:

Why do you play or mess around with Doom?

I asked the same question when i saw that Merzbow had 58000 listeners on Last.fm. I asked myself: WTH wrong with these people? How this is possible to listen? HOW?
Since 2011 I've started listening that crazy japanese man and you know what? I still ask why...
Same here: why people loves playing such old games if exist mega-ultra trip projects like Uncharted? Maybe... Maybe these old games has some culture. Yep. It's like investigation... Curiously where all began and how it looked like.

[Dragonfly]

In a closely similar boat as Jimmy, being born '92. Not sure what context we mean post-millenial here? Do we mean those with a birth-year after 2000 (16 years and under) or those who started playing doom post-2000?

My parents were both pretty hardcore into the FPS scene when I was growing up, often hosting LAN Parties for games, from Doom 1/2 to Quake 1/2 and even Q3A. Naturally, I was told this game's 'for grown ups' but I'd always watch and cheer on my parents vs their friends, as kids do. It would be around the release date of Q2 that my parents let me play the games with them sometimes. Sure, I was awful at the game but I was very young. Q3A was released and by that point I had a computer of my own, and became addicted to this game.

It was around xmas '04 / jan '05 that I picked doom back up. After beating the game I looked online to see what expansion packs, if any existed. It was then I came across the Collectors edition (the Ultimate doom, Doom2, TNT and Plutonia, bundled with the crappy Doom95 port.) and subsequently found out about Doomworld, along with a lot of other doom-related modding sites and most importantly, Doom Builder.

Since then, Doom's always been my go-to game when my time frees up, and with the neverending stream of new content made by the numerous masterful level authors within the communities it never gets old!

The 'extensively moddable' state doom is in makes it the obvious choice for someone like myself who enjoys dabbling in both tech related stuff and design, as in my opinion, mapping is a fine balance of both.

[purist]

Dragonfly said:

In a closely similar boat as Jimmy, being born '92. Not sure what context we mean post-millenial here? Do we mean those with a birth-year after 2000 (16 years and under) or those who started playing doom post-2000?

OP says he's specifically interested in people born around the turn of the century and are around 16 years old now. Funnily, most the posts here don't meet this criteria.

[snapshot]

17 years old, playing it from time to time online when there's nothing interesting in other games , I enjoy Jumpmaze, LA Worlds and Zombie Horde , sometimes i join other servers to try out new Wads .

[fraggle]

Dragonfly said:

In a closely similar boat as Jimmy, being born '92. Not sure what context we mean post-millenial here? Do we mean those with a birth-year after 2000 (16 years and under) or those who started playing doom post-2000?

Both views are potentially interesting, but the "born after 2000" camp is particularly interesting. People like you who are born in the early '90s potentially have memories of playing Doom as a small kid, so Doom potentially has some nostalgia factor that can influence the decision to play it.

By contrast, people born >= 2000 have grown up in a world where eg. Half Life 1 has always existed, or maybe they played Doom 3 as a small kid. I expect that growing up surrounded by games like these sets some pretty high minimum expectations (the difference in technology is pretty large), so it's interesting to understand the attraction and how people came to develop an enthusiasm for such an old game.

[Doomkid]

fraggle said:

I expect that growing up surrounded by games like these sets some pretty high minimum expectations (the difference in technology is pretty large), so it's interesting to understand the attraction and how people came to develop an enthusiasm for such an old game.

I'm in the boat with Jimmy and Dragonfly. For me, there definitely is nostalgia to it, but I'm nostalgic about plenty of old games, but even then I only play them a few times a year. There's simply something different about Doom.

On the topic of setting expectations, some of my fondest memories from the late 90s have to do with scouring the web for wadfiles. Everything surrounding Doom - the wads and mods, the funky websites, the super-fast multiplayer - it's all stuff I expected to be surpassed back when I was little, yet that just never happened. Graphics kept getting better, but the true perks of Doom just never got stale to me. I love both the game and the community and it's strange to think of a world without either of them after so many years.

Edit: Any time a peer asks why I play "such an old game", my mind immediately starts reeling off things about being a Doomer that simply can't be replaced by playing another game or another community. I remember wishing gaming was more popular in grade school as other nerdy-influenced kids were hard to come by. Now gaming is huge, but it's the wrong era! ;)

Another final bit of this ramble.. I love showing a "new school" gamer Doom and them being blown away by it, wether it's in a good way or a bad way, I find all reactions highly entertaining. More people like it than dislike it I can easily say. Two of my younger friends (19 and 16) couldn't believe deathmatch this fast has been around since '93.

[pritch]

Just to clarify, reason I use post-millennial in this context to describe anyone born after about '97 because, to all intents and purposes, you really weren't around for the 90s - your growing up has been done, and conscious experiences are located in, the internet culture and more advanced gaming technologies of the 2000s onwards. More to the point, Doom and Doom 2 were already several years old, and superseded in the popular consciousness, when you started gaming.

So I would indeed count you, ChekaAgent and PseudoGold.

gemini09 - I'm the same age as you, so, no, definitely not :)

Some interesting answers here. Content, creativity, shit hardware - I guess some things remain constant regardless of age!

Keep 'em coming.

[joe-ilya]

I was born in early '99. I play with doom because it's funtastic, both to map for and to play with, there aren't any other games like that, that I know.

[Tracer]

I was born in 1990. Now, I am well aware that that doesn't make me post millenial, but it did make me oblivious to the true original hype of Doom..

For me, I remember being five years old and being kept up at night, terrified, at the sounds coming out of the computer room when my dad would play Doom95 really late. It kept me up, that's for sure.

I'd always ask to play, and could never get beyond the second map because that's when the levels got tricky or the monsters got scarier.

Well, about eighteen years later, I rediscovered Doom, and fell in love with it. Mostly for the nostalgia I felt while playing, but also the ability to create my own levels. I LOVED that.

[RobbingSnake]

I was born late into 2000.
The first DOOM I played was Doom 3 I don't know what age I was, but it was a few years after release, and obviously way too young for that game.
A few years ago my uncle was cleaning his house, and he found a disk with a bunch of old games. I put in our old computer, and I found that Doom was on there. Unfortunately the sound files and mouse control were corrupted, so I had to play it without sound, and on the keyboard. The game was running at about 25% speed.
I then found the Doom collection on Steam, and bought it while it was on sale, the only game that would work was the Master Levels for Doom 2. I'm sure you can agree that it wasn't the best place to start.
A month later I found a guide online which made the Steam copy of Doom playable, but whenever I picked up and item the game would pause for half a second.
A few months ago I bought Doom 3 BFG edition just so I would be able to play a fully functional copy of Doom. (I wasn't going to try modding because in order to make my copy of Doom work I had to change a few variables, and I was worried it would mods would mess it up.)
I guess the reason I play DOOM is because it was fast paced, with varied weapons, and no regenerating health.

[DoomzRules]

I was born on 2000. I'm 16 now, and I started playing it at the age of 4 on my parent's Windows 98 CRT computer they had. I was a very curious fella, and I remember I was good with computers at the age of 3. Naturally, my curiosity got a hold of me, and I downloaded the shareware version of Doom. I played it, and I beat the first episode on Hurt Me Plenty....

The only down side was that I had nightmares for weeks afterwards of the Barons of Hell.

I got the full game and Doom 2 eventually for the PC, where I generally play PSX Doom, Doom 64, SDND (Sporadic Deaths and Decorations), Beautiful Doom, Brutal Doom, and some other mods on.

I didn't know Brutal Doom existed until it popped up alongside Minecraft in 2011.

I enjoyed the hell out of Demonsteele and I still play Demonsteele along with Accessories to Murder. Wildweasel's Nazis is also pretty fun.

Anyway, I still play Doom because Doom feels right. Nothing else is that original these days.

These days it's all boring generic military shooters.

Nothing has gibs, nothing has the music I listen to (thrash metal), nothing has gory death animations, nothing has that satisfying feeling, nothing has a more awesome shotgun, nothing is as original as it.

No other game on the market can claim that it's a mix of Evil Dead 2 and Aliens.

I love Doom because it's Doom, and no matter what I'll still play it.

I rediscovered it circa 2010 and I've still been playing ever since. I'm happy, and Doom is love, Doom is life. =)

[Marnetmar]

RobbingSnake said:

I was born late into 2000.
The first DOOM I played was Doom 3 I don't know what age I was, but it was a few years after release, and obviously way too young for that game.
A few years ago my uncle was cleaning his house, and he found a disk with a bunch of old games. I put in our old computer, and I found that Doom was on there. Unfortunately the sound files and mouse control were corrupted, so I had to play it without sound, and on the keyboard. The game was running at about 25% speed.
I then found the Doom collection on Steam, and bought it while it was on sale, the only game that would work was the Master Levels for Doom 2. I'm sure you can agree that it wasn't the best place to start.
A month later I found a guide online which made the Steam copy of Doom playable, but whenever I picked up and item the game would pause for half a second.
A few months ago I bought Doom 3 BFG edition just so I would be able to play a fully functional copy of Doom. (I wasn't going to try modding because in order to make my copy of Doom work I had to change a few variables, and I was worried it would mods would mess it up.)
I guess the reason I play DOOM is because it was fast paced, with varied weapons, and no regenerating health.

It never occurred to me that people born in 2000 are in their mid-teens until just now.

Fuck, time flies.